Indeed, during the course of its run, it has become increasingly obvious that the Minnesotan well ran dry after season one and we have been left with the reanimated, off-beat corpse of the source material.

When I was a kid back in the olden days, my dad used to do this thing where he would go to the video rental shop and come back with something that was hideously inappropriate for me and my siblings. Thus, I vividly recall Fargo (the movie) arriving at our house in or around 1997.

I was a hopelessly uncool 12-year-old and being exposed to the depraved but very sophisticated film gave me a sense of superiority that I was never going to find in or around anything to do with school, social groups or God forbid, sport. At the time, the wood-chipper scene was shocking, and the ultra-violence set among the softly spoken, lilting Minnesotans felt subversive and unique.

The movie was released 27 years ago. Clearly, a lot has happened since then and what is old is now new again. Somewhere in the middle of this is Fargo, the television series. Sure, it’s not outright evil but it is just the same mild-mannered small-town cops and character actor grotesques over and over again.

It continues to look beautiful but there are only so many times that one can watch the formula play out in the same setting without ever grappling with the consequences of what transpires. We know who is good and who is bad, but what happens after that? How is the town changed by the crimes and murders that have gone before? How can any of this mean anything if we don’t ever grapple with what goes next?

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In this respect, then, Fargo is kind of like Ricky Gervais. It looks and sounds the same year after year, but what was once interesting and maybe even thoughtful has tied itself up into a whole lot of self-parody and not much else.

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