FX’s Fargo never had the luxury of being the kind of show that finds its footing in its second year. As such, it spends its first season doggedly proving itself in the broader tonal and narrative strokes of its source material, Joel and Ethan Coen’s 1996 black comedy about a gambler who arranges the kidnapping of his own wife to extort a ransom from his wealthy father-in-law. But with that footing firmly found, Fargo’s Season 2 premiere “Waiting for Dutch” breaks into a giddy sprint, almost the zoomies, with a montage that pairs a flashy new set of editing tricks (which would become instant stylistic identifiers for the show) and a soundtrack of Peter Green-era Fleetwood Mac as a 1979 Jimmy Carter speech warning of a coming recession. With an entirely new cast and a story set 27 years before the first, these first moments of Season 2 are a colorful and confident fresh start, allowing creator and showrunner Noah Hawley to loudly clarify his unique goals for the project in an outside voice. It also lets slip one of the show’s strangest apparent preoccupations: the history of American economics.
Set in the Carter administration’s final year, the season contrasts cold premonitions of a new corporate America with the contemporary atmosphere of tense hopes for Ronald (“Dutch”) Reagan in the face of recession. Reagan makes great fodder for the show, partly because the conceit of his “trickle-down” economic policy…
