• by Adam Buckman , Featured Columnist, October 12, 2015

The new season of “Fargo” is the best TV show I’ve seen this year, and possibly in many years.

The show has everything -- great acting, writing, locations, cinematography and a story that seems to grow more believable the more farfetched it becomes. You find yourself thinking: This story’s sequence of events is too bizarre to be fiction.

As with the first season of “Fargo,” which was also a self-contained story, the question persists: Is the story true? Like last year’s yarn about a mysterious hit man named Lorne Malvo (played by Billy Bob Thornton), this year’s “Fargo” starts with the same claim: “This is a true story.” Then more words appear: “The events depicted took place in Minnesota in 1979.” 

Whether the events are true or not doesn’t really matter. In the first two episodes that I watched (of the four that FX provided for preview), the story is so well told that it never occurs to you to wonder whether it is true or not.

This season’s “Fargo” takes place in the same frigid, snow-covered region of the United States as last year’s series and the original 1996 movie (although at least some of the exteriors seen in the new “Fargo” were filmed in a town called Fort MacLeod in Alberta, Canada). Some of the characters seen in last year’s “Fargo,” which took place nearer to the present day, turn up much younger in this second season.

Most notable are two members of the Solverson family of law enforcement officers. In last year’s “Fargo,” Bemidji (Minn.) police chief Molly Solverson was played by Allison Tolman. In this new “Fargo,” Molly is 6 years old. Her dad, Lou, is played in this new 1979 “Fargo” by Patrick Wilson. In last year’s series, the character was retired from law enforcement and operating a diner. He was played by Keith Carradine. 

In the new “Fargo,” another diner -- this one located on a highway outside the town of Luverne, Minnesota -- is the scene of a violent crime. Years before this “Fargo” TV series, Luverne was one of four American towns that Ken Burns featured in his 2007 documentary called “The War” about World War II. A character in the Luverne of “Fargo” -- a sheriff named Hank Larsson played by Ted Danson --tells a World War II story in Episode Two.

Of course, this connection with Ken Burns has nothing to do with “Fargo.” But when you become engaged with a TV series this rich, you begin to make these kinds of connections all over the place. A prime example is the aforementioned Solverson family of police officers whose very name implies that they are “solvers” -- an apt surname for a family involved in detective work.

Shades of “Breaking Bad” dot the frozen landscape of this new “Fargo.” One character -- a butcher’s assistant -- stands before a fireplace wearing only his white underpants in the manner of Walter White from “Breaking Bad.” In connecting the dots from “Fargo” to “Breaking Bad,” it is helpful that the “Fargo” actor in the underpants was also in “Breaking Bad” -- Jesse Plemons. And in “Fargo,” he undergoes a transformation that is not unlike Walter White’s, but not the same either.

When twin hitmen come to town in “Fargo,” you might then recall a pair of twin killers from “Breaking Bad.” There’s even a homage to the original “Fargo” movie as a man’s leg is fed into a meat grinder -- the foot still visible like the one in the movie as a leg was ground into pulp in an outdoor wood chipper.

As if to plant this new “Fargo’s” roots even more firmly in its 1979 time frame, one of the townspeople is named Karl Weathers (played by Nick Offerman), triggering memories of the actor Carl Weathers, co-star of “Rocky” and even more significantly “Rocky II,” released in 1979.

In the new “Fargo,” every single actor gives award-worthy performances, many of them against type -- Plemons, Wilson and Danson (seen in the photo above), Kirstin Dunst as the butcher assistant’s wife, Kieran Culkin as a small-time hood, Brad Garrett as a mobster from Kansas City, Jean Smart as the matriarch of a rural crime family, and as one of her sons, Jeffrey Donovan, formerly of “Burn Notice” on USA Network (especially him).

This new season of “Fargo” is not to be missed.

The second season of “Fargo” premieres Monday (Oct. 12) at 10 p.m. Eastern on FX.