Lester Nygaard

In the winter, when the nights are short and all is darkness, I find there’s nothing better to banish those winter blues than cuddling up on the sofa in front of a cheery, gore-saturated shark film, full of toned Californian teens in swimwear being eaten hilariously alive. Conversely, in the summertime, when the pavements are all wobbly with heat-haze and the act of turning on the oven to cook dinner is enough to make your pet cat start to sigh demonstratively and open more windows, one needs a swift and chilly restorative to remind you that there is still somewhere in the world where it’s cold enough for the human brain to function.

That, at least, is the presumed rationale behind the decision to screen Fargo, the long-awaited small-screen successor to the impeccable neo-noir thriller of the same name, at this time of year. This is not a decision, by the way, that anybody needs to regret.

Prematurely stooped, afflicted with a face that could charitably be described as ‘lived-in’, and saddled with an emasculating, passive-aggressive wife, Martin Freeman’s Lester Nygaard is the perfect hero for our times. The hero, in fact, we never knew we needed. Chance encounters and wearied routines circumscribe his miserable existence.

In the basement of his bland Minnesota home a broken washing machine clatters angrily while an unregarded poster on the wall exhorts the insurance salesman to break his routine, swim the other way and have faith in himself. In full agreement with the poster is Lorne Malvo, an enigmatic shadow of a man, who gets the measure of Lester in one fortuitous conversation and decides to set the downtrodden schlub on the path to some kind of happiness. Malvo, played by Billy Bob Thornton with the ketamine-stare he perfected in Pushing Tin and the Coen Brothers’ The Man Who Wasn’t There, observes wearily that Lester has spent his whole life under the delusion that there are rules.

He sighs. “There aren’t.”

Across a formica-topped diner table, a light starts to burn in poor Lester’s eyes.

FARGO - Pictured: Allison Tolman as Molly Solverson. CR: Chris Large/FX

Much has been made, perhaps inevitably, of the comparisons between Freeman’s character in the new Fargo TV series and William H. Macy’s neurotic, desperate Jerry Lundegard in the original film. To be sure, there are similarities aplenty – and it’s not just Lester and Jerry, we also have a heavily pregnant woman, a gently sensible female cop and a malevolent force of nature thickly spreading blood across the icy landscape, but many of these factors are more homage than outright borrowing. The Coens’ film is not a template for this series, it is merely one of the elements at play.

If the original movie prefigured the Scandi-noir craze by a decade, the series makes recompense by stealing back from the Scandinavians the frosty solitude of Stieg Larsson’s Millennium trilogy and the wintry drift of the first season of The Killing. There’s a little bit of Breaking Bad, too, which also played with the Lundegard trope of ‘good guy driven to do bad things’, and more than a small helping of cherry pie-flavoured Twin Peaks-iness, particularly in the awkward longeurs, the placid tracking shots and the beautifully-filmed post-Norman Rockwell scenery.

Freeman and Thornton are magnificent as the put-upon Lester and his mephistophelean saviour, but the rest of the cast are just as good. Bob Odenkirk, the very Saul Goodman himself, puts in a splendidly knock-kneed turn as weak-stomached Deputy Sheriff Bill Oswalt, and Kate Walsh (Grey’s Anatomy and its spin-off Private Practice) gets her teeth into the scenery as a freshly-widowed mother of two Minnesotan morons.

But the true stand-out in the cast is the immaculate Allison Tolman, whose warm, kind, thoughtful and quietly ambitious Molly Solverson looks set to be the beating heart of the show. A relative newcomer, Tolman is a delight in every scene, and at absolutely no point does she take all of her clothes off and bounce noisily around on top of any of her co-stars, making her genuinely unique in modern American TV.

FARGO - Pictured: Billy Bob Thornton as Lorne Malvo. CR: Chris Large/FX

Fargo began on Channel 4 this evening, and if the other nine episodes stand up to the promise of this debut, we are in for a treat that will get us right the way through to the second series of The Returned (also on Channel 4) and the arrival of Bob Odenkirk’s very own Better Call Saul, the oddly-enticing prequel to Breaking Bad.

It’s hot outside, kids, and the pubs are full of loud idiots. Let it all boil and stay in on Sundays for the next two months. It’ll be worth it. Treat yourself to a little bit of Minnesota nice.