Moving Pieces on a Collision Course: How ‘Fargo’ Showrunner Noah Hawley Weaves Crime and Irony

After five seasons and six Primetime Emmys, the anthology series Fargo has a knack for crafting elaborate, tongue-in-cheek tales of deceit and death — and you can bet showrunner Noah Hawley isn’t done yet.

“I describe Fargo “There are a lot of moving parts on a collision course, but you never know which parts are going to collide and when,” he says.

Originally inspired by Joel and Ethan Coen’s Oscar-winning 1996 film of the same name, the streaming series began as an “homage to the tone and setting” of the original film but now embraces the sensibilities of the filmmakers’ oeuvre, a reason it consistently ranks “Fresh” among critics and fans on Rotten Tomatoes. Blending crime and philosophy with seemingly random bursts of unnerving violence and humor, the show tells a self-contained story each season with what NPR calls “a wide range of characters whose brutality and depravity are coated in just the right amount of Minnesota nice.”

Hawley, whose twin brother Alexi is also a television writer, wrote and created the series, which premiered in 2014, after serving as a writer and producer on three seasons of the television series Bones. Besides being a novelist, Noah Hawley wrote and created the Marvel Comics-inspired TV series Legion and develops Alien: Earthan upcoming TV series based on the Stranger film franchise.

Fargo has received 15 Primetime Emmy nominations this year, including Outstanding Writing for a Limited or Anthology Series or Movie. Hawley says the premise still sparks ideas to unravel. “One of the things that keeps me coming back Fargo “It’s this strange alchemy of crime and an examination of our great American experiment,” he says.

“Of course there is humor in it, but there is also a lot of philosophical underpinnings in the work of the Coen Brothers. So I can watch the film FargoI can look at No country for old men. I can look at (The Big) Lebowski or A serious man. These are all very different films that all contain elements that are in Fargo.Put them all in a bag and shake them, and you’ll get something different every time.”

Still, just like the plots of Fargo, that spontaneity only exists on the surface. We spoke with Hawley to learn more about weaving the show’s meticulous tapestries. (Spoilers ahead.)

Jon Hamm as Roy Tillman in Fargo (2024).

Thanks to FX

A morality play at its core

The story takes place in the Midwest, largely around Minnesota. Fargo occasionally features overlapping characters, but mostly focuses on separate stories involving ordinary people whose lives are thrown into wider chaos. The first season introduced a hitman (Billy Bob Thornton) who influenced a lowly insurance salesman (Martin Freeman) in the early 2000s, leading to a crime spree. Later seasons focused on the 1950s, 1970s, late 2000s, and nearly the present, with ordinary people getting entangled with con artists, crime families, and more.

“Some years are more philosophical,” Hawley says. “For season five, I really wanted it to be lean and mean, no more than 44-minute episodes and not too much navel-gazing. Just a good story, well told, as opposed to season four, which was 65-minute episodes and an American crime epic about the original sins of capitalism, with the exploitation of free and cheap labor.”

While each season can have a different theme and feel, the show always revolves around a morality play. As one character in season four notes, “Why do Americans like a crime story? Because America is a crime story,” Hawley says.

“That’s what interests me the most. Who are we cheering for in America? We’re not cheering for the victims; we’re cheering for the criminals. And I think there’s something interesting in that.”

Questions about truth and violence

One reason Fargo deserves praise because, as one review wrote, “it changes the humor of the Coen brothers’ film into one that is much more noirish and grotesque.” Part of that comes down to the way violence is depicted.

“I try to force the audience to consider their own morals and sensibilities and why they thought they wanted violence as a repercussion,” Hawley says. “We’re trained to see violence as entertainment. But I always try to make the violence really shocking and ugly and make you care about the people it’s being used against, so that you’re like, ‘Oh, I thought I wanted this, but I really don’t.’ … You’re shocked by how graphic and real it felt.”

The show also uses thematic ideas as a springboard for a larger story. The film Fargo famously begins with the words “Based on a true story,” even though the plot is fictional. Yet those words proved fruitful in the making of season three, which debuted after “this idea of ​​alternate realities started to emerge in 2016,” says Hawley.

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Although he didn’t say so explicitly, the term “fake news” was used worldwide that year, referring to disinformation and hoaxes on social media published for political purposes or to generate traffic. (One dictionary named the term “word of the year.”)

“We tried to really deconstruct the phrase, ‘This is a true story,’ because it’s either true or it’s a story,” he says.

The plot of that season involved a man named Stussy (Ewan McGregor) who was accidentally killed because the killer went to the wrong address, and a second man named Stussy who also died. Another character “was like, ‘Well, all we have to do is kill a few more Stussys. And then there’s a serial killer who hates guys named Stussy,'” Hawley says. “Then you find a guy, and he confesses and he goes to court, and he gets convicted and goes to prison. And now that’s the reality, right?”

One character knows there is more to the story than what the court found to be true, he adds. “She tells her son later, ‘There is violence in realizing the world is not what you thought it was.'”

Unexpected but inevitable

While many books and movies depict criminals with superior cunning, Hawley prefers Fargo to follow the example of the original film, where none of the plotters are known for their intelligence.

“I think both the tragedy of crime and the comedy of crime is that it’s often just a series of bad ideas,” he says. “And in order to solve a crime, you have to be able to say, ‘Well, assume there was no plan, or assume the plan was bad.’”

While the show’s criminals may not plan exhaustively, the writers certainly do. “There’s a lot of work that goes into making something seem random,” Hawley says. The writers’ room will often suggest a twist that would be great for a movie, but from that first instinct, they’ll brainstorm what could happen in real life.

Take season four, for example, in which Chris Rock plays the leader of a criminal network of black immigrants in the early 1950s that comes into conflict with the Italian mafia in Kansas City, Missouri.

“I didn’t want the Italians to kill him, and I didn’t want to put the black guy in jail as the last scene. But I also knew that in real life, the guy who runs the criminal organization never gets to live happily ever after,” Hawley says. “And so we set up the idea that he betrayed these two women. And at the very end of the show, when you think his story is over,[one of them]walks out on the porch and stabs him, and that’s it. It’s something that he did that came back to him and felt like real life rather than a movie twist. … I always say I want to do something that’s unexpected but feels inevitable when you look back on it.”

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From inspiration to “What happens now?”

Just like the original film, Fargo‘s final season centers on a woman (Juno Temple) who is kidnapped by two men, except her husband isn’t out for financial gain; her ex-husband (Jon Hamm) is arranging it out of “patriarchal bluster” and revenge. She’s also a lot more cunning in this scenario, with an “unbreakable will for freedom (that) gives her preternatural survival skills, like a caged tiger ready to pounce,” notes one reviewer.

Find your own unexpected moments by focusing on one thing—an image, a character, whatever—and asking yourself, “What if?” That’s how Hawley recharges his creativity.

“It always starts with a premise, a scene, a moment — you know, two crime families, where they’re trading their youngest sons; or two brothers whose father died, and one of them got a stamp collection and the other got a Corvette. Or, you know, in this case, a woman who’s kidnapped by two men hired by her husband. But unlike the movie, it’s not her current husband; it’s her ex-husband,” he says. “You just take that and say, ‘OK, well, who are the guys, and what happens next?’”

Season 5 of Fargo is now streaming on Hulu.

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