THE NEW YORK TIMES, TUESDAY, DECEMBER 1, 2020 N C5When the third season of “Fargo” ended in
2017, the concept of “alternative facts” and
“fake news” were clearing the way for what
became the Trump presidency’s challenge
to reality. The themes the creator Noah
Hawley explored in that season seemed
oddly prescient, all the way down to Rus-
sians and disinformation, but he shrugged
it off: “You can never predict the zeitgeist,”
he said at the time. “I just managed to land
in it.”
Now he’s managed to land in it again.
During a pandemic-induced, five-month in-
terruption in filming, Hawley’s theme for
Season 4 of “Fargo” — which ended on Sun-
day on FX — again collided with current
events. This time, a story set in 1950 fea-
tured Chris Rock as the head of a Black
crime family in Kansas City locked in a bat-
tle with Italians — and both groups being
demonized by white police officers and poli-
ticians. There are still plenty of Hawley’s
trademark Easter eggs — ample references
to the show’s previous seasons and the
canon of Joel and Ethan Coen, who wrote
and directed the 1996 film that inspired the
series. It’s difficult not to draw parallels to
this summer’s social upheaval, but Hawley
doesn’t see these issues as anything new.
“This show emerged into a country that
was having an active and urgent conversa-
tion about race,” said Hawley last week.
“But it’s also a conversation that we have
been having for hundreds of years in this
country, about this country. So I’m not sure
that if this show premiered in 1986, or 1995,
or 2007, that it would have been much differ-
ent.”
The following conversation has been
edited and condensed for clarity. Spoilers
await — and if you didn’t watch the closing
credits in Sunday’s finale, make sure to do
so.
How difficult was it to return after such a
long break?
It presented some challenges. It’s helpful
that we had nine hours that the cast could
watch and everyone could understand, “oh,
that’s the show that we were making” —
which you don’t usually have. The crew and
the cast, if you’re lucky, they might see the
first hour while you’re filming. So in many
ways, they were much more informed than
they’ve ever been. I know that Jason
Schwartzman never shaved that mustache
because he was so dedicated.
After George Floyd was killed and protests
started this summer, there were a lot of
conversations in journalism and entertain-
ment about representation: Who gets to tell
whose story? As a white writer, were you at
all concerned about how this season’s story
would land in that climate?
Everyone has their own American story,
their own American experience. My Ameri-
can experience starts on one side of my
family with a grandmother who fled from
Russia in 1895, as the Cossacks were com-
ing. Everyone arrived here at a certain
point, and in a different way. What I knew in
exploring the immigration experience and
the experience of Black Americans is that,
to the degree that those are not my story,
that I did want and need as many voices and
as much understanding as possible to be
able to tell those stories: in the writers’
room and among directors and actors and,
you know, as much diversity as possible —
an actual diversity of experience and opin-
ion and perspective.
Those conversations were so intense that I
wondered if you felt like the story carried
more weight?
You used the word “conversation,” and
that’s what I’m trying to have. And not ev-
eryone says the right thing in a conversa-
tion. But what was important to me, to the
degree that this show has always been a
show about America, was to continue to ex-
plore America from all points of view. On a
very primal level, the reason that I write is
to try to understand the world that I’m liv-
ing in and to recreate the world in a fictional
way, and then look at it and go, “Did I get
this right?” That becomes the exploration
— and the risk, because there’s a risk that
you’re getting it wrong. But we can’t oper-
ate from a place of fear in terms of asking
the hard questions.
I had a lot of conversations throughout
the process with a lot of people that I really
respected, who I knew would call me out if I
was not being authentic. If it was Chris
Rock, writers, directors, or the other actors,
if there had been a moment that didn’t feel
authentic or felt like it was romanticized,
then we would have those conversations.
We had an interesting conversation in the
writers’ room about Ethelrida [E’myri
Crutchfield]. Some of the writers wanted,
because she’s a teenage girl, to have her
struggle with some moral issues of her
own; maybe her aunt offers her a drink, and
she takes it because she’s a teenager. There
was a fear expressed that I was making her
too honorable a character because she was
Black. I said, “No, I’m making her that hon-
orable a character because she is the char-
acter this year that represents that pure
goodness that Marge [Frances McDor-
mand] represented in the movie, or Patrick
Wilson represented in Season 2, or Carrie
Coon in Season 3: decency.” The strugglethat she is going through is a struggle
against exterior forces, but she is very com-
fortable with who she is. She knows that the
path that she’s on, one mistake can throw
her off it. So we had those conversations
and, as in any good writers’ room or any
good process, it forces you to justify the
choices that you make.
As I said, we can’t live in fear. Writers
have to be willing to take those risks and put
ourselves out there because the reward is
too great. To be able to put yourself into
somebody else’s shoes, and to create that
empathy in yourself and in others — that is
the definition of good writing, I think.This season is set in a time and place, post-
war America, that was superficially quite
optimistic: “We can do anything.” But many
of the characters are traumatized, which
seems to say that America is actually a
vicious place.
I came upon this equation when I was writ-
ing Season 3, which is that irony without hu-
mor is just violence. Think about the stories
of Kafka. But also think about the immi-
grant experience or the experience of Black
people in America. We say it’s the land of the
free and the home of the brave, and yet
those freedoms are not available to every-
one equally. What is that if not ironic? But
there’s no humor to it. When you tell some-
one that they have to be an American to be
accepted, but then when they become an
American, you say they’re not a real Ameri-
can — it has the setup for a joke, but the joke
is on you. It’s not funny.
That comedic setup to a tragic payoff
feels very much to me like what many of
Joel and Ethan’s movies have that is unique,
and something that I felt very much would
translate from that fundamentally Jewish
point of view to the experience of people of
color and immigrants in this country.It was a pleasant surprise to see so many
“Raising Arizona” references this season. As
you’re writing, do you create Coen mile
markers for yourself as templates?
It’s like the Talmud, right? You go to the big
book of questions: “How has this problem
been asked and answered before?” I knew
that in setting up this epic season with 21
main characters trying to look at the history
of crime in America, that there was a lot of
information I was going to have to deliver to
the audience very quickly. So I tried to
think, how had Joel and Ethan done that?
My mind went to “Raising Arizona”: The
first 11 minutes of that movie is this amazing
narrated montage that tells you everything
you know about H.I. McDunnough [Nicolas
Cage], and Nathan Arizona and their quin-
tuplets, and it brings you all the way up to
the ladder on the roof of the car as they’re
driving off to go get them a baby. It’s a comic
masterpiece unto itself.
So I settled on this history-report format
from Ethelrida, which allowed me both to
tell the history of crime in Kansas City and
also her history, and introduce all the impor-
tant characters and ideas in about 24 min-
utes. Once I had “Raising Arizona” in mind,
I thought it would be fun if we did a jailbreak
with two women instead of John Goodman
and William Forsythe, and rather than be-
ing H.I.’s buddies from prison, it’s Ethelri-
da’s aunt and her paramour. That led me
into a story that drove those characters
through the rest of the season.What about Mike Milligan [Bokeem Wood-
bine] made you want to close the season out
with him?
He remains a kind of active conundrum, as
this iconoclastic character that didn’t seem
to belong anywhere. He’s clearly a Black
man in America in 1979. But you don’t get
the sense that he really fits into that culture.
He clearly doesn’t really fit into the white
culture he’s part of, or at least he’s not re-
spected there. And he also has this larger
perspective on things. He’s a very thought-ful and erudite speaker who played the
game — he went out and did what his boss
told him; he won the war and he came home
and he wanted his reward, and his reward
was a tiny office with an electric typewriter.
We left him in limbo, and when I thought
about what to do this year, he was still there
in that limbo. His story wasn’t done.
I didn’t set out to tell the Mike Milligan
origin story per se. It was an element of this
larger story in the same way that Season 2
was the Molly Solverson [Allison Tolman]
origin story. There was a young girl named
Molly Solverson, and she was in a few
scenes, but it was mostly the story of her fa-
ther and her mother. It’s the same here. I
think you can get from Satchel, whose story
we’ve seen in Season 4, to the Mike Milligan
that we see in Season 2, but it’s not the sum
total of what the story was.
Art Blakey’s “Moanin’ ” features prominently
in the last two seasons, in two different
formats. What about that album resonates
with you?
Percussion has always been really attrac-
tive to me as a sonic element. When it came
time in Season 1 to introduce Mr. Wrench
and Mr. Numbers, I asked [the composer]
Jeff Russo, I said: “I don’t want music, I just
want a beat. That’s their signature.” And it
continued from there. In Season 2, we had a
drum line, we brought in a marching band to
record; Season 3, there was a lot of New Or-
leans-style music that was very rhythmic.
Jazz is such a rhythmic form of music, so in
figuring out what to set this season’s open-
ing 24-minute montage to — which in “Rais-
ing Arizona” is “Ode to Joy” for banjo and
whistling — I went to “Caravan” as a piece
of music that you can hear for 24 minutes
and not be tired of it. We can reinvent in dif-
ferent ways, and some of it is just percus-
sion.
With “Moanin’,” in the third season I used
a song version in the first hour. This season,
when we knew we were doing the jazz club
and they asked me what piece of music I
wanted to use, it occurred to me to use that
same thing but to do it from an instrumental
point of view. Again, it’s a kind of rhyme
with the previous year, but there’s some-
thing about that music — it’s kind of the per-
fect piece.
Are you definitely done with “Fargo”?
No, I don’t think so. I’ve been saying I’m
done for three years and I haven’t been, so it
feels obnoxious to say it again. The show
has always been about the American expe-
rience, and there’s still a lot to say about it.
That said, I don’t have a timeline and I don’t
even really have an idea. But I find myself
compelled to come back to this style of sto-
rytelling: to tell a crime story, which is also
a kind of character study and philosophical
document exploration of our American ex-
perience. It’s not something I feel like I ever
would have been allowed to do without the
Coen Brothers’ model in the beginning, and
now I can’t think of why I would do it in any
other format. The tone of voice is also
unique: It’s that Kafka setup to a tragic
punchline, with a happy ending. That feels
like a magic trick, if you can do it right.
Do you have much interaction with the
Coens about the series, or feedback from
them?
I do not. I have not spoken to them in a
while. In the first two or three years I would
make my way to New York and have a
breakfast or a quick conversation from time
to time. It’s never creative. It’s never about
the show, other than they say, “You’re still
making that thing?”
If they have something to volunteer, I’d
love to hear it. But at the same time, their
tacit neglect is — I still get a warm feeling
from it. Because they’ve allowed me to do
this. This grand experiment in storytelling
that has been so fulfilling and enriching for
me.ASK A SHOWRUNNERNoah Hawley Isn’t Done With ‘Fargo’
The show’s creator thinks
there’s still a lot to say about
the American experience.
By FINN COHENELIZABETH MORRIS/FXELIZABETH MORRIS/FXFXFrom the top, Noah
Hawley, center, on the set;
Chris Rock in the fourth
season; Jason
Schwartzman kept his
“Fargo” mustache during
a pandemic shutdown.