FX’s Fargo has been one of the biggest critical success stories of the last few years, pulling off the seemingly impossible task of translating the bleakness, violence, and occasional decency of Joel and Ethan Coen’s distinctive, snow-buried 1996 Oscar winner to TV with an almost effortless ease and style. Pretty much everybody—the network, critics, audiences—loves it, with only two notable exceptions: Joel and Ethan Coen.
That’s per a recent Radio Times interview with the movie-making pair, where they express their complete disinterest in TV, the film industry’s tagalong, hundred-billion-dollar little brother. “We’re just not very interested. I mean, we’re perfectly happy with it. We have no problem with it. It just feels divorced from our film somehow,” Joel told interviewers, while, somewhere in America, a tear dripped down showrunner Noah Hawley’s earnest, bespectacled face.
At least he won’t have to worry about the Hail, Caesar! writer-directors horning in on his windswept, darkly funny territory: when asked whether they’d ever make the TV plunge themselves, Joel responded with another round of total indiffence, saying, “Our longest movie is two hours two minutes. It’s just not how we think about stories. I mean, after two hours with a character, we feel we’re pretty much done with them.”