The Box Set: "Fargo: Season 5."

Deconstructing Ep. 1, "The Tragedy of the Commons" and Ep. 2., "Trials and Tribulations.

These Box Set deconstructions contain spoilers and should be read after you’ve watched the episode.

You can feel it. Immediately.

You can feel Noah Hawley, the writer, director and creator of the TV version of the Coen Brothers “Fargo,” leaning in to the fifth installment of his adaptation.

Leaning all in.

This is a good and welcome turn of events. No, check that. It’s great. If you flash back to the original idea to take a classic Coen Brothers gem and turn it into a TV series, well, and I’ve said this many times, it was maybe one of the dumbest ideas on paper you could imagine. The likely failure rate was astronomically high.

Yet Hawley straddled both worlds — taking the original idea, making it his own thing and in the process not only winning over critics and fans (and, more impressively, the Coen Brothers), but creating an exceptionally great series.

By the fourth season, when the three previous were so thrilling and inventive, something went amiss. Maybe it was just that it was the fourth season — who could have even imagined it would get there when the concept was pitched? Or maybe it was the pandemic. Maybe it was burnout. For whatever reason, that fourth season — one I didn’t even finish — just didn’t work for a lot of people.

But you can feel it again.

That indescribable wow that permeated the first three. It’s back. Hawley and “Fargo” are back. A superb cast, an already pulsating storyline and subversive, creative writing light up the two first episodes.

Can it sustain a whole season? Who knows; another conversation for another time. But geez, “Fargo” really came out of the gate in the first two episodes that dropped late on Tuesday. Let’s get to it.

Jon Hamm and Juno Temple in “Fargo” Season 5.