Fargo - Season 5 (HBO Max)

Jon Hamm (Mad Men, The Town, Top Gun: Maverick) is fat, angry, murderous, corrupt and highly religious. He's crazy sick, darkly ultra-violent and has no conscience. In the fifth season of the TV series version of Coen's Fargo, Hamm portrays Bible-quoting psychopathic sheriff Roy Tillman, and he does such a good (and creepy) job that I think I'll remember the character in ten years' time. And that's where my judgement of this season falls, generally speaking. Memorable. Remarkable. Strange and very, very funny.

Striking the right balance between bloody ultra-violence, malice, anger and pitch-black madcap humour must be one of the hardest things to do as a director and especially as a screenwriter, and showrunner Noah Hawley has really shown that he's mastered it, especially in this fifth outing of the Warner series. Because it's as laugh-out-loud freaky as it is tight and scary, this one. And I loved every second of season five.

The story here is clearly stronger than in the last three seasons and the characters and casting are better, tighter. Hawley tells a "reality-based" story about how an unassuming little skinny housewife with a quietly exaggerated little family in Minnesota lives with a stolen identity after running away from the next state, from the big-headed Sheriff Tillman and a conspicuously violent marriage. When this is discovered and the sheriff, via a group of more or less clumsy hired thugs, sets out to "bring home" his ex-wife, they force a "tiger" in a long dress into a corner, which leads to unexpected twists and turns, violence, revenge and lots of bizarre trips back and forth, here and there. The twists and turns are numerous and increasingly bizarre the further into season five we get, and the themes here are brilliant. Hawley deals with topics such as religious beliefs, class divisions and loyalty in a way that is admirably funny and there is a resonance to the articulated dialogue that is beautiful, never over the top but rather surprisingly poetic.

Many of the people involved are good, here. Some are less good. Jennifer Jason Leigh is downright painfully bad in the role of an arrogant multi-billionaire mogul while Hamm in particular is so good that it's almost hard to digest. As I mentioned earlier, the character Roy Tillman is so memorable in his own concentrated evil that I just want to see more, more and more. Fargo hasn't been this good since the TV series first debuted and there is currently no more suitable winter sequel to spend time with.