Noah Hawley compares his dormant Star Trek to Fargo, says there's no Kirk or Picard
The fourth season of Fargo is finally set to premiere on FX on September 27, four months after its originally intended May premiere. But it’s not the only Noah Hawley project to be put on hold in 2020, as detailed in Variety’s new profile on the creator and showrunner of the acclaimed FX anthology series.
Hawley was also set to direct a new Star Trek film based on his own script, but Paramount paused that project following the re-merging of Viacom and CBS. The studio’s plans to continue the Star Trek film franchise have felt somewhat chaotic; Quentin Tarantino wrote a script for an R-rated Trek movie that may or may not still happen in some iteration, with or without his involvement, while franchise star Simon Pegg has cast doubt on the continuation of the series. Little was known about Hawley’s script, but, speaking with Variety, he offers a couple of interesting details: For starters, he says, “We’re not doing Kirk and we’re not doing Picard.” He goes on to compare his Trek narrative to the first season of Fargo, which took four episodes to reveal an explicit connection to the Coen Brothers’ film of the same name. “It’s a start from scratch that then allows us to do what we did with Fargo,” Hawley says, “where for the first three hours you go, ‘Oh, it really has nothing to do with the movie,’ and then you find the money. So you reward the audience with a thing that they love.”
That’s certainly an intriguing pitch, though it remains unclear if Hawley’s Trek will be revived under new Paramount president Emma Watts—who was overseeing Fox Searchlight when it released Hawley’s feature directorial debut, Lucy In The Sky, last summer. Hawley believes that film, which he describes as a “magical-realism astronaut movie,” should’ve been released in the fall; instead, it hit theaters the same weekend as Joker and ultimately bombed with both critics and audiences. Still, Hawley seems optimistic about directing another movie, and in the meantime there’s a new season of Fargo premiering in just a couple of weeks.
The fourth season stars Chris Rock and Jason Schwartzman as warring mob bosses in 1950 Kansas City, and as with previous installments of the series, features an impressive ensemble cast that includes Jessie Buckley, Jack Huston, Ben Whishaw, and Timothy Olyphant.