Adapting one of the best crime films of the last 30 years - ever, in fact - into a faithful yet successfully standalone TV series was not going to be easy. Streaming services are awash now with pale, derivative remakes of popular IP, demonstrating all the pitfalls of reimagining the classics for modern audiences. Fargo (the TV series), however, is perhaps the apogee of film-to-TV adaptations. With 5 anthologised seasons to date, the show has retained the farce and darkness at the centre of the Coen brothers’ 1996 Oscar winner, but created a richly layered world all of its own.
For this First Pages, I took a look at the opening of the pilot script for the first series of Fargo. Noah Hawley, the writer, had a pretty solid template to work with already. But even assuming the reader knows nothing about Fargo, this a masterful opening.
The title card alerts us to the exact location of the story: Minnesota. Nevertheless, we can still surmise that this opening scene takes place somewhere in a frigid and remote landscape.
With our setting established, a car appears from the snow, breaking into the purity represented by the blizzard wall. There are chains on its tires: the driver is prepared. But more than that: he is reserved, every bit as icy-cold as the environment he is about to disturb.
One piece of advice that any screenwriting master will give is that characters are built on how they act and react to events around them in the story. Lorne Malvo’s character is made crystal clear in less than a page here. ‘If he minds he doesn’t show it’, and he coolly ignores the thumping from the trunk of his vehicle. When the car skids and crashes, and the man emerges from the trunk and makes a break for escape, Malvo is unmoved. His stoic reaction when he looks down at the dying deer betrays a man not unused to seeing life in its final throes, a man accustomed to holding the fate of others in his hands. He is also patient, able to refrain from panic or rash decisions even in moments of stress.
It is abundantly clear from this first page that Lorne Malvo is a man of his own volition, a clear-eyed, dangerous and intelligent character who quite literally pierces the silence of this landscape with a bang.
What Hawley also does well here, I think, is that he gives us enough of Malvo’s character but refrains from having him act immediately. We are baited into reading on to find out exactly what action he will take. Will he put the deer out of its misery? Will he attempt to save it? Will he decide, after all, to pursue his escaped captive? We need to read on to find out, and in this it is clear that Hawley has created a compelling character in under a minute of screen/page time.
Fargo the TV series goes on to be one of the most incredible adaptations committed to screen, a cascade of comedy, darkness, incompetence and chaos that channels the spirit of the Coen brothers in the best possible way. I’d highly recommend watching it, and then coming back to this screenplay to see exactly how Hawley laid the blueprint for one of the best anthology dramas of recent times.