Update: December 16, 2015
FARGO Season 3 Premieres in 2017; Season 1 Characters Not Returning
Fans of
Fargo aren't going to have to wait longer for the next season of the FX series, but 2016 may be a sad year indeed.
In lieu of the standard series of postmortem interviews showrunners invariably do these days,
Fargo mastermind Noah Hawley spoke on a Tuesday morning conference call with a cadre of reporters to break down the state of his ongoing anthology series.
While many of the questions were about specific details resolving the second season finale, the third season was nebulously discussed, with the big revelation being that we probably won't get any
Fargo in 2016.
"It's a winter show, for better or worse, and this winter, there is not time to shoot another year before this winter is over," Hawley said.
The first season premiered in April 2014, with the second season in October 2015, so given a similar gestation process, the reasonable expectation was always Spring 2017, which won't impact the show's Emmy window in the slightest.
As has been reported previously, the third season will be set in 2010, a few years after the events of the first season. Before you start thinking, 'Yay! More fun adventures with grown-up Molly,' don't.
"None of the main characters from our first year will be back for our third year," Hawley said, noting this would violate the relatively peaceful and resolved endings to each chapter of the saga.
"As much as I love those actors and characters, the dangers of bringing them back and putting them through their paces for another sort of crazy case is that then the artifice of the whole thing becomes too clear and suddenly it just feels like we're doing it because it's fun and we like them, but we've broken our own rules," he said.
But there's a caveat: "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."
Fargo Season 3 Wont Premiere Until 2017; Season One Characters Not Returning
Note: The first Fargo thread right now is a mess due to the migration as posts are suddenly not arranged chronologically and hard to read. Until it's fixed, let's continue the discussion here.