‘Fargo’ Might Follow ‘Louie’ Model After S3, New Seasons Every Few Years
The first season of FX’s Fargo established the series as an entity independent from the film, without necessarily promising a sequel. Along came Season 2 to push Fargo closer to an anthology model, but according to creator Noah Hawley, if Season 3 doesn’t end up the final Fargo chapter, they may follow Louis C.K.’s practice of delaying new seasons until a worthy idea surfaces.
A wide-ranging chat with Vulture saw Hawley opening up on a few details of the third season, of which the first Ewan McGregor-doubling script has been written. The rest of the season has also been broken, though they’re allotting time to figure out the process of shooting Ewan’s scenes in multiple takes. Meanwhile, Season 2 aired later in 2015 than Season 1 did in 2014, with Season 3 bypassing 2016 altogether, though Hawley also cautioned not to expect any kind of regularity to new seasons.
If anything, Hawley might take a page from Louie after Season 3, to go on hiatus, and return for additional seasons whenever the right idea strikes:
I guess [accumulated backstory]‘s assuming there are going to be more than three years of it or more. Every time I’m in the middle of one I go, I don’t know if there’s another one. I know that big corporations don’t usually do a mic drop after a success, but one of the things I really respect about John Landgraf and FX is we did the first one and it was a huge success, and we wouldn’t have done another unless we both felt like we could equal it or top it.
It was the same with this one — the bar is very high, and I don’t think there has to be ten years of something to make it great. If usually you get, what, five seasons in five years? I’ll probably have three seasons in five years given the first one was 16 months between seasons and this one will be 18 or 20 months between seasons. So at that point … I don’t know.
I mean it’s gotta work. But the other thing is, maybe then you go, “Okay, great, we had three, those came relatively easily,” and you do the Louis C.K. thing and say, “Hey, it’s four years later, I have another one,” and then you just make that. If it isn’t an anthology or a limited series in that way, you can event-ize it and not stick to that TV schedule.
Hawley also offered some insight into the “selfie-oriented culture” description of Season 3's 2010 setting, noting the “Minnesota-nice” permeating the series could come under attack once social media begins to distort personal interactions:
I wanted it to be more contemporary. I didn’t want to jump to another period to do a period piece for the sake of doing a period piece, and then I got interested in this idea. There’s always this sense of danger and threat that goes on, and I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting if “Minnesota-nice” itself was under threat? This idea that we’re in this modern world, and that that region was so isolated for so long. Joel and Ethan Coen described it as Siberia with family restaurants. There’s this overly friendly sense of community built up by very isolated people, and there’s this Lutheran humbleness that keeps people from talking about their own feelings and asking about yours. What does that do in this modern age where everyone takes pictures of their food, and they share every thought they’ve ever had in real time? What happens to Minnesota-nice when people start interacting with screens instead of each other?
That divide will come to influence a law enforcement character in particular, as well a woman Hawley noted has having a 10-year old son, but before you get your hopes up for Molly Solverson, remember that son we glimpsed in Season 2 would only have been born in 2007.
Additional details and casting of Fargo Season 3 will surely emerge before long, but might Season 3 prove the last we see of Fargo for several years?