Fargo creator Noah Hawley has revealed some new details about the show’s recently announced third season, telling Entertainment Weekly that FX’s anthology of the violent dealings of the Minnesota Nice will be returning to a setting some time closer to the present day. That comes after a second season—wrapping up later this month—that took a trip back to the late ’70s, departing from the first’s mid-2000s milieu.
“It’s more contemporary,” Hawley told Entertainment Weekly, placing the new series a few years after the events that sent so many “Gee whizz”-ing to their dooms in the show’s first season. He did caution, though, that the show’s (entirely fictitious) “based on a true story” conceit means that we’ll never seen an episode of Fargo that takes place in the year it was aired. “It always has to be at least a few years ago,” Hawley said, “Because the idea is we finally know what really happened and it took time–because the book doesn’t come out until five or six years after.” (To be clear, there is no actual book.)
Hawley was more closed-lipped about whether any of Fargo’s established characters would be revisited when the show returns next year. “Potentially,” is all he would say on the matter; the show swapped out its casts between its two seasons so far, although a few characters—notably, the crime-busting members of the heroic Solverson clan—have appeared in both. (Hawley has previously expressed his reluctance, though, to drag Allison Tolman’s Molly Solverson into yet another human nature-soiling case of Coen Brothers-esque squalor and greed.)