As a massive fan of the TV series Fargo, this season 4 has just completely missed the boat thus far

There's 1 episode left in this season and I find myself very disappointed with this season. I'm not familiar with the writing/directing changes from season to season for this show but this season feels like a bunch of writers and directors doing their best attempt at an impression of the previous season and either not understanding the depth of the previous seasons or perhaps just failing on the execution.

1. There's so much monologue-ing and the characters often try to appear as if they have wisdom to bestow but the writing of the dialogue completely fails to back it up, so they come off as haughty at best. They tell stories that are supposed to be revelatory and I sit there saying to myself "So what?" Their monologues feel unearned and the stories they tell, I'm not even sure are worth telling. It feels like 'The Wire' without the authenticity and wisdom to back it up.

2. Chris Rock's character in particular never earns the respect you're supposed to have for him. Its half because(and I say this as someone that loves and admires Chris Rock as a comic) Rock's performance is very flat and it very often feels like he's reading dialogue off of a piece of paper. It literally reminds me of high school when we would take turns reading parts of a book out loud, paragraph to paragraph, switching from one student to another. Rocks performance feels like a kid reading a paragraph. It feels like he brings little to this role. And the other half of the problem with Rock's character is he's predictable and he's not supposed to be. Very clearly the show is trying to make this character out to be this strong, principled Denzel Washington-esque character that you're supposed to respect when they speak. But the character(and the actor) never earns that image so you just end up eye-rolling scenes that are supposed to shake you at your core.

3. The show tries to do the off-beat 'Fargo' moments but there's no substance behind it and it again, feels like an imitation of someone else's work. Previous seasons have briefly and almost precariously touched on supernatural elements and the way this season does it, is just so much more bold. The colorful characters feel like they are colorful for the sake of being colorful instead of offering more substance to the show. Characters do wacky things because its wacky. They will spontaneously die, not because there's a deeper message, but because they want to fill a gap in and make something loud and odd happen. Some characters even die in ways that are just so dissatisfying and it feels like the writers are just discarding them because they are running out of runway as the season comes to a close and it's more of an exclamation point to have one character kill another or for them to slip up and make a mistake that somehow results in a silly, dark 'Fargo' death.

4. It also doesn't help that the show is just painfully predictable when it comes to character actions and circumstances and there's nothing particularly clever about things that the show wants you to believe is clever. And when they do make an attempt at being 'poetic' it's just overwrought. You can just visualize the "A-HA" moment the writers had in their writing room when they perceive they've just created some bit of "poetry". But again, its so overwrought and predictable that it loses any power it could have had.

Submitted November 28, 2020 at 08:47PM by Ok_Aioli7821 https://ift.tt/3qcXgk0