Fargo (Third Season)

This is the weakest of the three seasons of the TV series sort of “inspired by” the brilliant Coen Brothers movie. (The Academy has made some really poor choices for Best Movie over the years, and one of the worst, almost as bad as naming Forrest Gump over Pulp Fiction, was giving the Oscar to The English Patient, a movie no one remembers, over Fargo.) But being the weakest doesn’t mean it’s bad, because the first two were just enormously entertaining. Still, the declining curve is there, and I think it’s time for Noah Hawley to wrap it up.

The first season, with Billy Bob Thornton, Martin Freeman, Alison Tolman, and Colin (son of Tom) Hanks, was stunning. The second, with Kirsten Dunst and the too-stupid-to-live Gerhardt (except for Mamma) family, was very, very good, even if some did object to a flying saucer interrupting the action in Episode Nine. The highlight of this one, as in the movie, were two smart women, played by Carrie Coon and Mary Elizabeth Winstead. The weakest part? Ewan McGregor as twin fuckups.

Come to think of it, the movie and all three seasons of the TV show were about fuckups, weren’t they? Which is probably why I liked them all so much. Stories about criminal geniuses are fun, no question, like the Ocean’s movies. But in the sad old, dumb old real world, 99.99% of criminals are dumb as a box of rocks. Maybe even more. The second weakest part: David Thewlis as the chief villain. I didn’t find him so much scary as just disgusting. He was bulimic, for chrissake. His teeth were bad. I’ll bet his breath would stun a yak. I hated that he probably got away scot-free at the end (it’s left ambiguous), but he had powerful friends, and in the real world …