Unexpected but amazing casting
Fargo can definitely stake a claim at being the best film-to-TV of all time. The Coen Brothers’ original 1996 crime movie, starring Steve Buscemi, Frances McDormand and William H Macy, is one of the best American movies of the 1990s, and picked up Oscars for Best Screenplay and Best Actress (McDormand).
Trying to remake it for the small screen seemed like madness – but somehow it worked. Instead of a direct retelling of the story, the FX show went with an anthology format, with each season being its own self-contained crime story, with new characters each year.
So far, over its first three seasons the show has featured such big names as Billy Bob Thornton, Martin Freedman, Ewan McGregor, Kirsten Dunst, and Mary Elizabeth Winstead. But the headline for season four has just been announced , and it is bigger than any of them.
Chris Rock will star in the next season of Fargo. One of the greatest and most important American stand up comedians ever, Rock isn’t really known as being a prolific actor, so this is an incredible get for the show.
FX also released an official synopsis for the new season:
Season four of Fargo is set in 1950, at the end of two American migrations — that of Southern Europeans from countries like Italy, who came to the U.S. at the turn of the last century and settled in northern cities like New York and Chicago — and African-Americans who left the South in great numbers to escape Jim Crow and moved to those same cities — you saw a collision of outsiders, all fighting for a piece of the American dream. In Kansas City, Missouri, two criminal syndicates have struck an uneasy peace. One Italian, one African-American. Together they control an alternate economy — that of exploitation, graft and drugs. This too is the history of America. To cement their peace, the heads of both families have traded their eldest sons.
Chris Rock plays the head of one family, a man who – in order to prosper – has surrendered his oldest boy to his enemy and who must in turn raise his son’s enemy as his own. It’s an uneasy peace, but profitable. And then the head of the Kansas City mafia goes into the hospital for routine surgery and dies. And everything changes.
