Show runner Noah Hawley gives a few clues about Fargo season 3 including the fact that the series will not be seen in 2016….
Fargo has been one of the most well received and well reviewed shows over the past few years with season two getting critical acclaim from just about every writer working in television today.
The season finale for Fargo just aired this past Tuesday, but show runner Noah Hawley has already started work on season 3, which was renewed by FX several weeks ago.
The first season of Fargo took place in 2006 with one major connection to the original movie by the Joel and Ethan Coen with plenty of references littered throughout that paid homage to the film that inspired the series. Season two that just finished airing took place in 1979 while playing off a reference that was made during season one with writers then connecting that to the plot for the second season.
So what we know about Fargo season 3 is this…
— Season 3 will be set in 2010, four years after the events in the first season. There are no plans to have any of the characters from season one be featured in season 3 — in other words don’t expect Molly Solverson to be the lead investigator on the case — but Hawley says there is a chance somebody from season one pops up in season three if for no other reason that typical coincidence that it could happen.
“That’s not to say that one of our stories might not intersect with characters we’ve seen before for a certain period of time,” Hawley said.
— As previously mentioned, season two spawned from an off the cuff remark made by Lou Solverson that ended up as the inspiration for season two that took the story back to 1979 when Solverson was on the job as a state trooper. Well, as seamless as that transition happened, Hawley warns that there weren’t any of the same clues from this past season that will end up blooming as season three.
“We didn’t really do what we did in our first year,” Hawley said. “We didn’t tee up the story of season 3 within the body of Season 2. That said, I think it’s very exciting to now think once more, ‘What else can you do with Fargo?’
“In the third year the question becomes, structurally and stylistically — What’s left to say? What do we do that feels similar, but different so we’re not repeating ourselves? We’re always looking for connections and things that fit into the larger body of work we’re building, hopefully without ever seeming twee or precious or too clever by far.”
— So that’s the idea going into Fargo season 3? Hawley teases that with the show moving into 2010, there are a lot of technological advances and societal changes that happened over four years from that first season. Those pieces will play a major part in season three.
“Our first year was set in 2006, but we didn’t really deal with what it’s like to be in that region in a more contemporary world,” Hawley said. “I like the idea that we’re now living in a very selfie-oriented culture — people photograph what they’re eating and put it up for other people to see — it feels like a social dynamic that is very antithetical to the Lutheran pragmatism of the region. So much of our crime stories are based around the difficulty people have expressing themselves and communicating.”
— Fargo season 3 won’t debut until sometime in 2017 for a couple of reasons. One part is the fact that the show films during the winter and this winter will already be over by the time the scripts are done much less casting the show and shooting it. Hawley says he likes to have about 80-percent of the scripts done for the season before a single frame is shot that way the writing is already developed and the story is told just as it was intended and not changed due to episode demands.
So Hawley and his team and already started writing season three, but there’s no way they will be able to shoot it until later in 2016, which puts them at a 2017 debut date.
“It’s also very important to me and the other producers that we separate the writing from production. We take our time and break the whole story, write eight of the 10 hours at least and we end up knowing exactly what we’re doing and exactly what the whole story is. We’re going through the writing process now,” Hawley said.
“I’ve written the first hour, we’re about halfway through breaking the season. We’ll be writing over the next few months with the idea we’ll go into production, much like our first year, in November and be back on the air in spring of 2017.”
So it looks like you’ll just have to keep warm watching Fargo seasons one and two until the third iteration is ready to be released sometime in 2017.
