Fargo, Watchmen, and the New Television History of America

The first episode of this new season of Fargo, now airing on FX and Hulu, begins with a history lesson. It’s not the sort of lesson you’d find in a high school history textbook.

It concerns the growth and changing leadership of the Kansas City underworld from the very start of the twentieth century up to 1950, when the main body of the show takes place. It shows how the criminal elements of that city were initially under the control of a Jewish crime syndicate until the Irish came to town and made a deal straight out of Feudalism. This deal results, inevitably from the tone of the show, in betrayal. After the Irish take over, the Italians enter the scene and the whole play starts all over, ending with the Italians on top. We enter into the ‘present day’ of the show when Cannon Limited, the Black gang headed by Loy Cannon (Chris Rock, in an incredible performance), is attempting to take over from the Italians and decide to join the same Feudal son-swapping arrangement both the Irish and the Italians had previously been shown to double-cross.

And all that’s just in the first ten or so minutes of the first episode of this season. A succinct historical lecture given by a character with personal connection to the story, that also shows how other individuals caught up in the history being told were affected on both the micro/personal level and on the macro/societal/gang level. In just ten minutes, Fargo builds a concise and clear thesis statement for what I believe will be one of the main themes of this season of the show: History is inescapable. It shapes your life in large and small ways.

I believe this is a theme and a lesson that applies to a large swath of television made in the last couple years.

HBO’s Watchmen began with a history lesson as well. And unlike Fargo, it isn’t a necessary mashing-together of a couple different Midwest crime traditions and chronologies. No, the Tulsa Massacre shown at the very start of the series, was unfortunately quite real. And it may have been even more brutal than what was depicted on screen: they really did use aircraft in the actual destruction of what was known at the time as Black Wall Street. But the problem with learning about history in the abstract, in the way of only blunt facts; is that it is inherently depersonalizing. Watchmen, much like this season of Fargo a year later, addresses this by giving one of the most important and pivotal characters in the whole series his origin in the Tulsa Massacre, in this piece of awful, oft-forgotten American history.

What this character, Will Reeves (played at various times by: Louis Gossett Jr., Danny Boyd Jr., and Jovan Adepo), does with his origins, how it shapes and misshapes him and his actions, is the question that lies at the exact center of the whole show. Will Reeves makes decisions eighty years before the start of the show’s ‘present day’ that still carry huge consequences for his family and the nation at large over two generations later. But Watchmen goes deeper than that. Set as it is in an alternate America where we won Vietnam thanks to superheroes and both Richard Nixon and Robert Redford were president for far longer than is legal, one of the things Watchmen is most clearly fascinated by is the way people respond (on both the personal and the cultural level) to large and historic events they have no control over.

This is shown clearly not only in Will Reeves and his descendants, but in the unstable form Vietnam takes as America’s 51st state, in the Seventh Kavalry misunderstanding Rorschach’s message from the original graphic novel and weaponizing it and certain other pieces of malformed history for their own ends, in the desperate post-squid New York tourism advertisements, and in the character Looking Glass and the episode centered on him. This is the character who witnessed the squid attack on New York from the original graphic novel as a child, and found himself utterly changed by this event, by history, for the rest of his life. He visits a support group and learns about the concept of ‘inherited trauma‘. The idea that the horrors visited upon a parent, as long as they are of sufficient and altering strength, can be felt in the child in significant fashion, in ways that go beyond environment and nurture to something in our very genetics.

This idea of inherited trauma, even if it does have its skeptics and is still in the process of being proven or disproven, is still, I believe, the perfect lens to look through for what both Watchmen and Fargo want to say about history. It is inescapable, the ravages of the past will come back to ravage the future in one way or another.

To paraphrase a quote from the first episode of this new season of Fargo: it is also important to note that (almost) none of the people involved were white.

This is a more important distinction than you may think at first. It is this insistence on a minorities’ history, an immigrant’s history, the history of those without power (for reasons that usually have to do with race or class) and how that history can shape people and cultures long after the specific events have passed, that separates the historical fiction of Fargo Season 4 and Watchmen (also Lovecraft Country, True Detective Season 3, Umbrella Academy Season 2, etc…) from the other major strain of historical fiction currently in vogue on TV. Seen in shows like The Great, Downton Abbey, and Dickinson on AppleTV. While these shows are still incredibly relevant to the modern day, they focus much less on the passage and movement of history. Instead, they opt for a more static staging of time and place and pour their attention on the timelessness and metaphors of power. The Great, in particular, does this very well.

What Downton Abbey and The Great argue with their history (even if The Great, winningly in my opinion, gives much less of a shit about historical accuracy than Downton) is that it is universal. And they are right, in their way, in what they say about power. What they say can be applied to almost any historical or present-day situation involving men, women, and state power.

But Fargo Season 4 and Watchmen have a different, and a little more specific, goal in mind; with a different, and a little more specific, audience they target. Fargo Season 4 and Watchmen want to talk about American history. More specifically, they want to talk about forgotten American history. And they’re telling these stories to an American audience who may have done the forgetting in the first place. This is the big, specific, point I believe both shows are trying to make with their historical fiction: America’s history is deeper, more complicated, darker, and more racially focused than the average citizen has been led to believe. And more than that, these shows want to remind you that as an American, you are living with this history. It has shaped you and your life in this country no matter your race or your class. In fact, history has shaped what you think of race and class.

This is shown in Fargo through the alternately muted and twitchy reactions of the two survivors of the son-swapping history lesson shown at the top. It’s shown in a white bank manager dismissing Loy Cannon out of hand for pitching him a prototype of a credit card months before the Diner’s Club Card (the first ‘financial instrument’ that could be recognized as what we know now as a credit card) debuted in a couple small restaurants in New York. It’s shown in a private hospital angrily turning away a seriously wounded man simply because he and his family are Italian and look like the hospital administrator’s stereotype of gangsters. Because Italians (and Irish and Jews) weren’t considered white at the time. They all, along with Chris Rock and his gang, were considered lesser Americans if they were considered Americans at all.

Fargo, even with only two episodes of this season released, shows the consequences of these strains of ugly history running through our country. These groups of people have been excluded from legitimate prosperity for generations by historical discrimination. Their choices are severely narrowed by this history. So, according to the logic of a crime drama that still must meet the demands of television entertainment, they must work in criminal enterprise. They must create their own alternate economy (a paraphrasing of the title of the first episode). They are shaped by history out of their control. Anyone who has seen the entirety of Watchmen, would be hard pressed to argue this is not also one of the main points of the show.

While readers of historical fiction novels might argue (with justification, in my opinion) that none of this is new to the genre’s literary form, I would argue that it is at least a little new for television, especially in the popularity and prestige of the shows that are using historical fiction in this fashion. Television, as a medium, simply costs infinitely more to produce than a book. Thus, it has always needed to appeal to a much wider audience than even a successful novel. This makes television a naturally more conservative medium, instinctively frightened of turning it’s audience off due to any controversy. And up until very recently, confronting the specific and complicated history of the United States of America was something TV had never had the balls to do.

Watchmen and now Fargo Season 4 may be the shows to change that. They may be the series able to change the way television is willing to look at America’s racial and class based history.

After the debates last night, more people than ever may agree that we need a bracing and honest dose of American history now and then.

If you enjoyed this article at all, please check out my New Adult Contemporary Fantasy Novel: Magic, Television, & Marijuana. Out now on Amazon.