Fast-Tracking the FARGO Project
This past year I was commissioned to write a short-ish chapter on the series Fargo (2014-present) for a collected edition of essays on shows airing on the FX network modeled on the much-beloved tome from 2010, The Essential HBO Reader, edited by Gary R. Edgerton and Jeffrey P. Jones. Needless to say, my other projects and the workload from this semester caught fully up with me, and it wasn’t until early October when I started looking into the show in earnest, trying to figure out what I wanted to write that was my own, even as the chapter itself would need to be filled out with basic information about its inception and production history, with a focus on its relationship to the brand identity of the network, and a lit review of previous scholarship on the program. Of which, it turns out, there has been much more than I was aware, though nothing inordinate.
Such as it is, I am only just now getting down to wrapping up the research portion, and am combing through interviews with John Landgraf, head of the FX network, and Noah Hawley, the creator and showrunner of Fargo, mining them for additional insight where others have mined them for their own purposes and arguments across an array of interesting scholarship.
Before writing each day in an effort to hit my (extended) deadline of December 31, I’m going to log some of my thoughts here, hoping to both track my progress on the Fargo project, but also to maybe highlight some of my processes and the madness that I undertake when trying to write anything academic. Tomorrow I’ll start with some summaries of the book chapters I’ve read so far, followed with thoughts on an entire dossier published all the way back in 2019 in Middle West Review.
Of course, most of the scholarship on the series only takes the first two seasons into account, as the long publishing schedule for academic journals has gotten even longer since 2020. So, the good news is that I may actually be first out the gate with analyses of its most recent season, which had a whole lot to say about Trump’s America and the corruption of faith and government that sits at the dark heart of conservative political ideology in the United States. I’ll share some of my rough thoughts there as well, whenever I finally get to them over the next few weeks as I try my best to hit that looming deadline.
