FX renews ‘Fargo.’ Who should season 3 be about?

Senior Television Writer

“Fargo” will be back for a third season, you betcha!

FX today announced they've ordered another installment of Noah Hawley's Coen brothers-adjacent anthology series, which is in the midst of a fabulous and fun second season. (You can read all my reviews here.)

No details about the season have been offered, save that Hawley will once again be the executive producer.

The first season took place in the mid-'00s, but Keith Carradine's Lou Solverson occasionally alluded to an incident in Sioux Falls, SD in the '70s, and season 2 has told that story, with Patrick Wilson as the younger Lou. At press tour this summer, I asked Hawley whether the new season would feature hints about what the third would be.

“We”re on the UFO,” he joked. “It”s going to be, this space station 'Fargo' in the year 2555.

More seriously, he added, “If it”s 1979, you can only tell a story about what happened before that. So pretty soon it will be 1934, and we can”t afford those cars. So, no. But I think I like the idea that, you know, you watch the first three episodes of year one, and you thought, well, it”s actually not connected to the movie at all. And then in the fourth hour, you realize that it was connected to the movie on some level, and that this second year is sort of very literally connected to the first year. So I feel like there will always be some connect, but it doesn”t necessarily have to be pivotal. It can be tangential, and but that”s as far as I”ve really thought about it.”

So it could be that the third season has a minimal connection to the characters from this season (or from season 1). And we still don't know how this story will end, who will survive (and who therefore might be available if they do a story set post-79), or what other tangential info there might be, but some possibilities just based on what we've seen so far:

* Some sort of Karl Weathers spin-off. It can be, as Fienberg suggested, young Karl in Korea (preferably still played, without comment, by Nick Offerman), or perhaps a “Better Call Karl”-type show where he's a drunken, conspiracy-loving country lawyer at a different stage of his career.

* The Further (or Past) Adventures of Mike Milligan. Bokeem Woodbine's pretty ageless, so this could be a sequel (if Mike lives) or a prequel charting his career before he became a fixer for the Kansas City mob.

* The young Kitchen brothers. This would have to be a prequel, obviously, and would either require a third character (also possibly Mike Milligan) to speak a lot, or else reveal how they communicate to the world when they don't have a loquacious interpreter.

* Hanzee clearly has a history that the show's barely scratched the surface of, though he's so intertwined with the Gerhardts that I fear it might be a rehash.

* Young Betsy helps younger Hank solve a crime?

How about it? Would you want a third series to feature a character from this season? Would you want to revisit anyone – say, Mr. Numbers and Mr. Wrench – from season 1 instead? Or are you at the point where you just trust Hawley to make the right decision, whatever it is?

Around The Web

People's Party iTunes