With Fargo‘s second season capitalizing on the promise of the show’s first, FX has announced that it will be renewing the Coen Brothers adaptation for a third season. Showrunner Noah Hawley recently gave Entertainment Weekly a few (very noncommittal) hints about what to expect, leaving us to fill in the blanks.
While the second season takes place in the 1970s and painstakingly details the events leading to a massacre in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, that’s referenced several times in the first season, the next story will bring us back to the near-present. “It’s more contemporary,” Hawley told EW. “It’s set a couple of years after season one.” And while it would make a nice analogue to this season’s occasional Ronald Reagan appearances, don’t expect season three to reference a potential Trump presidency. “The idea of the ‘true story’ is it always has to be at least a few years ago, because the idea is we finally know what really happened and it took time,” Hawley said. So we’re looking at roughly 2007 to 2012, most likely. Hawley also said that the characters from the show’s previous seasons could “potentially” make an appearance in season three, though who those character might be—or whether they’ll appear at all—is anybody’s guess.
So that’s what we know. What we don’t know is legion, particularly since the second season is still unfolding. What actually happens in season three—or at Sioux Falls, for that matter—remains a mystery. Maybe Mike Milligan retires from a life of violent crime and becomes a radio announcer? Bolstered by LifeSpring, Ed and Peggy start their own vaguely cultish personality program in Malibu? Betsy Solverson beats cancer and goes on to live a happy and productive life and was so busy being a successful career woman that we didn’t get to meet her in season one? (Please?)
Probably those things won’t happen. Probably it will be a long, dark, and utterly compelling spiral into the morally snowblind world of the Upper Midwest. But we can dream.
(via The A. V. Club)
