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FX's Emmy Award-winning Fargo continues to impress with the announcement that Ewan McGregor has been signed to join the show in not one, but two roles. Said to be the focus of the third season of the show, which is supposed to take place closer to the present than either of the two preceding years did, the actor has been cast as brothers Emit and Ray Stussey. Says the network of those roles, “Emmit Stussy is the Parking Lot King of Minnesota. A handsome, self-made, real estate mogul and family man, Emmit sees himself as an American success story. His slightly younger brother, Ray Stussy, on the other hand is more of a cautionary tale. Balding, pot-bellied, Ray is the kind of guy who peaked in high school. Now a parole officer, Ray has a huge chip on his shoulder about the hand he’s been dealt, and he blames his brother, Emmit, for his misfortunes.” Little more is known about the third season. McGregor, of course, is known for his roles in the Trainspotting films (the second of...

A look back at the highs and lows of 2015 television. By Brandon Wolfe Winners 1. Fargo (FX) Last year’s biggest surprise has evolved into television’s most consistently excellent and creatively energized series. In its second year, Fargo unleashed a boldly complex, tightly interwoven narrative concerning a brutal gang war in 1979, the hapless couple (Jesse Plemons and Kirsten Dunst) who unwittingly ignite the fuse between the warring factions and the decent cop (Patrick Wilson) trying to keep order amidst the chaos and bloodshed. With a knockout cast, superb humor, delightful characters, defiant weirdness (those UFOs!) and more Coen Brothers references than you can shake a snow shovel at, Fargo is the best thing on the air right now, you betcha. 2. Justified (FX) After a penultimate season that seemed muddled and confused, FX’s contemporary Western came roaring back with its guns a-blazing, brimming with renewed purpose. The ballad of Raylan Givens (Timothy Olyphant) and ...

Has the FX series still got it? You betcha. Review by Brandon Wolfe Fargo , FX’s expansion of the Coen Bros’ modern film classic, was last year’s greatest surprise. There was every reason to look at the series askance prior to its debut. The film, with its unique blend of “aw, jeez” Minnesota geniality and blood-in-the-snow violence, seemed impossible to duplicate without simply standing as a facile duplication. Even with a top-shelf cast, featuring Martin Freeman and Billy Bob Thornton, it was hard to imagine the show amounting to anything more than a misguided curiosity, a fool’s errand to recapture something too idiosyncratic to replicate. The bar was set too high to clear. Forget it, series creator Noah Hawley, it’s the Coen Brothers. Yet Fargo did the impossible. It carved out its own niche, telling a story that meshed with the Fargo house style while being uniquely its own thing. Hawley spoke fluent Coen without seemingly like a mere impressionist. The unlikely resu...

Read on for the ten best and worst television shows of 2014 2014 TV Winners and Losers by Brandon Wolfe 2014 was a surprisingly great year for television, with an unusually large crop of incredible new series debuting alongside a handful of rejuvenated returning favorites. But as with everything, you take the good with the bad, and there was still plenty of bad this year. Here are my picks for TV’s ten biggest winners and losers of 2014. Winners 1. Fargo (FX) The year’s biggest surprise. There was no reason to expect anything from Noah Hawley’s ten-episode interpretation of the Coen Brothers classic. It seemed like the most thankless of tasks; at its best, it could only wither in the shadow of the film. But the show’s best turned out to be much better than anyone could have guessed, matching the humor and tone of the film while staking out its own unique ground. It helped that it was impeccably cast. The very British Martin Freeman disappears completely into the skin (and...