IT STARTED WITH 1996’s Fargo, the Academy Award-winning film from Joel and Ethan Coen. Before anything else, text came on screen that made a claim:
THIS IS A TRUE STORY.
The events depicted in this film
took place in Minnesota in 1987.
At the request of the survivors,
the names have been changed.
Out of respect for the dead,
the rest has been told exactly
as it occurred.
If you’d never seen the movie before—or had no idea what you were getting into—you’d have no reason not to believe what was being claimed. But, as we’ve now known for nearly three decades, none of this is true.
Fitting with the screwball, unreliable, bizarre events of Fargo—both the film and the FX anthology television series—Fargo does not seem to be “a true story.” Perhaps as part of a long, running bit, the explanation for the film’s opening scroll has changed through the years.
Back when the film was first released, Joel Coen claimed that the events in the film were based on a real case that he and his brother had discovered, but that the characterizations were fully imagined by the pair. “If an audience believes that something’s based on a real event, it gives you permission to do things they might otherwise not accept,” he said at the time. In 1997, Ethan Coen told The Brainerd Dispatch that the events of Fargo were largely true, but that the murders were not actually committed in Minnesota.
Many residents of Minnesota believed that the film’s basic story—about a man (William H. Macy) hiring someone to kidnap his wife—was actually based on the true story of a man named T. Eugene Thompson, who was convicted of hiring someone to kill his wife in 1963. When Thompson died in 2015, though, Joel Coen, when asked by The New York Times, once again changed his story on the film’s events. “[The story was] completely made up,” he said. “Or, as we like to say, the only thing true about it is that it’s a story.”
A Special Edition version of Fargo on DVD offers up yet another account—that the film was partially inspired by the 1986 murder of Helle Crafts, a woman who was murdered by her husband and disposed of in a wood chipper—events that infamously occur in the film.
Stream Fargo (1996) Here
So… you can kind of draw your own conclusions on Fargo the movie, and the origin of this bizarre, against all odds “franchise.”
The Fargo TV show, which is now airing its 5th season on FX, also opens each episode with a version of the same text—substituting “1987” for the year when the season is set, and “Minnesota” for whatever state the action is taking place in. But creator Noah Hawley has been much more straight-forward than the Coens about where, exactly, his inspiration has come from.
Is Fargo Season 5 based on a true story?
FX
Despite the opening text—just like the movie (we think…) and four TV seasons before it—Fargo Season 5 is not actually based on a true story.
“The show…It’s all just made up,” showrunner Noah Hawley said back when the very first season was premiering back in 2014.
Stream Fargo Season 5 Here
That said, Season 5 didn’t come without its inspirations. Hawley had a window of time between finishing Season 4 of Fargo and beginning his upcoming Alien series (which will also run on FX), and so he decided it was a perfect time for another go-around with the midwestern crime anthology. That led him back to the OG source—the 1996 Fargo film.
“It’s such a compelling moral dilemma story, and the characters are so great, but I found myself focused on Bill Macy’s wife,” he said in an interview with The Hollywood Reporter. “It was such a great performance, but once the bag went over her head, that was it for her. I thought, ‘What if the bag never goes over the head? What if she’s not kidnappable and there’s a backstory there?'”
Hawley, from there, says he was inspired by the concept of “the wife,” and in his research, found an essay called “I Want A Wife,” written by Judy Brady Syfers and originally published in a 1971 issue of New York Magazine.
“She wrote about all the things that she wanted a wife to do for her. I thought that was really fun to play with, as well,” Hawley said. “I thought that given that every year the show, for me, is primarily female in identity, because the movie was Marge’s story, when you think about it, that would be a really powerful place to land.”
As far as Jon Hamm’s diabolical MAGA sheriff and Joe Keery’s incompetent nepo baby brat cop? Those are clearly figures straight out of 2019. Sam Spruell’s Ole Munch is clearly the season’s version of an Anton Chigurgh (Javier Bardem’s Academy Award-winning role from No Country For Old Men) unstoppable killing force character (also portrayed well by Billy Bob Thornton’s Lorne Malvo in Fargo Season 1).
Many of the characters in Hawley’s Fargo series tend to feel like they’ve been inspired by characters from various Coen films; Season 3’s drifting stranger Paul Marrane (Ray Wise) felt like a direct parallel to Sam Elliott’s Big Lebowski Stranger, down to a philosophical conversation at a bowling alley bar.
Just like with every season, you will likely be able to find clues to Fargo’s latest seasons in the many masterful films of Joel and Ethan Coen.
Stream The Coen Brothers’ Movies Here
Evan Romano
Evan is the culture editor for Men’s Health, with bylines in The New York Times, MTV News, Brooklyn Magazine, and VICE. He loves weird movies, watches too much TV, and listens to music more often than he doesn’t.
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