The Fargo TV show is one of the medium’s improbable success stories: It started out in the shadow of its Coen brothers classic namesake, but it held its own, and now it can do whatever it wants. Each season tells a different season-long story, set in different times with different characters, sharing only a Midwest location — though never actually Fargo, North Dakota — and a mordant-grisly tone that’s not quite the Coens but its own thing. We’ve known Chris Rock was headlining its fourth spin, and that it was set amongst 1950s gangsters. And now we get a trailer that shows the mad scope of its ambitions.
Fargo Season 4 is pretty far from North Dakota as well as Minnesota, where previous seasons have unfolded. Instead it nips down to Kansas City, Missouri to tell of Rock’s Loy Cannon, a (fictitious, by the way) leader of a crime syndicate of ex-pats who fled the Jim Crow south only to wind up battling the local Italian mafia.
“Italians, they’re the past,” Rock’s Loy says in the ad. “We’re the future. They just don’t know it yet.”
So why, if it’s neither in North Dakota nor Minnesota, is it still called Fargo? Perhaps these are the wrong questions to ask. Instead focus on Jason Schwartzman playing what looks like his chief antagonist, or how the stacked cast makes room for Timothy Olyphant, Ben Whishaw, Jack Huston, and Wild Rose breakout Jessie Buckley. It vaguely recalls the Coen’s own gangland opus Miller’s Crossing, and there’s even a callback to Raising Arizona’s classic quotable, “Son, you’ve got a pantie on your head.”
Fargo Season 4 will hit FX starting April 19.
