A lot of things have really been bothering me about the fifth season of FX’s Fargo and every week I’ve been trying to suss out what exactly it is that’s rubbed me the wrong way, especially in the last few episodes.
The ham-fisted politics are jarring, for one thing. This show used to be a bit cleverer when it came to bringing politics into the mix. At least casting Bruce Campbell as Ronald Reagan in Season 2 was funny!
I’m also annoyed by how black and white the conflict is at this stage of the game. Villainous constitutional sheriff Roy Tillman (John Hamm) is more like a caricature than anything—just a cartoon villain with no depth whatsoever. Juno Temple’s Dorothy ‘Dot’ Lyon is his complete opposite—heroic and good to the core. Even when she lies to her family, it’s only because she’s trying to protect them, or because she’s a victim who needs to lie to protect herself.
Season 1’s central character, Lester Nygaard (Martin Freeman) was given a lot more to work with. You sympathized with him at first, and then had to reconcile that sympathy with all the terrible, selfish choices he made afterwards. In Season 5, that intricate character study is gone.
But another thing I’ve been thinking about is just how jarring and unpleasant this season is when it comes to the subject matter. We’ve known from pretty much the start that Dot is on the run and living a fake life under a fake identity. We learn fairly quickly that her former husband, the wicked sheriff Tillman, is not a bad guy. As the season has unfolded, we’ve come to realize that he’s much worse than we expected. In episode 6, we see photos of Dot after he beat her close to death. In the next episode, creator Noah Hawley used a puppet show to further illustrate the abuse—a clever way to show something so horrific and hard to watch (but note that this is also unique—in past seasons, the unpleasant subject matter wasn’t so horrible that we couldn’t see it happen onscreen).
In the most recent episode, Dot is brought back to Tillman’s compound, chained to a post, and beaten unconscious by Tillman after he suffers a rather hilarious humiliation at a local election debate. The New York Times’s Scott Tobias does a great job explaining why this segment—and the season’s handling of domestic violence—feels so wrong:
At this point, it may be worth questioning how sincere “Fargo” is about domestic violence. As skillfully as the show’s creator, Noah Hawley, has spun his serio-comic yarn this season, it can be difficult to reconcile the glib, knowing, referential tone of the show with the content warnings that have bracketed the last two episodes. When Roy takes his long walk back to Dot in the shelter, following his humiliation at the county sheriff’s debate, a Lisa Hannigan cover of the Britney Spears hit “Toxic” blankets the soundtrack and it strikes a bum note. “Dark” covers of pop songs have become a staple of movie trailers, and here it’s the coming attraction to a type of abuse the show isn’t sober enough to handle. What worked for the puppets in Camp Utopia feels more like genre exploitation here.
This is a great articulation of exactly how I’ve started feeling these past couple episodes. There are times when contrasting dark humor and really upsetting story beats can work wonders. You can keep viewers off-kilter by throwing something horrible in right after they’re laughing. Or you can follow up a terrible scene with something really funny for much-needed comic relief.
But this subject matter is so dark, and for many so personal and triggering, that literal trigger warnings have been placed before these last episodes, and a domestic violence hotline number at the end. I don’t want to laugh at all, but Fargo still wants to be funny. As Tobias notes, this starts to feel more than a little exploitative.
I find myself uncomfortable watching this season but not in a good way. Watching earlier seasons, I often felt uncomfortable. There are many awkward moments. Many tense moments. But the subject matter fit the tone. A dark crime drama of murder and mayhem with larger-than-life characters in a twisted yet mundane setting. Fargo works when it tells that kind of story. When it tries to crack jokes—even dark jokes—right before a scene of ghastly domestic violence, the whole thing falls apart. Juxtaposing comic (completely implausible) debates with Tillman and his clones alongside truly horrific scenes of domestic violence strikes me as tone-deaf more than anything.
The show can’t divorce itself from its comedic undertones any more than Dorothy can from her deplorable husband, and so we’re left with a show that can’t ever reconcile its tone and its subject matter. Fargo may be trying to grapple with domestic violence in a serious and sensitive manner, but it’s supposed to be darkly hilarious. The problem is that nothing about Dorothy’s situation is funny in the slightest.
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