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'Fargo' To Take The Anthology Route As Season Two Announced

Staff Writer

Series creator Noah Hawley has quickly opened up on the details, too

US cable network FX has revealed that it has commissioned a second season of Noah Hawley’s serial adaptation of Joel and Ethan Coen’s cult dark comedy flick Fargo after its first series picked up a whopping 18 nominations for this year’s Emmy Awards.

The second season, as with the first, will run for 10 episodes, and star a fresh batch of characters and actors in a new time period – established by Hawley to be the 1970s – but likely still within the existing universe built by the Fargo film and show’s first season, which starred Martin Freeman and Billy Bob Thornton.

The announcement came simultaneously with the news the station had also renewed comedian Louis CK’s popular sitcom Louie, albeit for a heavily reduced episode order of seven instalments, and barely had time to sink in before Hawley and Fargo producer Warren Littlefield took to the stage at the Television Critics Association meet this morning (AEST) to wax lyrical on what viewers can expect from season two.

Although the pair were (understandably) still somewhat vague with their details, they did indicate that the show would canvass the 1979 “Sioux Falls incident” mentioned in the penultimate episode of season one, and that the character likely to fall at the centre of the new season would be earnest, down-home papa-bear-sort Lou Solverson, played by Keith Carradine, the father of season-one protagonist Molly Solverson (Allison Tolman).

Contrary to the first season’s main dual settings of Bemidji and Duluth, both in Minnesota, the titular North Dakotan township of Fargo will once again serve as the series’ location, alongside Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and Luverne, Minnesota.

“I spoke to Allison Tolman this morning and told her that unless she can channel her four-year-old self, we wouldn't be able to have her in season two," Hawley told the TCA, stressing that none of the first season’s cast would be returning for the second. “Lou [is now] a 33-year-old man, recently back from Vietnam. We would meet Molly's mother, and we may learn what happened to her.”

In addition, we can expect further changes to be peppered throughout the second season, from the purely aesthetic – “I think going forward it would be fun to start in a wintry environment and change over the course of the season,” Hawley said – to the deeply thematic.

“In the first season, the three [influences] were Fargo, No Country For Old Men and A Serious Man,” Hawley said. “This year, we are in Fargo, Miller's Crossing and The Man Who Wasn't There.”

Fargo, season two, is due to start shooting in January 2015, with production lasting until May.