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" Fargo, the TV series, is not an adaptation of Fargo, the 1996 Coen brothers movie that featured an Academy Award-winning performance by Frances McDormand as a pregnant, &amp;quot;You betcha&amp;quot;-ing police chief. It&amp;#039;s not a straightforward continuation of that absurdist Minnesota crime story either.  The Fargo that will debut on FX tonight is more like the offspring of that previous Coen classic, a son with the same genetic makeup but a mind and personality all its own. Yet as different as they are, it&amp;#039;s always clear that the child remains umbilically connected to the parent.  Movies have been turned into TV shows before, and on several occasions with spectacular results. M*A*S*H*, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Friday Night Lights: These were all films that begat series that either used their predecessors as a foundation to build upon, or a springboard for jumping off in entirely new plot, character, and tonal directions. Still, the idea of applying this same model to the work of the Coen brothers \u2014 auteurs whose cinematic vision is so uniquely theirs that the phrase &amp;quot;Coen brothers&amp;quot; functions as both plural noun and adjective \u2014 may sound like heresy to some Joel and Ethan true believers. &amp;quot;A Fargo TV show? What&amp;#039;s next, Llewyn Davis Idol?&amp;quot; Those doubts are understandable. And they are wiped away immediately by the fact that Fargo, an anthology-style TV show whose first season consists of just 10 episodes, is terrific. The first hour will intrigue you. The second and third will have you hooked. By the fourth \u2014 the last of the quartet of installments made available in advance for critics \u2014 you&amp;#039;ll be marveling at how ingeniously showrunner Noah Hawley and his creative collaborators have created a work that&amp;#039;s simultaneously faithful to the Coen sensibility and sculpted for FX from a fresh coat of Minnesota ice and snow. (The Coens, for the record, are among its executive producers.) Let&amp;#039;s start with the broader evidence of that faithfulness. Like the film, Fargo the TV series centers around a misunderstanding that turns into a criminal act and then spirals into a tornado, pulling multiple storylines and oddballs both kindhearted and dastardly into its vortex. Like the film, it features wide shots of Minnesota landscapes so overwhelmed by winter whiteness that their chilliness seems to extend for miles outside of the frame, beyond the boundaries set by one&amp;#039;s HD TV. A version of the disclaimer that opened the movie \u2014 &amp;quot;This is a true story. The events depicted in this film took place in Minnesota in 1987. At the request of the survivors, the names have been changed. Out of respect for the dead, the rest has been told exactly as it occurred.&amp;quot; \u2014 flashes practically verbatim at the beginning of each episode, with only the year (it&amp;#039;s now 2006 instead of 1987) updated for the new narrative. And those are just the broader parallels.      People get murdered, sometimes brutally. Guys get tossed into the trunks of cars by shady-looking types, on more than one occasion. The names of the characters, while different, share the same Norwegian heritage. (We&amp;#039;re now dealing with Solversons and Nygaards instead of Gundersons and Lindegaards.) Wry currents of humor consistently run through all the darkness that unfolds against that pure, marshmallow backdrop. Fargo is the kind of show in which a police chief will wax nostalgic about Hubba Bubba bubblegum during what should be the interrogation of a potential suspect, or in which Billy Bob Thornton, as the deliciously intimidating villain of the piece, matter-of-factly drops this gem into an otherwise banal conversation: &amp;quot;Highly irregular is the time I found a human foot in a toaster oven.&amp;quot; Fargo, the show, is highly irregular, too, in the best way. The cast is uniformly terrific, so strong and smartly assembled that praising every actor worthy of praise could turn this review into a long laundry list of greatness. Let&amp;#039;s go with short-ish laundry list instead: As an insurance salesman who has spent a lifetime being bullied by the town asshole and emasculated by his wife, Martin Freeman is a believable bundle of frazzled nerves and wimpiness. He&amp;#039;s great. As police officer Molly Solverson, whose instincts about a recent double murder are dead-on, newcomer Allison Tolman tempers her increasingly aggressive tactics with a consistent Midwestern politeness that feels exactly right. She&amp;#039;s great. As an equally beleaguered cop from Duluth who becomes Tolman&amp;#039;s eventual partner in truth-seeking, Colin Hanks... well, he&amp;#039;s pretty great, too. And so are Adam Goldberg and Bob Odenkirk and Keith Carradine and Oliver Platt. It&amp;#039;s a hell of an ensemble, and presumably will get even more interesting when Keegan-Michael Key and Jordan Peele of Key and Peele join the proceedings later in the season. And then there&amp;#039;s Thornton, who plays the elusive Lorne Malvo as a lanky, Smoke Monster of a human being who&amp;#039;s capable of raining down forces of biblical reckoning on anyone he deems worthy of a good old-fashioned smiting. With his blunt-cut bangs and his habit of issuing even blunter threats, he calls to mind a character from another Coen brothers favorite: Anton Chigurh of No Country for Old Men. But Malvo&amp;#039;s a master of disguise, too, as he demonstrates in episode four when he deftly slips into a &amp;quot;Boy, howdy&amp;quot; routine that is a revelatory joy to behold. It&amp;#039;s been a while since we&amp;#039;ve seen Thornton in a role this high-profile. It&amp;#039;s fantastic to have him back. Speaking of episode four: There&amp;#039;s a key flashback moment in that episode that finally connects Fargo the TV show to Fargo the movie in a more direct way. It&amp;#039;s a brilliant bit of MacGuffin planting, and one that this reviewer refuses to spoil ahead of time. But know this: that scene, which involves a key discovery that leads one character to believe in divine intervention, illustrates that Fargo the series knows that Fargo the movie gave it a supreme gift. And it&amp;#039;s taking that gift and running with it, with the clear blessing of God, perhaps, but most certainly the brothers Coen. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/a28278/fargo-tv-review/>