In the Flesh: Fargo s5e01 'The Tragedy of the Commons'

What’s Bisquick, if we’re being honest? A brand name attached to a mediocre product and marketed aggressively for decades toward parents and children until, to some of them, it became synonymous with family breakfast. Sweetened glue and sawdust mixed into a nondescript haze of white suburban contentment, generalized and unthreatening. Like Lyon family matriarch Lorraine’s (Jennifer Jason Leigh) Christmas card photoshoot in which aides unobtrusively hand each family member a high-powered assault rifle to hold, it’s about projecting your values, about making something complicated as simple as dirt. Family isn’t a pancake any more than power is a heavily armed twelve-year-old. Dot Lyon (Juno Temple) isn’t just a housewife any more than her ruthless, dead-eyed mother-in-law is just a grandmother. As the opening text reminds us with its definition of Minnesota Niceness, there’s the self you show to the world, and then there’s the reality beneath it.

Fargo has always been at its best when series creator and showrunner Noah Hawley gives himself space to riff on black comedy drama in the key of the brothers Coen. Munch (Sam Spruell) and Donald (Devon Bostick) are cast from the same mold as the original film’s Showalter and Grimsrud, just as Lorraine recalls the stony-faced Wade Gustafson and the cat and mouse home invasion ping pongs between Blood Simple and Burn After Reading, with a glimpse of Jon Hamm’s Roy Tillman as a dash of O Brother, Where Art Thou? It’s stuff we’ve seen before rearranged in new and interesting ways, and right out of the gate it’s clear that the show hasn’t lost a step in its fifth season. Temple, looking starved and owlish, is captivatingly intense beneath the high-pitched folksy exterior, and our few scenes with Leigh promise the slow revelation of something glacially horrible, tied to her business in debt collection and to the episode’s repeated invocations of Conservative militancy. (Our story is set in the waning days of 2019, the country still reeling from Trump’s election, COVID and insurrection brewing on the horizon).

The episode’s action is tight and compelling, its characters competently sketched. Written and directed by Hawley himself, it’s bracingly well-lit and as dense with double meanings as an episode of some alternate universe in which Mad Men is set in Minnesota. It’s the image of the Christmas card photo I keep coming back to as the credits roll, though. The unhappy family is a given, the staginess of their firearm-toting tacky and ugly, and to top it all off it isn’t even Christmas. Inside this revolting McMansion, ensconced in a three-story atrium walled in glass, Christmas lights twinkle on a towering tree killed and kitted out to serve as a backdrop for a holiday that hasn’t happened yet, featuring a family who don’t believe in what they’re advertising, for the sake of a woman who doesn’t seem to like them much. (The after-dinner chatter also features an impeccable line of after-dinner dad dialogue; I cracked up at Jan Bos saying “Rommell wasn’t a tall man” with that kind of “I just heard this on the History Channel” expansiveness). It’s a fake of a fake of a fake, Bisquick to the Nth degree, and I'm ready to tuck in.