The inner workings of the adaptive process are key to my focus, I think. I really want to understand how the prestige drama format functions relative to true crime, and I think some of it is a claim to reflexivity. This was apparent in the interview with Godfrey that I highlighted yesterday, at least as her own understanding of how the genre has shifted since the mid-2000s into a more respectable, reflective space. But I question how that works outside of fictionalized texts where this is made such an explicit point in the text itself, such as it is in Under the Bridge.

In a brief 2019 conversation in Interview magazine, Godfrey was asked about the surge of interest in true crime since 2015 or so when it re-entered mainstream culture in a major way following the successes of the podcast Serial (2014-present), the HBO series The Jinx (2015; 2024), and the Netflix series Making a Murderer (2015; 2018).

But last night I read “Fargo and Cinema” by Sylvaine Bataille, and it has a very good bit of writing on the different ways the show connects to cinematic style broadly speaking, as well as specifically to the various parts of the Coens’ ouevre. While, again, much of the chapter is about the first two seasons - with some good analysis of how vastly intertextual those seasons are - it pointed out some of the ways season three also focuses on cinematic elements, especially in its use of screen style and genre tropes (as well as typically Coen-esque elements).

So, the good news is that I may actually be first out the gate with analyses of its most recent season, which had a whole lot to say about Trump’s America and the corruption of faith and government that sits at the dark heart of conservative political ideology in the United States.