‘Fargo’ Teasers Show Billy Bob Thornton’s Quirky, Sub-Zero Crime

FX has released a slew of morbid and eccentric trailers for Fargo, their upcoming TV adaptation of the Coen Brothers’ 1996 movie of the same name. All sorts of evildoings abound, set to the most mundane soundtracks ever: a body gets dumped out of a car, a man sprints across a frozen tundra and while there’s no woodchopper, two criminals make good use out of a chainsaw to get a body down an ice fishing hole.

The show stars Billy Bob Thornton as a shiftless figure (à la Steve Buscemi’s Carl Showalter) who meets a small-town insurance salesmen (much like William H. Macy’s Jerry Lundegaard) played by Sherlock‘s Martin Freeman. Freeman pops up in one clip with a broken nose while sitting, horrified, on a rumbling dryer. In the clip above, Thornton speeds down a snow-covered highway saying, “There’s nothing wrong with living by the rules, as long as you’re willing to die by them,” as someone beats on the inside of his trunk.

Of course it’s not all grizzly, below-zero murders, with the teasers giving a good sense of the show’s humor: In one clip, someone stocks up on, er, supplies like duct tape, a knife, a crowbar and chips, while in another, Thornton sits at a diner booth ready to feast on a gigantic steak before whipping out his own, much more effective knife (this one’s set to a instrumental muzak cover of Daniel Powter’s “Bad Day,” no less).

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Joel and Ethan Coen, who helmed the film, are serving as Fargo‘s executive producers, while the show is being written by Noah Hawley. Fargo also stars Colin Hanks as a Duluth police deputy and Allison Tolman as an ambitious deputy from nearby Bemidji, Minnesota.

Fargo‘s first season premieres on April 15th at 10 p.m. on FX and will have a 10-episode run. Like True Detective, Fargo will be an anthology series and will feature a different story if picked up for a second season.

You can watch a handful of the new Fargo teasers below, and check out the full set over on the FX’s YouTube channel.