Pregnancy Is Not the Point: Fargo’s Marge, Fargo Season One’s Molly, and Midwestern Feminisms

The Midwest as a region is famously amorphous, not only in terms of identity and culture but even geography. Cultural geographer James Shortridge claims that “the more one thinks about the Middle West, the more muddled the regional identity seems to become” with conflicting images of a sturdy, virtuous heartland and parochialism.¹ In a piece on Jonathan Franzen’s midwestern politics, Ralph J. Poole notes that the region is “forever caught in the schism between always remaining the same and reluctantly admitting change.”² This shifting ground, however, can also offer possibilities for change and growth, especially for women. The film and television incarnations of Fargo feature female protagonists who blend certain aspects of stereotypical midwestern values—decency, hard work, lack of pretension, and so on—with conspicuous feminist qualities including individual strength, professional leadership, and investigative skills. Marge Gunderson (Frances McDormand), the pregnant police chief in Joel and Ethan Coen’s Fargo (1996), is an unusual film character. Although Marge is seven months pregnant, film scholar Parley Ann Boswell points out, “We hear almost no references to Marge’s pregnancy,” as the character simply “goes about her business, doing what she needs to do.”³ This is just one of the interesting ways that the first season of the Fargo (FX, 2014–) television series resembles the originating film: through its subtle but radical interventions in the standard roles and plotlines offered to women. Among the many references to the film in season one, Deputy Molly Solverson (Allison Tolman) clearly evokes Marge in several ways. Because of Marge’s long shadow, series creator Noah Hawley remarked, “I knew from the beginning that the biggest challenges I had was [sic] giving Molly’s character her fair shake.”⁴ The similarities are striking: both are decent, astute, down-to-earth midwestern female police officers, and both are very pregnant. Despite appearing almost twenty years after Marge, Molly is noteworthy because her professional and personal storylines interact in a manner that remains unusual for female television characters, particularly given the gender stereotypes of midwestern women.

The fact that both female characters are afforded a central status within their respective narratives is historically unusual for police procedurals and remains so today. As Julie D’Acci observes in her study of the ground-breaking series Cagney and Lacey (CBS, 1981–88), “women were traditionally cast as the protagonists of situation comedies rather than prime-time dramas,” and while progress has definitely been made on this front, there have always been more male cop characters on American television than female.⁵ Cop shows have been a staple throughout television history, and Ken Dowler notes that almost three hundred of them “have aired on American network, cable, and syndicated television, with several new shows premiering each year.”⁶ Many, perhaps even most in recent years, cop dramas on television are ensembles, like NYPD Blue (ABC, 1993–2005) and The Wire (HBO, 2002–08), and most do include female characters. These female characters are always outnumbered by the male characters, usually by a significant margin. Consider The Wire, which had numerous major male detective characters (including McNulty, Bunk, Carver, Herk, Freamon, Prez, and Sydnor), as well as a group of higher-ranked police characters who are exclusively male. In contrast, there are only two main female cop characters: Kima, the only female detective who is featured in all seasons of the show, and Beadie, who is only featured in season two before being relegated to the role of McNulty’s love interest, soon to be forgotten altogether. Single-protagonist police shows with a female lead were very rare, with only two of note in the ’70s and ’80s: Police Woman (NBC, 1974–78) and Cagney and Lacey. Such series remain comparatively rare, as only a few contemporary examples have lasted more than a season or two, most notably, The Closer (TNT, 2005–12), Rizzoli and Isles (TNT, 2010–16), and Saving Grace (TNT, 2007–10). While Fargo could easily have featured several important police characters and been an ensemble show, as is more common...