I really need to go back and finish watching the first season of FX’s “Fargo“. I think I watched the first three or four episodes and enjoyed them, but just never finished the season off. Now the second season is prepping to arrive this fall and, like HBO’s “True Detective“, it will have nothing to do with the first season. In fact, it will be set 27 years before the story of Lorne Malvo (Billy Bob Thornton), Lester Nygaard (Martin Freeman) and Deputy Molly Solverson (Allison Tolman).
Speaking with The Hollywood Reporter, “Fargo” producer Warren Littlefield said, “The second season is really is about the corporatization of America. It’s the difference between a mom and pop family business and a Walmart.”
The ten-episode season will accomplish its examination of the corporatization of America, through a true crime tale of a mob turf war set in 1979, and will even include Ronald Reagan starting out on the presidential campaign trail.
“It’s the Kansas City mob basically looking to do a hostile takeover of the Gerhard crime family,” Littlefield said. “In the middle, we have a couple, Ed and Peggy Blomquist, and they get caught in the middle of a war between these two crime factions.”
The Blomquists will be played by Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemons (“Breaking Bad”). Patrick Wilson does serve as something of a tie-in with the first season playing Lou Solverson — the former state trooper played by Keith Carradine in the first season –. Solverson is a clean cut Minnesota State Patrolman, four years back from Vietnam, while Ted Danson will play a WWII veteran and sheriff of Rock County, Minnesota named Hank Larsson.
Additional members of the cast include Jean Smart in a juicy role, playing crime family matriarch Floyd Gerhardt. Nick Offerman plays a Minnesota lawyer named Karl Weathers and they’re joined by Brad Garrett, Kieran Culkin, Bokeem Woodbine, Jeffrey Donovan and Angus Sampson.
The difference, of course, between “Fargo” and “True Detective” is one plays on network television with commercial breaks, the other on premium cable. So how do they account for the advertisements in the writing? Easy, they don’t. “With ‘Fargo’, it’s strong content. We don’t do melodrama,” Littlefield said. “We don’t build at the end of an episode. We have never show the network a script with an ad break in it. We figure it out in the edit suite.”
I really have to go watch that first season…
