Fargo - Season Five (2023 Noah Hawley)

Hawley is still in charge of this 10 part wry black comedy drama series. In this one, Minnesota housewife Juno Temple seems to be more than she seems when kidnapped, helping cop Lamorne Morris. Turns out she's been married to maverick sheriff John Hamm, so now he and his son Joe Keery are after her. She's also married into rich family - husband David Rysdahl is meek but mother Jennifer Jason Leigh is an initially nasty matriarch. With Sam Spruell, Nick Gomez, Dave Foley, Jessica Pohly.

Great moments: tripping over the washing basket; kidnapper's head smashes onto toilet and a bit of it breaks off; car dealership reference to the original film; final encounter between Temple and Leigh... Home invasion by Halloween figures is Home Alone plus The Shining (the gangster trapped under the loft ladder looks just like mad Jack Torrence), and you have to love anything that displays the title 'Five Hundred Years Earlier'.

Episode six has a great key confrontation between Leigh and Pohly, as the latter urges the other to read Temple's record and her terrifying abuse at the hands of Hamm - and this is carried on in the next episode where Temple attends a women's refuge and is forced to reenact her marriage with wooden puppets - a terrific sequence - and the sound of her beatings in wood are all the more disturbing.

All acting good but Temple and never-so-horrible Hamm shine.

Good pot shots at crazy gun-loving ultra right wing ultra-Christian pro-Trump pro-militia conspiracy theory nutters.

There's some really interesting editing going on, and the music is eclectic to say the least, ranging from classic Yes to The Prodigy, with some great incidental music and drumming (not Antonio Sanchez I think).

Editors are: Regis Kimble (3) who also is a producer, Skip Macdonald (3), Christopher Nelson (3), Misha Sayeed (co-ed), Robin August.

Made for FX in the US.