Flipping the script

The new Fargo may echo the original film but it's also a product of the Trump era.

- RUSSELL BAILLIE

FARGO Streaming: Neon, from Wednesday, November 22 

Screening: SoHo, from Monday, November 27

The previous four seasons of Fargo - the anthology series which used the 1996 Coen brothers' movie as a foundation to Midwest crime stories delivered as dark and bloody comedies - have proved that film spin-offs don't have to be knock-offs. And that they don't necessarily have to stick to one film.

The fourth season from 2020, with its warring crime families in 1950s Kansas City, Missouri, felt as much of a homage to the Coens' mobster movie Miller's Crossing and had characters who tied into season two, set in 1979.

Judging by early episodes of the forthcoming fifth season, there is an amusing, you'll-know-it-when-you-see-it touch of the Coens' No Country for Old Men, their Oscar-winning adaptation of the Cormac McCarthy novel.

But Noah Hawley, who created the acclaimed anthology with little input from the duo but with an expert ear for their tone, has also delivered a Fargo show that might be the closest he's got to the original film, albeit in a script-flipped kind of way.