The Fargo TV series starts with the 1996 film, but it borrows DNA from other Coen Brothers movies too. You can see the dark absurdity and botched crime energy of Blood Simple and Burn After Reading, the small-town moral unraveling of A Serious Man, and the wandering, almost folkloric storytelling style of The Ballad of Buster Scruggs. There’s even a little No Country for Old Men in the way unstoppable forces (like Malvo or Hanzee) crash into everyday lives. Theme-wise, Fargo is obsessed with moral choice. The show keeps asking- what happens when decent people get pushed into bad decisions? There’s also a strong undercurrent of fate vs. free will — the idea that you might just be caught in some cosmic joke you can’t escape. The Midwestern politeness is a constant counterpoint to bursts of violence, creating that strange tonal mix of cozy and horrifying. Greed, pride, and human weakness drive most of the plots, but there’s always that flicker of hope that decency can survive — embodied in the show’s various 'Marge Gunderson' types, who try to do the right thing even when the snow is up to their knees and the bodies keep piling up.