We certainly hope that you’ll be thinking about last night’s finale of Fargo Season 2 for a long time, because that’s how long you’ll be waiting to see Season 3 make its way to your televisions. According to creator Noah Hawley, we won’t be seeing a lick of this show in 2016, and we’ll have to wait until 2017 for new Fargo to arrive. Guess that means I’ll have enough time to create a soundboard full of Mike Milligan quotes.
So is this relatively large delay caused by aliens that don’t really do much? Is it because of sharply-dressed gangsters? Is it because Jeffrey Donovan kept threatening to hit people with his belt buckle? Nope to all of those. It’s because there’s not enough time for the season to put it together in time for a 2016 debut. As Hawley explains, it’s a show meant to be set in the winter, and there wasn’t enough time to form the story and characters in order to get things done during the upcoming winter.
According to EW, a production start on Season 3 will likely be in November 2016. So we can perhaps hope to see it premiering around March or April, around the same time as Season 1. And really, there were 16 months (give or take some days) between the end of Season 1 and the beginning of Season 2 this past October. So if Season 3 does premiere in April, it will be a wait that Fargo fans were already used to. Not that we liked it, but still. Worth it.
Indeed, Fargo is a show so engaging and particular that any amount of time is worth waiting in order to get another guaranteed season. We don’t even need to know what Season 3 will be about to want it, which is fine since Hawley isn’t really giving much up by way of details. We know it’ll take place in 2010, will feel more contemporary, and could bring some characters back, but likely won’t make them main characters. The way the Season 2 finale worked Season 1 characters in was pretty great, so even if that’s the only human connective tissue between the second two seasons, that’d be great.
Of course, it’s not like Hawley is brimming with spare time these days, regardless of if a winter-based production was feasible. He recently entered into a multi-year overall deal with FX, and thus has a bunch of new projects on the horizon. Here’s hoping Fargo still gets the lion’s share of his attention, though.
Hey, at least we’ll still be able to kind of relive the glory of Fargo Season 2 during next year’s Emmys, where the show will hopefully rake in some awards.
