As you know, most television series produce a season each year and typically it works out fairly well. There are some out there, either members of the audience or the show's creators, who wish that certain shows would be allowed to just pump the breaks every so often and refuel. In the case of Louis C.K. with Louie or Larry David with Curb Your Enthusiasm, they're lucky enough not to have to produce a season of their respective series each and every year, and it's possible that Fargo may be following that model as well.
Fargo creator Noah Hawley spoke with Vulture recently about the show's upcoming third season and whether or not he's worried about expanding the franchise's mythology further with a forth season.
I guess that's assuming there are going to be more than three years of it or more. Every time I'm in the middle of one I go, I don't know if there's another one. I know that big corporations don't usually do a mic drop after a success, but one of the things I really respect about John Landgraf and FX is we did the first one and it was a huge success, and we wouldn't have done another unless we both felt like we could equal it or top it. It was the same with this one — the bar is very high, and I don't think there has to be ten years of something to make it great. If usually you get, what, five seasons in five years? I'll probably have three seasons in five years given the first one was 16 months between seasons and this one will be 18 or 20 months between seasons. So at that point … I don't know. I mean it's gotta work. But the other thing is, maybe then you go, “Okay, great, we had three, those came relatively easily,” and you do the Louis C.K. thing and say, "Hey, it's four years later, I have another one," and then you just make that. If it isn't an anthology or a limited series in that way, you can event-ize it and not stick to that TV schedule.
I can certainly think of several shows which would have benefited from taking a breather and waiting for the right idea to emerge rather than forcing a substandard season out. Fargo's third season is starting to come together, Hawley said that he's written the first episode and has the remainder of the season broken down. We don't know much yet, other than it will take place in 2010 and Ewan McGregor will be playing a dual role as two brothers, Emmit Stussy (a self-made real estate mogul) and Ray (a parole officer with a chip on his shoulder). It's easy to write (and cast) a dual role, but Hawley is just now starting to map out what that means in a production sense.
You know, when I met with Ewan, I hadn't realized he has this Jesus movie coming out where he plays Jesus but also Satan. So when I met with him, he said, "Oh, I just did this on some level," and he actually had his stunt guy, his body double do the scenes with him because the guy had been working with him for a while, and then you could get on the one side or the other and film it. Look, it's going to be a process, and you need to give yourself more time in production just to think about shooting that scene an extra, whatever, ten times.
The third season of Fargo will debut in 2017.