No new 'Fargo' till 2017, says producer
No time to write and shoot another installment before winter's over, says Noah Hawley.
Bad news, "Fargo" fans: There'll likely be no freshly blood-spattered snow coming to FX until spring 2017.
That's the word from Noah Hawley, the writer whose adaptations of the Coen brothers' movie have topped many critics' best-of lists.
In a conference call with reporters Tuesday to discuss Monday's latest "Fargo" finale, Hawley noted that "Fargo" "is a winter show, for better or worse," and that there isn't time to shoot another season in Calgary before the winter is over.
It's not just logistics. Hawley prefers that "Fargo" be an "event" (event programming being the industry's favorite new toy).
""I think the minute you're hitting the same airdate every year, you're just making a television show," he said.
What he would say about the next installment, for which he's so far written only one episode:
-- It takes place in 2010, two years after the ending of the first installment.
-- Allison Tolman, Colin Hanks, Keith Carradine and Joey King, all spotted in a tantalizing dream sequence in Monday's finale, apparently won't be part of the future "Fargo." "None of the main characters from our first year will be back for our third year," said Hawley, noting, as he has before, that the illusion that the show is based on a true story can only be maintained if the incidents depicted are once-in-a-lifetime events for the main characters, not routine.
-- It will pit its characters against what he called "the culture of narcissism," noting that by 2010, they'll be "living in a very selfie culture, where people photograph what they're eating and put it up for other people to see."
But, hey, you probably have questions about Monday's multi-layered finale (and from here on in, expect spoilers):
Though it may have begun as the Molly Solverson origin story, this installment of "Fargo" became as much, if not more, about Hanzee Dent (Zahn McClernon), the native American henchman who emerged from the shadow of the Gerhardt crime family to become their (and other people's) worst nightmare. Whether or not you believe that there's a plastic surgeon who could make Hanzee look like the crime boss Moses Tripoli from last season's 2006 story (I'm finding it a stretch myself), it's enough to know that Hanzee didn't "just survive this melee, he's also going to thrive," said Hawley.
I'm a little disappointed to learn that Hanzee was not, after all, the son of Otto Gerhardt and Wilma the cook (which seemed like a late-breaking possibility in the finale), but perhaps that would have been too neat.
As for the UFO, which hovered overhead much of the season, "you mean it's not clear?" joked Hawley.
UFOs were "very much in the zeitgeist" in 1979, when this season took place, and "that at the point where the violence and the sort of chaos of our story and of the period became ... both deadly and absurd on a real level that the UFO kind of manifests that sense of absurdity."