Fargo

Even more than its excellent first season, the second season of Fargo channeled the absurdist humanism of the Coen brothers’ film. The series features a rogue’s gallery of characters, each motivated by an urgent mission and many at least “a little touched,” as someone says of Kirsten Dunst’s accidental gangster Peggy Blomquist. Jean Smart’s grimly effective gang matriarch and the matter-of-factly unhinged characters embodied by Dunst and Zahn McClarnon, not to mention Bokeeem Woodbine’s sardonic henchman, are as indelible as the ones Steve Buscemi and Frances McDormand played in the film. Although they appear to be on a collision course toward mutually assured destruction, watching these vivid oddballs crash into one another in a deadpan dance of life, death, and (at least for Peggy) self-actualization is an oddly joyful experience. Written for Slant Magazine