Floyd Gerhardt

When her husband Otto is felled by a stroke, Floyd Gerhardt takes the reins of the family's Fargo crime empire rather than let it pass to her sons or crumble under pressure from the Kansas City outfit. She is steady, plainspoken, and utterly unsentimental about what needs doing to hold the territory together.

Jean Smart plays her without a trace of camp menace — Floyd's authority comes from calm competence, not theatrics, which makes her scarier than any of the men around her. The writing hands her a genuine tragedy of succession and business at once, and Smart carries both with the same flinty, exhausted dignity.