Wrath of the Showrunners

The all-powerful gods behind Fargo and The Leftovers inflict their worst.

- Matt Zoller Seitz

NOT FOR NOTHING is the modern TV showrunner called a “creator.” On the more freewheeling and stubbornly independent shows, the artist truly is God, or, at the very least, a god, creating universes that can be at once compassionate and cruel, like HBO’s post-Rapture drama The Leftovers, or fundamentally unknowable yet still faintly mocking, like FX’s Fargo. As these two superior dramas unfurl their third seasons (also the final one for The Leftovers), they tease out philosophical and theological questions along with their personal dramas. Both series continually wonder aloud if there’s a supreme being enacting a plan that we’re not evolved enough to grasp, or if God is more along the lines of a fairy tale, a literary device, or something akin to John Lennon’s formulation: a concept by which we measure our pain.

Fargo is the more unsettling of the two, even though its stakes are lower: Where The Leftovers, based on Tom Perrotta’s novel, is set in a post-Rapture universe in which 2 percent of the world’s population vanished without warning or explanation, Noah Hawley’s riff on the filmography of Joel and Ethan Coen is set in a world of grubbily ordinary towns, jobs, and family configurations beset by uncanny coincidences and bursts of chaos and bloodshed that reorient the characters’ lives. The cast is populated mostly by good-hearted cops and other law-abiding folks and dedicated bands of schemers who are willing to torture and murder each other over—as the original Fargo’s Marge Gunderson put it—a little bit of money. Hawley’s unabashedly novelistic approach to the characters continually asks if they really have free will or are cogs in a vast machine predestined to operate in clockwork rhythms. Season one starred Billy Bob Thornton as a trickster and killer who, like