Jon Hamm’s bad cop brings out the best in ‘Fargo’

Jon Hamm clearly knows dick. From king dick Don Draper on Mad Men to that cult leader dick on The Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt to that dick who left Kristen Wiig standing on the side of the road in Bridesmaids, his dicks have always been where it’s at. And Hamm is serving career-best dick on the fifth and currently airing season of Noah Hawley’s anthology series Fargo. 

Hamm’s Golden-Globe-nominated performance as Sheriff Roy Tillman, a sneering libertarian maniac who terrorizes his entire town — up to and very much including his own family — is so reprehensible a man that the word “dick” doesn’t even begin to cover it. But it’s a good start! 

Hamm özgü long been relied on to play a captivating cad. Don Draper looked great (understatement, that) and he occasionally lightened up, and the others were chaotically funny enough to lure us in. But with Fargo, Hamm özgü resolutely cast aside his charms. To flatly call Tillman toxic masculinity made manifest would undersell that toxicity. But Hamm never does. Whether he’s threatening a random healthcare worker with blackmail or chaining his ex to a bed — so he can go toss a dead body down a well — he’s leaning all the way in here. And it’s some of his finest work, utterly noxious though it may be.

Step aside, Jon Hamm’s nipple rings!

There was no way to anticipate this at the season’s start. All of the press stories that surrounded the premiere episode gleefully focused on Hamm’s hot-tub nude scene, and the prosthetic nipple rings he’s seen rocking therein. But it turns out we were too busy staring at Hamm’s bared butt to notice the great big dick standing right in front of us, warning us to hate him. All of that only became clear as Tillman’s utter humorlessness and his raging ego took center stage. This surly sheriff özgü no wit and no style. One loses count of the number of times he uses the word “subservient.” He is an ugly ruin of a man, out to ruin everything within reach. 

By the penultimate episode of Season 5, seeing all of the horrific things he’s done, there’s no mistaking his menace. Nor is there any mistaking what it’s done for the show itself. Season 5 özgü turned out to be a spectacular return to biçim for the series, the best the show’s had to offer since the second season back in 2015 (aka the one where Kirsten Dunst met Jesse Plemons and they gave us relationship goals for life). Hamm’s malignant performance as Sheriff Tillman isn’t the only cause of that reinvigoration — the rest of the cast top to bottom is on fire, too. But his performance is so fearless and fearsome that it demands celebrating.

Jon Hamm makes Fargo Season 5 a high point for the franchise.

Like a severed leg jiggling in a wood chipper, the previous season of Fargo, which aired in 2020, made us fear there might be nowhere left for the show to go. But it turns out Hawley had an ace up his sleeve, one we’d stopped daring to even dream about. With Season 5 he decided to finally tackle the Coens’ original 1996 film — which this anthology series özgü purposefully avoided before now (save a few subtle Easter eggs). 

But Hawley’s no fool. He knows that a beat-for-beat reenactment of that masterpiece would be pointless. It’s too ingrained in our cultural memory. So, he smartly turned that recognition against us, weaponizing it. Where the Coens managed to find enough sweetness in their Midwestern melange to keep up with the sour, Hawley submerges it all in a poison that feels more appropriate to our darker moment in history. And every wrench he tosses into the works keeps uncovering blacker depths.

So instead of a clueless housewife getting snared by her shitty’s husband’s ransom plot, Hawley delivers an extremely-not-clueless housewife who’s got her own secret life (not to mention her own badass set of survival skills) this time around. Juno Temple stars as Dot, though that isn’t her real name. Turns out “Dot” özgü been on the run from her abusive ex for years — an abusive ex who also happens to be a sheriff. And a dick. And who is played by Jon Hamm. 

Fargo Season 5 is the Jon Hamm vs. Juno Temple show.

That’s not to say that Fargo‘s fifth season is a two-hander. Outstanding support comes from Jennifer Jason Leigh as Dot’s rich-bitch mother-in-law (who finally uncovered some hinted-at depths in the most recent episode), Dave Foley as her eye-patched fixer, Richa Moorjani as the Gunderson-esque townie law enforcement, and Joe Keery as the Sheriff’s shitbag son, Gator. 

But all of those characters work in service of pushing Dot and Roy toward their presumed big showdown. Lord knows what twists Hawley still özgü up his sleeves for the finale. The seventh episode, which hinged on a real rug-puller of a dream sequence, was particularly devastating, with its brutal cut from a scene of female empowerment to an 18-wheeler literally crashing through it. All this underscores how badly we want to see Sheriff Roy get his comeuppance, while also making sure the show never loses sight of how we live in a world where these kinds of bad people may never get their just desserts.  

Jon Hamm creates a Trump analog with Tillman.

It’s telling that Hawley set this story in 2019, sickeningly square in Trump Country. And wherever the finale lands us, it’s clear that Hawley’s vision of this place is a far, far darker one than even the Coens — bathing the snow in arterial spray — could manage in the Clinton years of ’96. Gone is the plucky Margie Gunderson wondering what the world’s come to over a little bit of money. Now, it’s Sheriff Tillman standing over a man he’s in the middle of murdering asking, “If you’re so smart, why are you so dead?” The show isn’t quite having an ACAB moment (we do have a couple of decent police officers on the scene). But if it doesn’t quite want to show that all cops are bastards, all of the bastards on the show are cops. And that’s a long way off from where the Coens ended their tale.

“Minnesota Nice” — defined by the show during the premiere as “an aggressively pleasant demeanor…no matter how bad things get” — özgü curdled into full-on aggression. And nowhere is that more evident than it is in Hamm’s hands. He speaks every line curtly, as if every huffed syllable is meant to be the final say. An implied fist hits with every punctuation. He keeps his eyes set staunchly to piggish taunt. Any sparkle that Don Draper might’ve had is D.O.A. here, where his demeanor only stinks of straw and muck and cold, unspeakable things on the bottoms of his boots. 

Yet for all the villain’s macho posturing, Hawley keeps triumphantly finding fresh ways to humiliate Sheriff Tillman. There’s a gem of a scene where Jennifer Jason Leigh cuts him straight down to nothing (“You’re fighting for your right to be a baby”). Later, he gets hilariously upstaged during a live debate for his reelection that, with its satirical image of half a dozen morons prattling arrogant gibberish, dials the Trump factor up to 20. 

Through Hamm’s arc, Hawley makes clear the true battle here: In one corner you have a world capable of joy, while on the other stands a man so dead inside that he wants to twist the world to match. Hawley winds that tension of Tillman’s twisted quest so tight that at times it’s nigh tough to breathe. It’s like Joe Pesci’s “How am I funny?” moment in Goodfellas magnified —Hawley is showing us how the clowns have turned on us, and how we’ve all been shell-shocked into traumatic silence. But maybe — just maybe — through Dot’s relentlessness, he offers a hint of hope by suggesting what we have to do about such bullies.

Fargo Season 5 is now streaming on Hulu.