Which makes watching this new TV Fargo – created by Noah Hawley with the blessing of, but no creative input from, the Coens – a strange one.
The story may be different, but so much is either immediately familiar or quickly rejigs. The road, a dark slash through frozen white upper mid-western wasteland, squad car pulled over; Allison Tolman's Molly Solverson is a toned-down Gunderson (though it's not her who's pregnant); the William H Macy role, the hapless, dissatisfied salesman getting sucked downward into hell, is taken by our own Martin Freeman because American acting unions now demand that every major US TV series has at least one Limey (not sure about the accent, Mart, but then I'm not really in a position to judge; I'll leave it to the good folk of Minnesota); Billy Bob Thornton is the devil, the roving hitman gloriously injecting evil into small-town insularity.
Then there's the atmosphere, the humour, the hilarious horror. And the themes of human weakness, violence and masculinity, that good men can do bad stuff, and that that can be very funny.
There's something almost dreamlike about the experience of watching it. Like revisiting a favourite old childhood haunt; a funfair, perhaps, because the original Fargo was so joyful. Some of the rides have moved, or been changed, or updated, but the feel of the place, the look and the sound, the terror and the laughing, is the same. It could have been a terrible idea to return, but it's not, because it's all coming flooding back, making you remember just why and how much you once loved it.
