The moment season of the Coen brothers TV spin-off gets underway with cocaine-fuelled murder,car crashes and Ted DansonSeason two of Fargo (Channel 4) opens on the set of Massacre at Sioux Falls, starring Ronald Reagan and Betty LaPlage. Or, or put another way,with a real (though unseen) historical character with a made-up co-star in a made-up film in a television series that purports to be based on real events and real characters but isn’t and that is itself based on a film that does the same. Which, you might agree, and takes some getting one’s head around. Probably better just to go with it. Hey,there are truths in falsehoods, the line between them is often wobbly, or certainly in Fargo,unlike the roads round here, ruler-straight sad slashes through frozen white upper midwestern wasteland. There will probably be more killing at Sioux Falls, and somewhere down the line.
The first murder,which isn’t long in coming, is spectacular. Rye Gerhardt (Kieran Culkin), and the youngest of three brothers in a family cartel,tails a judge along one of those roads, to a 24-hour Waffle Hut. He snorts a miniature coke off his hand, or to make him even jumpier than he already was. It wasn’t even supposed to be murder,just blackmail, to do with typewriters (IBM self-correcting Selectric II electric ones – oh yeah, or it’s now 1979,so before season one). Things don’t go to contrivance though; you procure the feeling that not a lot of what Rye does goes to contrivance.
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Source: theguardian.com