Three years in, Fargo has made the secrets to its success plain for anyone to see. First, the FX anthology series "lovingly" based on the Coen Brothers movie of the same name recruits a suicide squad of movie stars who have left the public eye, beloved character actors, and oddities looking for a chance to show off their dramatic chops. Throw them into a generally likeable, gently comic setting. (Or, in the case of showrunner Noah Hawley's other show Legion, a literally comic setting.) Mimic the original work in ways that are tweaked just gently enough to pass for genuine depth, and you're good to go.

Fargo can be pleasant enough—it'd be hard for it not to be, with long shots of the frozen Minnesota landscapes, goofy looks on the faces of famous people, and a few decent one-liners per episode. But it's also unbearably shallow and convinced of its own greatness, treating writerly coincidence as a standin for profundity and comic juxtaposition as a substitute for character growth. Yet the show is widely tossed around in conversations about the best show on TV. Why? Everything about Fargo is glossy, serving you a Big Mac and convincing you it's a steak. But that's all Hawley needs, because he's perfected the formula for making prestige TV.

This content is imported from YouTube. You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

"Prestige TV" as a label is meant to denote quality, but it's most frequently applied to the shows produced by certain networks—HBO, FX, Showtime, sometimes AMC, and increasingly Amazon and Netflix. Even the other series that fall under the category (like, Lifetime's UnREAL) have earned the "prestige" badge based on how similar they are to these other offerings. They accrue critical acclaim, but genres tend to follow a pattern: Over time, the markers of quality become both set in stone and increasingly easy to imitate—and the art becomes stale.

Genres tend to follow a pattern: Over time, the markers of quality become both set in stone and increasingly easy to imitate—and the art becomes stale.

The exact ingredients for prestige TV have shifted in recent years—from an explicitly "difficult man"-centric equation modeled after The Sopranos and Breaking Bad to something a bit more expansive and closer to the fabled "10-hour movie," ignoring episodic structure as more series get caught in the drift of Netflix's shapeless 14-hour seasons and moving closer to whatever a "cinematic" aesthetic is supposed to be. (This means, primarily, that the show's direction has loudly called attention to itself.)

But any set of rules you can string together to define a prestige TV series is designed to signal one thing: That the show is meant to be taken seriously. Its characters are very serious people doing serious work. Its structure mimics novels and movies (apparently more serious artistic media) as closely as possible. And, most importantly, it invites viewers to pore over every frame in all of the very serious ways viewers have available—recaps, pages of theorizing about the hidden significance of minor production design choices, and, always, hunting for clues.

There has to be some element that does genuinely engage audiences, but a lot of the parts of prestige TV are eminently for sale. It's never been easier to manufacture "quality," simply because the ingredients—high production values, decently well-known actors, a slight degree of directorial flourish—are in such high supply. With audiences shrinking and becoming more niche, it's easier to make splashes with casting choices. (Ryan Murphy has practically transformed this into an art form all its own.) In these cases, the product is fun and occasionally engaging, but it's rarely challenging or great. It's a product.

Dark, tense characters in dark, tense scenes (clockwise from top left): Mary Elizabeth Winstead and Ewan McGregor in FX / Netflix / HBO

Drawing on that surplus is precisely why few, if any of these shows will leave a real mark. TV, more than any other medium, tends to date itself quickly. Each groundbreaking series tends to render itself obsolete as its major advances—say, The Wire's intense "realism," or Buffy's perfected blend of season-long Big Bad villains and monsters-of-the-week—get absorbed into the baseline for what's expected of new series. Even once cutting-edge shows like Breaking Bad increasingly look and feel old, and it's the rare series that sustains the "classic" feeling that sustains so many films. (When was the last time you rewatched an episode of Homeland?)

Ewan McGregor in FX

Some prestige series are still excellent, of course. But the ones that feel artistically vital are also the ones doing something else with the genre. The Americans continues to maintain a delicate balance between exploring interior conflict and thrilling spy action. The Young Pope is on HBO, but the show's consciously slow, borderline parodic Italian fever dream is thrilling exactly because it's nothing like anything else on TV. And Ryan Murphy's increased focus on bite-sized anthological storytelling has had enormous artistic returns, precisely because it refuses to focus on the same, plodding story year after year.

So none of this is to say that all prestige drama is worthless, merely that the level of quality implied by the term is largely happening elsewhere. NBC's Hannibal, by far the most daring TV show of the past few years, aired on a broadcast network, with a much smaller budget than, say, Westworld, and it aggressively pushed at both the episodic and "cinematic" boundaries of what you could plausibly do on TV—on TV, not in a generic visual medium. And while Fargo receives most of the accolades, what TV does well is far better exemplified by something genuinely fun, episodic, and committed to occasional silliness (say, Riverdale) rather than whatever we assume "good TV" is supposed to be.

The miracle of Fargo, and of the proliferation prestige shows in the era of "Peak TV," isn't that the show works as an adaptation of the movie. It's that Hawley has all of the resources FX can throw at him, insanely talented performers, and all of the ingredients for genuinely exciting work and yet can never produce anything better or more interesting than "pleasantly derivative and flattering to watch." Is this, the ultimately generic "prestige" show, the standard-bearer for what TV ought to be? If we want something genuinely new and exciting, it might be time to put aside Minnesota nice.

This content is created and maintained by a third party, and imported onto this page to help users provide their email addresses. You may be able to find more information about this and similar content at piano.io