LOS ANGELES: The first season of Fargo was a complete surprise — who would have thought that an anthology series based on the movie would actually work? But it did, and now Noah Hawley is aiming to do it again in Season 2.
“It’s a complete reinvention,” said Hawley during yesterday’s TCA panel where the cast and crew previewed the second season, which takes place in 1979. “It’s a completely new story. It evokes the things you remember from the movie and at the end of the first year.” He described the second season as bigger but still in tune with the Fargo name.
“When I first went in to meet with everyone at FX, I said ‘Why is this movie called Fargo? It takes place in Minnesota’ … But now it’s evocative of a story, a true crime story that isn’t true, where truth is stranger than fiction,” said Hawley before elaborating on the series’ structure. “This has to be the way you tell the story: you meet the criminals before the crime is committed — it’s not a whodunit, there’s no mystery — and you don’t meet law enforcement until the crime is committed.”
As for hints about Season 2, Hawley teased that the look of the season will be different (“I found my way to ’70s filmmaking paradigms”) and feature split screens and freezes in order to keep track of this year’s bigger cast. It was also revealed that Bruce Campbell will play Ronald Reagan. Mostly, though, Hawley emphasized that it will be an American epic. “I wanted to find the way that we experience America and turn it into a crime story.”
Fargo‘s second season premieres October 12 on FX.