‘Fargo’ Creator Noah Hawley Just Spilled A Few Details About Season 3

Hawley explains that the 2010 setting allows for a “more contemporary story” and that Season 1 “didn’t really deal with what it was like to be in that region in a more contemporary world”.

Mentions of the Sioux Falls Massacre in the first season led directly into the 1979-set second season, but Hawley suggests no such tie-in necessarily occurred with this season into the third. While the show creator did not give a specific return date for the series, he hinted that the writers have a sense of where to take the story next season and that filming the series in winter is important to the upcoming storyline. I’ve written the first hour, we’re about halfway through breaking the season. We’re going through the writing process now. There was a year and a half gap between the premieres of Season 1 and 2.

He likes the idea of tying together threads both from the TV series and the movie, he said, and he used the Season 2 finale to stitch together several such links. “And I think those two things created the permission for me to kind of explore those elements”.

The last time we saw Charlie Gerhardt in season two, he was in jail – but he didn’t stay there long. “People photograph the food they’re eating and share it. We wanted to explore how antithetical that can be to the Lutheran predelictions of the region”.

Hawley said he was particularly satisfied with several aspects of Season 2, including the way that “outsiders” like Hanzee and Mike Milligan (Bokeem Woodbine) fought to be treated as equals.

As fans know, each season of Fargo has had entirely different casts, but two characters have appeared in both seasons: Lou Solverson, who was played by Keith Carradine in Season 1 and Patrick Wilson in Season 2, and Solverson’s daughter Molly (Tolman), who was a main character the first year and also reappeared as a minor character in the sophomore season. “If he’s out there, I’d love to get a letter from him someday telling me how he turned out”.

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. According to Entertainment Weekly, season 3 will be based in 2010.

“We didn’t really do what we did in our first year”, Hawley said. “We didn’t really tee up the story of season three within the body of season two”. That said, I think it’s very exciting to now think once more, ‘What else can you do with “Fargo”?’ And then in the third year, the question becomes, structurally and stylistically, what’s left to say, what do we do that feels similar but is 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”.