Too far to go

Note: Spoilers follow for the third season of Fargo.

A year and a half ago, I wrote on this blog: “Fargo may turn out to be the most important television series on the air today.” Now that the third season has ended, it feels like a good time to revisit that prediction, which turned out to be sort of right, but not for the reasons that I expected. When I typed those words, cracking the problem of the anthology series felt like the puzzle on which the future of television itself depended. We were witnessing an epochal shift of talent, which is still happening, from movies to the small screen, as big names on both sides of the camera began to realize that the creative opportunities it afforded were in many ways greater than what the studios were prepared to offer. I remain convinced that we’re entering an entertainment landscape in which Hollywood focuses almost exclusively on blockbusters, while dramas and quirky smaller films migrate to cable, or even the networks. The anthology series was the obvious crossover point. It could draw big names for a limited run, it allowed stories to be told over the course of ten tight episodes rather than stretched over twenty or more, it lent itself well to being watched in one huge binge, and it offered viewers the prospect of a definitive conclusion. At its best, it felt like an independent movie given the breathing room and resources of an epic. Fargo, its exemplar, became one of the most fascinating dramas on television in large part because it drew its inspiration from one of the most virtuoso experiments with tone in movie history—a triangulation, established by the original film, between politeness, quiet desperation, and sudden violence. It was a technical trick, but a very good one, and it seemed like a machine that could generate stories forever.

After three seasons, I haven’t changed my mind, even if the show’s underlying formula feels more obvious than before. What I’ve begun to realize about Fargo is that it’s an anthology series that treats each season as a kind of miniature anthology, too, with scenes and entire episodes that stand for nothing but themselves. In the first season, the extended sequence about Oliver Platt’s supermarket magnate was a shaggy dog story that didn’t go anywhere, but now, it’s a matter of strategy. The current season was ostensibly focused on the misfortunes of the Stussey brothers, played with showy brilliance by Ewan McGregor, but it allowed itself so many digressions that the plot became more like a framing device. It opened with a long interrogation scene set in East Germany that was never referenced again, aside from serving as a thematic overture to the whole—although it can’t be an accident that “Stussey” sounds so much like “Stasi.” Later, there was a self-contained flashback episode set in the science fiction and movie worlds of the seventies, including an animated cartoon to dramatize a story by one of the characters, which turned the series into a set of nesting dolls. It often paused to stage the parables told by the loathsome Varga, which were evidently supposed to cast light on the situation, but rarely had anything to do it. After the icy control of the first season and the visual nervousness of the second, the third season threaded the needle by simultaneously disciplining its look and indulging its penchant for odd byways. Each episode was like a film festival of short subjects, some more successful than others, and unified mostly by creator Noah Hawley’s confidence that we would follow him wherever he went.

Mostly, he was right, although his success rate wasn’t perfect, as it hardly could have been expected to be. There’s no question that between Fargo and Legion, Hawley has been responsible for some of the most arresting television of the last few years, but the strain occasionally shows. The storytelling and character development on Legion were never as interesting as its visual experiments, possibly because a show can innovate along only so many parameters at once. And Fargo has been so good at its quirky components—it rarely gives us a scene that isn’t riveting in itself—that it sometimes loses track of the overall effect. Like its inspiration, it positions itself as based on true events, even though it’s totally fictional, and in theory, this frees it up to indulge in loose ends, coincidences, and a lack of conventional climaxes, just like real life. But I’ve never entirely bought this. The show is obsessively stylized and designed, and it never feels like a story that could take place anywhere but in the fictional Coenverse. At times, Hawley seems to want it both ways. The character of Nikki Swango, played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead, is endlessly intriguing, and I give the show credit for carrying her story through to what feels like a real conclusion, rather than using her suffering as an excuse to motivate a male protagonist. But when she’s gratuitously targeted by the show’s villains, only to survive and turn into an avenging angel, it’s exactly what I wanted, but I couldn’t really believe a second of it. It’s just as contrived as any number of storylines on more conventional shows, and although the execution is often spellbinding, it has a way of eliding reasonable objections. When it dispatches Nikki at the end with a standard trick of fate, it feels less like a subversion than the kind of narrative beat that the show has taught us to expect, and by now, it’s dangerously close to a cliché.

This is where the anthology format becomes both a blessing and a curse. By tying off each story after ten episodes, Fargo can allow itself to be wilder and more intense than a show that has to focus on the long game, but it also gets to indulge in problematic storytelling devices that wouldn’t stand up to scrutiny if we had to live with these characters for multiple seasons. Even in its current form, there are troubling patterns. Back in the first season, one of my few complaints revolved around the character of Bill Oswalt, who existed largely to foil the resourceful Molly as she got closer to solving the case. Bill wasn’t a bad guy, and the show took pains to explain the reasons for his skepticism, but their scenes together quickly grew monotonous. They occurred like clockwork, once every episode, and instead of building to something, they were theme and variations, constantly retarding the story rather than advancing it. In the third season, incredibly, Fargo does the same thing, but worse, in the form of Chief Moe Dammik, who exists solely to doubt, undermine, and make fun of our hero, Gloria Burgle, and without the benefit of Bill’s underlying sweetness. Maybe the show avoided humanizing Dammik because it didn’t want to present the same character twice—which doesn’t explain why he had to exist at all. He brought the show to a halt every time he appeared, and his dynamic with Gloria would have seemed lazy even on a network procedural. (And it’s a foil, significantly, that the original Fargo didn’t think was necessary.) Hawley and his collaborators are only human, but so are all writers. And if the anthology format allows them to indulge their strengths while keeping their weaknesses from going too far, that may be the strongest argument for it of all.

Moving through time

Note: Spoilers follow for last night’s episode of Twin Peaks.

For all the debate over how best to watch a television show these days, which you see argued with various degrees of seriousness, the options that you’re offered are fairly predictable. If it’s a show on a streaming platform, you’re presented with all of it at once; if it’s on a cable or broadcast channel, you’re not. Between those two extremes, you’re allowed to structure your viewing experience pretty much however you like, and it isn’t just a matter of binging the whole season or parceling out each episode one week at a time. Few of us past the age of thirty have the ability or desire to watch ten hours of anything in one sitting, and the days of slavish faithfulness to an appointment show are ending, too—even if you aren’t recording it on DVR, you can usually watch it online the next day. Viewers are customizing their engagement with a series in ways that would have been unthinkable just fifteen years ago, and networks are experimenting with having it both ways, by airing shows on a weekly basis while simultaneously making the whole season available online. If there’s pushback, it tends to be from creators who are used to having their shows come out sequentially, like Dan Harmon, who managed to get Yahoo to release the sixth season of Community one episode at a time, as if it were still airing on Thursdays at eight. (Yahoo also buried the show on its site so that even fans had trouble figuring out that it was there, but that’s another story, as well as a reminder, in case we needed one, that such decisions aren’t always logical or considered.)

Twin Peaks, for reasons that I’ll discuss in a moment, doesn’t clearly lend itself to one approach or another, which may be why its launch was so muddled. Showtime premiered the first two hours on a Sunday evening, then quietly made the next two episodes available online, although this was so indifferently publicized that it took me a while to hear about it. It then ran episodes three and four yet again the following week, despite the fact that many of the show’s hardcore fans—and there’s hardly anyone else watching—would have seen them already, only to finally settle into the weekly delivery schedule that David Lynch had wanted in the first place. As a result, it stumbled a bit out of the gate, at least as far as shaping a wider conversation was concerned. You weren’t really sure who was watching those episodes or when. (To be fair, in the absence of blockbuster ratings, the existence of viewers watching at different times is what justifies this show’s existence.) As I’ve argued elsewhere, this isn’t a series that necessarily benefits from collective analysis, but there’s a real, if less tangible, emotional benefit to be had from collective puzzlement. It’s the understanding that a lot of other people are feeling the same things that you are, at roughly the same time, and that you have more in common with them than you will with anybody else in the world. I’m overstating it, but only a little. Whenever I meet someone who bought Julee Cruise’s first album or knows why Lil was wearing a sour face, I feel like I’ve found a kindred spirit. Twin Peaks started out as a huge cultural phenomenon, dwindling only gradually into a cult show that provided its adherents with their own set of passwords. And I think that it would have had a better chance of happening again now if Showtime had just aired all the episodes once a week from the beginning.

Yet I understand the network’s confusion, because this is both a show that needs to be seen over a period of time and one that can’t be analyzed until we’ve seen the full picture. Reviewing it must be frustrating. Writing about it here, I don’t need to go into much detail, and I’m free to let my thoughts wander wherever they will, but a site like the New York Times or The A.V. Club carries its own burden of expectations, which may not make sense for a show like this. A “recap” of an episode of Twin Peaks is almost a contradiction in terms. You can’t do much more than catalog the disconnected scenes, indulge in some desultory theorizing, and remind readers that they shouldn’t jump to any conclusions until they’ve seen more. It’s like reviewing Mulholland Drive ten minutes at a time—which is ridiculous, but it’s also exactly the position in which countless critics have found themselves. For ordinary viewers, there’s something alluring about the constant suspension of judgment that it requires: I’ve found it as absorbing as any television series I’ve seen in years. Despite its meditative pacing, an episode seems to go by more quickly than most installments of a more conventional show, even the likes of Fargo or Legion, which are clearly drawing from the same pool of ideas. (Noah Hawley is only the latest creator and showrunner to try to deploy the tone of Twin Peaks in more recognizable stories, and while he’s better at it than most, it doesn’t make the effort any less thankless.) But it also hamstrings the online critic, who has no choice but to publish a weekly first draft on the way to a more reasoned evaluation. Everything you write about Twin Peaks, even, or especially, if you love it, is bound to be provisional until you can look at it as a whole.

Still, there probably is a best way to watch Twin Peaks, which happens to be the way in which I first saw it. You stumble across it years after it originally aired, in bits and pieces, and with a sense that you’re the only person you know who is encountering it in quite this way. A decade from now, my daughter, or someone like her, will discover this show in whatever format happens to be dominant, and she’ll watch it alone. (I also suspect that she’ll view it after having internalized the soundtrack, which doesn’t even exist yet in this timeline.) It will deprive her, inevitably, of a few instants of shared bewilderment or revelation that can only occur when you’re watching a show on its first airing. When Albert Rosenfeld addresses the woman in the bar as Diane, and she turns around to reveal Laura Dern in a blonde wig, it’s as thrilling a moment as I’ve felt watching television in a long time—and by the way Lynch stages it, it’s clear that he knows it, too. My daughter won’t experience this. But there’s also something to be said for catching up with a show that meant a lot to people a long time ago, with your excitement tinged with a melancholy that you’re too late to have been a part of it. I frankly don’t know how often I’ll go back to watch this season again, any more than I’m inclined to sit through Inland Empire, which I loved, a second time. But I’m oddly consoled by the knowledge that it will continue to exist and mean a lot to future viewers after the finale airs, which isn’t something that you could take for granted if you were watching the first two seasons in the early nineties. And it makes this particular moment seem all the more precious, since it’s the last time that we’ll be able to watch Twin Peaks without any idea of where it might be going.

The three kinds of surprise

In real life, most of us would be happy to deal with fewer surprises, but in fiction, they’re a delight. Or at least movies and television would like to believe. In practice, twist endings and plot developments that arrive out of left field can be exhausting and a little annoying, if they emerge less out of the logic of the story than from a mechanical decision to jerk us around. I’ve noted before that our obsession with big twists can easily backfire: if we’re conditioned to expect a major surprise, it prevents us from engaging with the narrative as it unfolds, since we’re constantly questioning every detail. (In many cases, the mere knowledge that there is a twist counts as a spoiler in itself.) And Hitchcock was smart enough to know that suspense is often preferable to surprise, which is why he restructured the plot of Vertigo to place its big reveal much earlier than it occurs in the original novel. Writers are anxious to prevent the audience from getting ahead of the story for even a second, but you can also generate a lot of tension if viewers can guess what might be coming just slightly before the characters do. Striking that balance requires intelligence and sensitivity, and it’s easier, in general, to just keep throwing curveballs, as shows like 24 did until it became a cliché.

Still, a good surprise can be enormously satisfying. If we start from first principles, building on the concept of the unexpected, we end up with three different categories:

1. When something happens that we don’t expect.
2. When we expect something to happen, but something else happens instead.
3. When we expect something to happen, but nothing happens.

And it’s easy to come up with canonical examples of all three. For the first, you can’t do much better than the shower scene in Psycho; for the second, you can point to something like the famous fake-out in The Silence of the Lambs, in which the intercutting of two scenes misleads us into thinking that an assault team is closing in on Buffalo Bill, when Clarice is really wandering into danger on her own; and for the third, you have the scene in The Cabin in the Woods when one of the characters is dared to make out with the wolf’s head on the wall, causing us to brace ourselves for a shock that never comes. And these examples work so elegantly because they use our knowledge of the medium against us. We “know” that the protagonist won’t be killed halfway through; we “know” that intercutting implies convergence; and we “know” when to be wary of a jump scare. And none of these surprises would be nearly as effective for a viewer—if one even exists—who could approach the story in complete naiveté.

But not every surprise is equally rewarding. A totally unexpected plot development can come dangerously close—like the rain of frogs in Magnolia—to feeling like a gimmick. The example I’ve cited from The Silence of the Lambs works beautifully on first viewing, but over time, it starts to seem more like a cheat. And there’s a fine line between deliberately setting up a plot thread without paying it off and simply abandoning it. I got to thinking about this after finishing the miniseries Fargo, which I loved, but which also has a way of picking up and dropping story points almost absentmindedly. In a long interview with The A.V. Club, showrunner Noah Hawley tries to explain his thought process, with a few small spoilers:

Okay, Gus is going to arrest Malvo in episode four, and he’s going to call Molly to tell her to come, but of course, she doesn’t get to go because her boss goes. What you want is the scene of Molly and Malvo, but you’re not getting it…

In episode ten when Gus tells her to stay put, and she just can’t, and she gets her keys and goes to the car and drives toward Lester, we are now expecting a certain event to happen. Therefore, when that doesn’t happen, there’s the unpredictable nature of what’s going to happen, and you’re coming into it with an assumption…

By giving Russell that handcuff key, people were going to expect him to be out there for the last two episodes and play some kind of role in the end game, which is never a bad thing, to set some expectations [that don’t pay off].

Fargo is an interesting test case because it positions itself, like the original movie, as based on true events, when in fact it’s totally fictional. In theory, this frees it up to indulge in loose ends, coincidences, and lack of conventional climaxes, since that’s what real life is like. But as much as I enjoyed Fargo, I’m not sure I really buy it. In many respects, the show is obsessively stylized and designed; it never really feels like a story that could take place anywhere but in the Coenverse. And there are times when Hawley seems to protest too much, pointing to the lack of a payoff as a subversion when it’s really more a matter of not following through. The test, as always, is a practical one. If the scene that the audience is denied is potentially more interesting than what actually happens, it’s worth asking if the writers are being honest with themselves: after all, it’s relatively easy to set up a situation and stop, while avoiding the hard work that comes with its resolution. A surprise can’t just be there to frustrate our expectations; it needs to top them, or to give us a development that we never knew we wanted. It’s hard to do this even once, and even harder to do it consistently. But if the element of surprise is here to stay—and it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere—then it should surprise us, above all else, with how good it is.