Fargo

“Whatcha got there, Margie?” seems like a strange choice for the most memorable line from the 1996 film, Fargo.  A lot of crime goes on in that story, all against the backdrop of the snowy Minnesota landscape, but it’s the charming local accents and the banal interest in what people are having for their meals that has stayed with me to this day.  That said, I only saw the film during my university years in the early 2000s, during a period in which I felt the best way to round out my terrible personality was to make sure I had seen all those classic films people talk about.  Back in the days of DVDs, Fargo was easily procured from a now-defunct online rental company, viewed on a laptop intended for academic support, and sat through with an attention span that now seems alien as these were also the days that predated smartphones and their irresistible whispers of distraction when you are trying to concentrate on absolutely anything at all.

Fast forward to 2014 and, a mere 18 years after the film’s release, a TV spin off emerges.  I’ve chosen the word spin off, as it really cheapens the programme, making it clear where the quality lies in this originator-progeny relationship.  Pah, I thought to myself, I shan’t ever be watching that.  But join me, if you will, in 2021.  More advanced in age, with greater maturity and self-assurance than my student self from decades before, I was no longer pursuing self-betterment through lists of must-see movies.  Oh no, I was looking at the IMDb list of top-rated television programmes.  And this is called growth.  There, at 38 (rankings may change over time) and with a score of 8.9/10, was the previously ignored Fargo TV series.  Well, this omission needed rectifying.  What kind of wildly successful TV blog would this be if, while having sat through the vast majority of top scorers (don’t worry, they’re all covered here, guys, from Rick & Morty to Our Planet) I allowed this oversight to continue?  And lo, thanks to Netflix, three quarters of my neglect has been rectified.

From my vantage point of having seen three of Fargo’s four seasons, I shall now offload all my thoughts and opinions for you to read.  Unfortunately the fourth series emerged while I was otherwise preoccupied and I haven’t been able to track it down on a platform, so we’ll just pretend we don’t care (though I truly do as it looks like a ripping period production with casting that finally offsets Fargo’s overwhelming whiteness).  But what I can say is that those first three outings of this boxset are cracking viewing to put in front of your face – how wrong I was about not expecting much from the TV version of a film.  What’s more, the stellar cast just goes to show how far TV has come in taking on cinema as the home of the big acting name or indeed of the quality production.

Each episode of Fargo is exquisitely crafted.  From the first frame, care and attention has been taken over every detail, as if all of it is a pilot that wants you to like it.  It’s how telly should be.  This is made all the more impressive by the fact that so much of it is shot in temperatures below freezing, as I can only imagine cameramen wanting to get out of the cold and therefore not really caring a toss.  I also like to think of everyone slipping over in the ice during the outtakes.  Not because I wish them ill, but because I am the sort of person that slips in ice, so I might as well assume it’s a universal quality.  One curious feature of our storytelling is that every instalment is preceded by a statement that the events are based on a true story, but that names have been changed to protect identities.  There’s no way of checking this as I simply cannot be bothered to type it into the internet, so again, we can just sit with it, wondering if we believe it, wondering if it matters, before moving on.

It’s pertinent, though, as the plots in Fargo are delightfully far-fetched.  To me, this is proof of veracity.  Honestly, you couldn’t make this stuff up.  Right?  Each series tracks over its ten episodes a wholly different storyline.  This means you’ll need to jettison an old cast and get to know a new one.  Gradually, hints of how these worlds and timelines connect are revealed, with series two’s seventies setting engendering an aftermath that plays back into the first series, which in turn has repercussions on the third.  May I one day know how this comes to bear on the fourth.

Playing out over the real towns of Minnesota and the Dakotas, our cast is often split into three camps.  We have heroes, often nice folk with above-average yet underappreciated ability in their jobs, normally law enforcement, who have to put up with the nonsense that swirls around them.  These are our Margies, carrying a torch of affection over from our original film.  Then we have our malcontents.  Their morals are often dubious, yet we can’t resist rooting for them.  They’ve faced hardship and come out stronger, but their drive and effort often lead to their own downfalls.  And then we have some great straight-up baddies, doling out evil willy nilly, creating the murderous rampages and bloodstains in the snow that are required to propel much of the plot forward.

I’d venture to describe Fargo as gently soothing, even though it’s awash in ultraviolence.  Somehow, the gruesome gore is easy to forgive, maybe because it’s framed in a higher art form.  We have a top-notch ratio of intrigue resolution to new curiosity establishment in each episode, as well as exemplary season finale crescendoing that resulted in my own patented viewing strategy: episodes nine and ten of each series had to be back-to-backed simply because I would get so excited (what a sad little life, Jane).  I typically only ever watch one instalment of a drama at a time so it doesn’t become wallpaper, but don’t worry if you have an alternative approach – it just means I am better than you.

So come all and feast upon this ensemble masterpiece.  You’ll revel at whatshisface off that film once and whoshername that used to be in thingy.  Not everyone masters the accent as successfully as others, and all the “oh yah”s and “ok then”s are a crucial part of our charm requirements, but each player has a great time with their character.  There’s bold storytelling as far as the eye can see, and dusting everything else in snow covers a variety of other flaws that I simply didn’t notice.  So take a trip via your screen of choice to this slice of the USA and treat yourself to some of the nicest murder stories ever known.

The Office

“I couldn’t watch it because my dad wanted to watch The Office.”  It was 2002.  I remember it exactly.  I had asked a friend whether they had seen something on TV, something that was essential viewing in those days (though I can’t remember at all what it was now).  We were on our way to Scouts, because that was a perfectly acceptable thing to be doing at the age of 17 in Surrey.  “Well”, I thought to myself, “what a parent-y and adult-y thing to want to watch.  I’ll never be like that.”

Sixteen years later, I’m writing a blogpost about why The Office is one of the most significant works of comedy I have ever seen.  I may not be a parent, but I’m definitely an adult.  Last week I asked someone to let me finish a cup of tea before I would do anything else.  I think about coffee a lot of the time.  I wake naturally just after 5am.  These are all things I never thought would happen to me.  The other thing I failed to consider becoming a part of my everyday life, but which has in fact defined it for the last eleven years, is office work.  So let’s begin this discourse by acknowledging the irony.  Not only am I unable to remember the other show I loved so much when I was younger, while scoffing at grown-ups watching boring programmes about their places of work, but I have self-fulfilled the prophecy: my adult life has been spent as an office drone.

I eventually first watched The Office while still in education.  Too many friends were quoting it to me for me to be able to bear missing out.  It portrayed an alien world, mostly because full-time working life is so much worse than school.  I remember afternoons dragging till the bell went at 3.30pm, but now I’m rooted to a desk till 5.30pm at the earliest.  School terms were punctuated by lengthy holidays, but time off as an adult comes in the form of just a handful of weeks.  Unless punished with detention, school enforced breaks and full lunch hours.  I now shove food in my face while trying to stay on top of emails (occasionally carving out time to write this stupid blog).  So now, that alien world is my life, but it’s actually made each subsequent re-watching of The Office all the more artful in how it captures what we are sadly destined to become, as our schoolchild dreams slowly die one by one.

And this is exactly what happens to two of the main characters in the show.  Dawn has given up on becoming an illustrator and Tim has forgotten that he was going to do something else besides sell paper.  The Office celebrates so much that is familiar about British workplaces: the cheap shirts tucked badly into a pair of itchy smart trousers, being at your desk while it’s dark outside (half the year, roughly), not knowing where the line lies between banter and offence.  But then it champions the human spirit in spite of the fate that befalls millions of us (and I recognise that there are worse fates than earning your crust in an industrial park.  You could be murdered, for example).  Over the two series and the Christmas special, the chemistry between Tim and Dawn builds with brutal realism, carving out potentially the most real-life love story I have ever seen (as I mentioned when talking about Geordie Shore).  Their final moment at the office party to the sounds of Alison Moyet’s Only You (a song associated with enduring my dad’s poor music taste while he taxied me around) is a vital moment of hope that takes place between photocopiers and computer monitors.

Let’s move on from this emotional depth with some rape jokes.  Never really appropriate, I suppose, but this reference, from the series one episode, Training, still makes me smile.  Not because it trivialises an unforgiveable crime, but because of all the circumstances that lead to it.  But this is exactly the legacy of The Office.  Get the tone wrong at work (quoting a joke from the office that uses rape as a comedic device) and you enter into gaff territory, becoming your very own David Brent.  I freely admit to Brenting out all over the show with my teams in the office.  I do this so much, I have to own the situation by irreverently claiming to be a “chilled-out entertainer” while hoping nobody notices.  I never got the goatee beard, but the topknot that lasted two years came pretty close.  Oh well.

What else can I add to all the appreciation out there already for The Office?  Not much.  But I do want to dissect the mockumentary style some more, as this really enabled the banality of the show’s subject matter to be cast in a new light.  Characters were given pieces to camera, enabling them to dig even deeper holes.  They could also make eyes and faces at the audience at any point, joining us in on the jokes all the more closely, or making us aware of the artificiality of the situation, as embodied by the handyman that just stops in his tracks at the sight of the cameras.  Best of all are the interstitial shots that chop up each episode.  We see paper sheets going through the copier feed.  We see workers staring into space at their desks.  We see a whole load of nothing happening.

But somehow, it’s this nothingness that makes The Office all the more cherishable.  Its very scarcity, at least in the UK version, is its strength, as we will always want more than we will ever be given.  The perfect volume of things happen, because office life is characterised by its monotony.  The show’s style has seen its influence spread far and wide, with shows like Parks & Recreation.  It changed the game for what a comedy expects from an intelligent audience and, sixteen years later, I’m still talking about it.