FX is thankfully bringing Fargo back for season 5
The new season of Noah Hawley's darkly comedic crime drama will begin filming this winter
Aux News Fargo
FX is mercifully not leaving the Fargo train anytime soon. The cable network has renewed Noah Hawley’s acclaimed anthology drama for a fifth season, as announced during the Television Critics Association (TCA) winter press tour. The show last aired at the end of 2020, but there’s no update on when the next installment will air.
Fargo is a darkly comedic crime thriller inspired by the 1996 Coen brothers movie of the same name. It is set within the same universe as the film. Each season is set in a different era and location, telling different stories with a new cast and set of characters, with some minor overlaps.
The brief description for season five is naturally cryptic. It takes place in 2019 and will tackle the following questions: “When is a kidnapping not a kidnapping, and what if your wife isn’t yours?” FX Chairman John Landgraf called the upcoming season “contemporary” and “set in the upper Midwest,” during an executive session at TCA.
“The first script for this season came in yesterday. Noah Hawley has always found a way of respecting and making a reference to the original Coen movies and inventing new stories. [Season five] has an echo and rhyme with the movie, but it’s really original,” Landgraf added. He also confirmed that Fargo season five will begin shooting later this year in the winter.
There’s no casting update yet, but Fargo has historically landed an all-star roster for each installment. The first season bagged multiple Emmy awards and starred Billy Bob Thornton, Martin Freeman, and Allison Tolman. Season two’s lineup included Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons, and Jean Smart, while the third one starred Carrie Coon and Ewan McGregor. Season four, which arrived three years after the previous one, was led by Chris Rock, Jessie Buckley, and Ben Whishaw.
Fargo creator Hawley is also working on the Alien television series, based on Ridley Scott’s classic sci-fi horror movies. “We intend to shoot Fargo before Alien, even though we have more scripts of the latter right now,” Landgraf said about both projects. “Noah has this incredible ability, you’ve seen it with Fargo, to find a way to be faithful and show fidelity to the original, but bring something new to the table that represents both an extension and reinvention of the franchise at the same time.”
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I hope this show finds its way again. Season 2 is truly one of my favorite seasons of any television show, but Seasons 3 and 4 were disappointing. The basic setup of Season 4, with the swapping of the kids, was really interesting, but the show never did anything especially compelling with it.
I appear to have liked Season 3 more than some. Maybe I just like Carrie Coon, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, and David Thewlis?But yeah, Season 4 was not up to what I generally have come to expect from Fargo (except the twister episode—that was cool). And I am just a touch hopeful based on Season 5’s description that they are going to maybe come back around to a setting/story that is more conducive to a really good season.
I’m also someone who liked season 3 as much as the previous seasons. But I agree with the overall assessment of season 4.
I also really liked season 3, and especially the performances. Thewlis so often plays these deeply pathetic, shabby characters, and I like how ‘Fargo’ runs with that and says, “Imagine the most drab, nothing little man possible. Now imagine he’s going to eat you.”
“Now imagine he’s going to eat you… and then vomit you back up later. Like an owl””
Yeah, I would stand by V.M. Varga as one of the most fascinating antagonists ever put on screen. He is such a fun bundle of contradictions and deconstructions of normal antagonist traits, but—for me at least—he works extremely well as an antagonist nonetheless. And this is one of those performances where I struggle to imagine anyone but Thewlis pulling it off quite like that.
I honestly thought the twister episode was the season’s weakest, but I’m glad you got something out it that I did not.One nice thing about Fargo’s only tangentially connected stories is that it’s hard for the show to screw up anything too much. The new season will be something new, and there’s really nothing about the stumbles of previous seasons that should have an impact on this one.
Season 3 may be my favorite, where 2 was a dip and 4 flatlined.I think 3 vs 2 varies from person to person, but everyone can agree that 4 was iffy at best and 1 was just the best.
I was a bit cold on S3 the first time I saw it, but then I rewatched it before S4, and found myself liking it more the second time around. I’m hoping the same thing happens with S4, but I doubt it, cause I think it was more of a hot mess than S3
Season 3 was only disappointing in that season 1-2 were so great. Season 3 was still great to watch.
I agree that S2 was the best, and that S4 had an interesting setup with the kid-swapping. I also agree that they squandered that premise. Anyway, I disagree about 3 being disappointing, the cast was incredible and I can’t turn down a double McGregor and Mary Elizabeth Winstead combo.
I’ll watch it but S4 was a hot mess. The show had way too many characters and simply couldn’t do justice to all of them but tried to. So the writing felt all over the place and many of the late-season stuff just didn’t land well for me.I hope they go back to the formula for first three seasons. Get 5-6 main cast members and tell a story about them, stack the supporting cast / cameos with recognizable actors who can make a few moments shine.
SEASON 4 WAS SO BAD I COULDN’T EVEN FINISH IT
Same.
I thought it was just pandemic malaise, but no. It just wasn’t very compelling.
Same. It was straight up unwatchable. I got through 1.5 eps and bailed. I was able to appreciate the first three seasons on their own merit but four was a botch job.
I still don’t understand what the whole deal with the tornado was. It was a season that seemed to have a lot of dead ends/dropped plots/abrupt and confusing conclusions.
It may not fully justify it, but the tornado was a direct reference to A Serious Man. It was also a fantastic scene, whatever else it may have been.
I think it was a reference to The Wizard of Oz — it was shot in black and white and took place in Kansas. Why reference the Wizard of Oz, and what was it supposed to tell us about any of our characters or the story? I can’t help you there.
Maybe there’s a Wizard of Oz reference but I am positive the tornado was lifted from A Serious Man.
The twister episode (“East/West”) was by far my favorite.To me the twister represented a chaotic, unpredictable force with the power to moot human ambitions and conflicts. Specifically, Rabbi and Calamita seem destined for a climatic showdown, and then the twister intervenes and sweeps them both away.A little more broadly, I think it serves a similar purpose to the spaceship in Season 2, or the fish falling from the sky in Season 1. There are great, mysterious things going on, and yet we get wrapped up in our relatively petty concerns. And yet that is what it means to be human, to continue on with our concerns despite all that. Peggy’s, “It’s just a flying saucer, Ed, we gotta go,” is one of my favorite lines in like anything, ever, because it so perfectly captures this aspect of the human condition.Even more broadly, Hawley has talked before about how elements like this in Fargo, going all the way back to Mike Yanagita in the movie, are designed to engage the audience’s imagination and make the experience less passive and more dynamic. And for me, it works!
I love that flying saucer line too. It’s a neat little way to show how trapped these characters are in their desperate lives. Sure, it’d be nice to stop and look at the flying saucer, but we’ve got vengeful gangsters and dogged cops to escape.
Yeah… yeah okay you make some good points. I’d forgotten all about the fish and saucer. I was just confused I guess from a conventional story telling perspective ( I should know better) , it seemed like those characters were going to come into conflict and important things were going to happen with them. But then boom, nature’s like naw.
And to be sure, in many ways Season 4 felt much more conventional than other Fargo up to that point, such that East/West is sort of discordant with the rest of the season. So while I liked the episode in isolation, I can see why it didn’t work for people in the context of the season. And even for me, it was sort of a “I wish the whole season was more like this” moment.
Oh for sure it was a a highlight. But felt oddly disconnected from everything around it. You pretty much nailed it.
I agree with you in a sense. I just think it works less when the series is a bit of a convoluted mess that is trying to do too much. If Hawley had managed to make s4 play like s1-3 that episode would have been fantastic (and I greatly enjoyed certain aspects of it), but as it was, plopped into a season that overall wasn’t working, it was just another thing that didn’t work. Which to me was the curse of s4. There wasn’t any one element of it that I would point to and say, “That was dumb, they should have left that out.” It had a lot of interesting ideas. It just had too many of them and they weren’t fleshed out and connected into the whole very well.
Yeah, that is a perfectly fair criticism of the overall unsatisfying construction of Season 4, and I agree East/West was in that sense adding to that overall problem.I suppose I just liked it the best of all the different stuff in Season 4 that didn’t come together. And it probably helped that it was so formally separated from everything else that I basically enjoyed it as its own isolated mini-movie. In fact, I probably processed East/West as more of a Mike Milligan origin story movie than as a Season 4 episode, and in that sense it was more connected to Season 2. And I loved Season 2, like as in one of my all time favorite seasons of TV ever, and that connection probably furthered my appreciation for East/West.But that for sure is not how a well-constructed season is supposed to work!
Side note but I believe the last scene in season 4 is an incapsulation of the problems. What we got was stock season 2 footage of Mike Milligan implying the season was memories. But the original idea was to have a new scene with Mike at his 9 to 5 day job and he glancing at a photo of Rabbi and sighs. That I feel is better but due to covid or scheduling or whatever it never happened. Real pity.
East and West was my favorite episode by far and I wish the entire season had been as good.
I hated it and I think we got four or five episodes in before we gave up.:0(The first two series were fantastic.
I’ve soured on Rock’s performance in that season too. I kinda enjoyed it at first, but he just doesn’t seem to have the overall acting chops of the previous leads.
As amazing he is at standup, that amazingness has not translated to his acting gigs unfortunately.
Season 4 had three to five great story ideas, and wasted all of them.If they had walked, matter-of-factly, through any one of them and skipped the others it would have made an incredible season.Honestly, imagine how succinct the story would have been if they had dropped the nurse, the funeral home, the kansas tornado episode, and the gun molls.
I enjoyed it. Big fan of Jason Schwartzman and Timothy Olyphant, as well as thankfully being introduced to Jessie Buckley. I hadn’t seen her before and have since sought out her work.
I just couldn’t muster two shits to give about the rival gangs. Crime and criminals aren’t interesting in themselves. Such a dry, flat season compared to ones that gave us the likes of V.M.Varga, Lorne Malvo, the Stussy brothers, and Ed & Peggy.
Chris Rock was miscast, too.
I felt the same way about the third season
Third season was not up to one or two, McGregor’s performance threw me off even though I generally like him (or at least want to) but it had the most villainous villains, Carrie Coon and Winstead were flawless and Wrench coming back was enough to push it over the edge into legitimately good.
I feel like Hawley has the self-indulgence of a David Lynch, without the attendant genius. He needs a collaborator who will rein him in. Fargo started strong and just devolved into a mess. Legion started a compelling mess and then became an exhausting one.
It’s generally a bad idea to kill off your best, most interesting character less than halfway through the season. Who could have guessed?It had a lot of problems beyond that, but that stood out.
Absolutely agree.I say that even if Season 4 is indeed hot mess, I still enjoyed the hell out of it for lot of interesting ideas and plot points that they have taken.Yes, there’s way too many characters that bogged down the plot a lot, though I am not sure how else the story could have been done. They made their story choices and the story is pretty much completed from start to finish.Hopefully that Season 5 is more like the first two seasons: absolute masterpiece.
I agree, S4 had too many characters to really keep track of. S2 was my favorite, other than a bit of a dropped plotline with the aliens and Ted Danson inventing Esperanto, I think it had the best collection of characters and the most satisfying conclusion. Also, Hanzee Dent is my favorite person from any season. I’ve legitimately enjoyed every season, they all have incredible casts and delightfully named characters, but some are definitely better than others. 2, 3, 1, 4 is how I’d rank them.
I also believe season 4 was a giant pile of shit! Season 3 was no great shakes either. Thank you.
hawkboy is not wrong.You are welcome.
Season 3 was my favorite, but 1 and 2 were both great, too.
Season 4 was so much wasted potential. Very disappointing. I hope they get this show back on track.
Are folks still pretending Chris Rock was a good fit?
It’s funny when people get excited that Chris Rock is going to be in new, unusual projects (this, the SAW sequel) and then they slowly come to remember that he’s a terrible actor.
I will say Ben Whitsaw was really good and Jessie Buckley did pretty well with a character the writing never quite figured out.
Yeah, Buckley is a gamer, but I thought this role really ended up wasting her talents to a large degree.
I guess its better to say I liked the idea of her character. Because she’s based on an Irish nurse serial killer named Jane Toppan and female serial killers are something I study a lot. But your right I will profess, she added little to the series and could have been cut without much changing.
Yeah, Jesse Buckley plays a nurse who is actually a serial killer is a fantastic elevator pitch.But then in execution (and I blame the writing), the character was thin, cartoonish, more annoying than menacing . . . just a little off in a bunch of ways that added up to a significant disappointment for me.
I hate to agree but I fully agree. She was never threatening in the way Lorne Malvo was, not uniquely weird as VM Varga, she was just kinda there doing nothing and the quirks didn’t land as well. Again massive pity because Jane Toppan the inspiration for Nurse Mayflower is creepy as fuck. Super easy going and happy to a point of being called Jolly Jane, but she liked to inject morphine and atropine into patients and then get in bed and carass and lick them and other weirdly sexual acts. She got off on playing god, she liked to see the soul leave the body. When she was caught, she frankly couldn’t explain why she did it other then she liked it. Its absolutely horrifying and the perfect building block for an amazing antagonist. It should have worked but it didn’t!https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Toppan
She was acting her ass off, but it felt like she was in a completely different show than the rest of the cast.
The problem I found with Chris Rock is that anytime he had to do any kind of monologue it sounded like he was doing a stand up bit, what with the way he delivers lines. Which didn’t really work if he was trying to be dramatic.
He’s good actor.But he’s definitely a miscast.Tried he may, but he doesn’t makes for a good mafia don.
…the third one starred Carrie Coon and Ewan McGregorAnd Mary Elizabeth Winstead. Never leave out MEW.
And this guy showed up. (with two beers)
Oh yeah, Mary Elizabeth Winsteadwas nominated for an Emmy award for that season.
No, on second thought, that was David “You’ll Miss Me When I’m Dead” Thewlis. (He lost)
Thewlis was, far and away, the best part of Season 3. He gave a real sense of menace to a show that was too heavy on the whimsy and too light on an actual compelling story.
I still crack a smile at that bit where Sy asks Varga where he’s from, and Thewlis waits a beat before saying, “America.”
I, on the other hand, thought he was awful and he almost ruined the show for me.Carrie Coon was great, though.
David Thewlis makes everything better.
That season is probably why those two are a thing now so even more important to mention her.
Whenever my cat comes up to me and says, “MEW!”, I say, “Yes, Mary Elizabeth Winstead is a fine actor, but we can’t spend all our time talking about her.”
Especially considering she was the best part of that season, which is all the more impressive given that Carrie Coon was in it.I think I like S3 more than most people, mostly due to the performances of Winstead, Coon, and David Thewlis.
Yes! Nikki Swango is also a top tier name, which complements the top tier acting that Winstead brought along.
When is a kidnapping not a kidnapping, and what if your wife isn’t yours?
So someone is going to steal and marry a goat?
I’ll take a more charitable tack than most and say that season 4 had some amazing stuff but overall was a bit meh. Here’s hoping things get back on track in s5!
That is about where I’d land. Overly ambitious, tried a lot, had great moments, didn’t come together by the end.
I stand behind this take. Then again, I’m one of those freaks that maybe liked season 2 of Legion as much as season 1, so maybe nobody should listen to me.
That’s not a bad take though, season 2 was at least as good as season 1.
Ask me at two separate times of day and I’ll profess to loving season 1 or 2 more. Both are masterpieces that do different things but with fantastic results. Can’t lose either way.
I sort of agree with the common sentiment that even a “bad” season of Fargo is better than most TV.But darn it, for me the first three seasons set such a high bar that Season 4 still counted as a significant disappointment for me. And I sure hope Season 5 does not inspire the same feeling.
Truth!Honestly I don’t know if it gets better than season 2, that’s TV firing on all cylinders right there.
I liked season 4 more then most but it wasn’t the best. Still I’m totally willing to watch another season, you just never know what your going to get.
Shit, man… She kidnapped herself.
The surgeon was a woman!
I still contend that each season of Fargo was a little bit lesser than the previous one. That first season with Martin Freeman/Billy Bob Thornton is still my favorite.
S2 is my favorite, and I liked S1 and S3 about the same. So to me there was no consistent trend as of S3.
I think S2 was the watermark. It was the only season that felt like it had a story that demanded to be told. S1 is almost as good, and S3 is fantastic too.S4 was rife with potential, and had a lot of great moments.So in general, yes I agree with you. I sort of hope S5 is the endpoint.
It’s crazy how Hawley keeps finding these incredible true stories to base the seasons on.
If it is going to be set in 2019 can it be a story about Gus Grimley’s daughter? Season 1 was set in 2006 and she was a teenager so a story about her as an adult would work. Plus while season 3 and 4 had their moments they weren’t anywhere close to the greatness of seasons 1 and 2 so we obviously need to bring back the Solverson family.
Ehhh, I don’t know if this needs another season. I’ll check it out, and probably watch it all, but I can’t promise I’ll enjoy it.
Will it be as hacky and un-Coen like as the past 3 and a half seasons? The answer is yes.
There are always eclectic casts with a couple of fantastic performances, but I’ve never found any of the stories to be terribly interesting.
My favorite Fargo is the masterpiece that is season 2, closely followed by a great season 1. Season 3 was good and had some particularly resonant moments (too hazy at this point to recount, though one involved Carrie Coon’s Gloria Burgle and a cartoon stick figure; another, involved Ray Wise), and season 4 had more problems than those which came before. Still, I enjoyed it. As someone else noted, a mediocre Fargo is better than most other shows. And Legion had some excellent episodes (though a bit of a mess in general).
first season was alright (started stronger than it ended), second season was when Hawley ascended to Ryan Murphy levels of unchecked hubris.