Fargo has garnered glowing critical praise for the last two seasons for the clever way it riffs on both the Coen brothers film of the same name and their filmography as a whole. But according creator Noah Hawley, the show’s third season will take a pretty significant departure from the old-fashioned vibe of the first two seasons and won’t include any returning characters at its center. Brace yourselves, Fargo fans, selfies are coming. (Some light spoilers from the Season 2 finale below.)
Vulture reports that Season 3 will take place in 2010, and while that’s only four years after the setting of Season 1, the technology in that first season wasn’t exactly advanced. The computers and phones looked a lot closer to the 1987 setting of the original film.
That technology-centric Season 3 theme is about much more than giving Fargo an Internet-friendly face-lift. Landgraf points out that millennial culture “is very antithetical to the Lutheran pragmatism of the region. So many of our crime stories are based on the difficulty that people have expressing themselves and communicating. In a lot of ways, the tragedies that are at the heart of these crimes could all be averted if Jerry Lundegaard (William H. Macy) could have asked his father-in-law for the money or if Lester (Martin Freeman) could have been honest about who he was, or Peggy (Kirsten Dunst) as well. I like the idea of setting up these pragmatic and humble people against the culture of narcissism and [seeing] what that generates for us, story-wise.”
Anyone who watched Ted Danson’s riveting monologue on the nature of language and miscommunication in the Season 2 finale can see how well that clash fits in with the already established Fargo universe. But Hawley says he wants to branch out a bit from the multi-generational Solverson saga in order to preserve the satisfying endings of his first two seasons. “None of the main characters from our first year will be back for our third year,” Hawley says to the disappointment of Molly Solverson fans everywhere. “The risk we take, obviously, is that we say at the beginning it’s a true story. It’s what Joel and Ethan Coen did in the movie, and what made the movie so powerful and poignant is that it ended. The danger of bringing them back and putting them through their paces for another crazy case [is] the artifice of the whole thing becomes too clear. That’s not to say one of our stories might not intersect with characters we’ve seen before for a certain period of time.”
Once again, the Fargo Season 2 finale supports the importance of tying up a Fargo tale with a neat bow. The episode’s final shot of Lou and Betsey (the one character we felt sure would die!) snuggled happily in bed together has its echoes in the final shots of both the Fargo film . . .
. . . and Season 1.
And while Lou’s frequent mention of Sioux Falls in Season 1 wound up being the premise for Season 2, Hawley said you won’t necessarily find clues for Season 3 in this most recent season. “We didn’t really tee up the story of season three within the body of season two. That said, it’s very exciting to now think once more, what else can you do with Fargo? What other kind of movie can it be? What’s left to say, what do we do that feels similar but is different so we’re not repeating ourselves? That said, we’re always looking for connections and things that fit into the larger body of work that we’re building. “
So get ready to do your best Molly Solverson impression, Fargo fans. We’ve got some detective work in front of us before Season 3 premieres in 2017.