Few film-to-television adaptations work well. Fewer still are brilliant. Which makes Fargo, a wry, uncomfortably funny crime thriller that hits its target with disturbing ease, a very unusual creature indeed. Based on the 1996 Coen brothers film of the same name, the television series opens with familiar tones and touches, but introduces new characters and crimes.
''What makes the film so unique is that all these years later and you can still remember a lot of things about it,'' says Colin Hanks, who plays police deputy Gus Grimley in the series. ''You remember the snow, you remember the accents, you remember the comedy, you remember the violence. You know there are all these sort of touchstones that are now associated with the film and vice versa.''
But the series tells a slightly different, if still strangely familiar, story: amoral drifter Lorne Malvo (Billy Bob Thornton) arrives in the small community of Bemidji, Minnesota, and seems to nudge, either directly or indirectly, everyone he encounters towards violent crime, either by his own hand or at his gentle urging.
One pivotal encounter, with insurance salesman Lester Nygaard (Martin Freeman) - the series' very loose equivalent of the film's hapless protagonist, Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) - kicks off a sequence of murders.
The series assembles a beautiful collection of characters, including Allison Tolman's too-smart-for-her-own-good deputy Molly Solverson and Kate Walsh as the fabulous hot mess Gina Hess, freshly widowed and oozing the kind of sexuality that your average widow shouldn't. Produced by the Coen brothers, the story has effectively been rebooted by director Adam Bernstein and writer Noah Hawley.
Hanks says he tried to set aside his memories of the film. ''Within the first few pages it was very simple to do; Noah's style of writing, the way not only story and structure - which obviously come across on film - but the way that the screenplays are written, they read for us like novels,'' he says. ''They were so well written that it wasn't until I was finished reading it that I sort of saw similar tones and similar colours, if you will, that the movie has.''
Timing, curiously, can be everything in television. And Fargo seems to benefit from the afterglow of HBO's True Detective, similar in the sense that both shows are presented as short-order crime dramas with an ''anthology'' element; that is, each season would propose a new crime and characters to its audience.
''I don't know if it's I scratch your back and you scratch ours, I'm not sure if True Detective is really going to get a huge bump if Fargo does well,'' Hanks says. ''Although I guess you could say that we might get a little bump because of what True Detective did. At the end of the day they're two very different shows, although the anthology element obviously binds them together.''
The other big difference, he adds, is that ''[True Detective] had helicopter shots; we didn't have those''. And yet that difference of scale serves Fargo particularly well. True Detective may have had some large-scale aerial scenery shots, but Fargo's intimacy and claustrophobia, and its shrewd use of darkness and cold weather, serve it well.
''When you're living in that bitter cold, and we did while we were making this, it does sort of seep into your bones a little bit, everybody's shoulders go up a little bit and everyone's face feels a little numb, and everyone sort of mumbles their lines,'' Hanks says. ''It seeps into the water, for sure. But it has to because again, it's the character. You can't have Fargo without snow; it's as simple as that.''
The series is just 10 one-hour episodes long, though Hanks believes that sets up a powerful contract with the audience.
''You have to make sure that you lay all your cards out on the table. If you know you've got 10 episodes then you've got to make the best 10 episodes you can,'' he says. ''I think it's actually easier when you can have a resolution at those 10 episodes, as opposed to, well let's just lay all our cards on the table and see how long we can make this show run.
''That's not really necessarily the goal here. The goal is what is the best story? What are the best characters? How does the story effect these characters and what's going to make for the best story later on?''
As a big television viewer, Hanks says, he is engaged by that sort of contract. ''To me, as someone who watches these programs, and I consume a lot of television, I really like that,'' he says.
''But whatever serves Noah I think is the best thing. Whatever serves the story. Whatever is most believable I think is the most important.
''The television audience is sophisticated. I think they pick up on that and they respect that.''
There were two attempts to bring Fargo to the screen in the 1990s, by the US networks NBC and CBS, though neither involved the Coen brothers. This version, from the cable network FX, has the Coens' endorsement, though much of the creative drive is left to Bernstein and Hawley.
And yet, says Hanks, the echo of the Coen brothers is everywhere.
''There's a darkness, there's a humour, there's a violence to it …
''We're not just borrowing from Fargo, we're kind of borrowing from a lot of their films and I think that that language that they've created, that cinematic language that we've created, has given us an opportunity to be able to do some really cool and interesting things that haven't necessarily been done much in television before.
''Why can't we introduce a main character in the final 10 minutes of the pilot? Why can't we have these characters come in and out in ways that we don't maybe understand in the first four episodes that maybe make sense a little bit later on?
''The Coen brothers have always really toyed with the technique, so to speak, and I feel like we, by extension, are sort of doing that same thing in a way that I think is really exciting and fun.''
Fargo, SBS One, Thursday, 8.30pm.
Show of the week
An understandable reaction to the news that someone was proposing a TV remake of Fargo would be that they're nuts. Amid the estimable array of films made by Joel and Ethan Coen, the 1996 thriller about a murder, a pregnant policewoman and the peculiar properties of small-town Minnesota is rightly regarded with awe. It's a gem: a film of delicious deadpan humour, grisly violence, Americana depicted with an acute yet oddly affectionate eye, and an ear perfectly tuned to the sing-song, Scandinavian-inflected speech patterns of the locals. In a terrific cast, it also features one of the best heroines ever to grace the screen in Frances McDormand's Marge Gunderson, the policewoman whose necessarily lumbering gait belies her agility at crime-solving.
There's nothing quite like Fargo. Until now. Read more here
- Debi Enker
