By his own count, writer-director Noah Hawley has generated 51 hours of off-kilter TV drama inspired by the Coen brothers’ 1996 movie “Fargo.” An astute wordsmith who writes novels in between TV shows, the Austin, Texas-based creator and showrunner excels in telling faux true-crime stories from the heartland populated with dead bodies, homespun wit and morally conflicted characters. Since its launch in 2014, “Fargo,” the series, has earned 55 Emmy nominations and six wins.
For “Fargo’s” fifth season on FX, Hawley and his team meted out their usual allotment of black-humored touches, including an eye-patched lawyer named Danish Graves (Dave Foley), puppets, a “Home Alone”-like sequence involving flamethrowing oven cleaner, body-switching slapstick at the hospital and a villain who rises naked from a hot tub to ask visiting police officers, “Does it bother you if I’m discussing matters of state in moist repose?” The show also hit somber notes in tracking the hero’s journey of Minnesota housewife Dot Lyons (Juno Temple) as she fights to be free of her brutally misogynistic ex-husband, North Dakota Sheriff Roy Tillman (Jon Hamm). Hawley recently returned from Thailand, where he’s overseeing production of a new “Alien” series based on the sci-fi film franchise. Speaking via Zoom from a Beverly Hills hotel room, Hawley explains how he built this year’s “Fargo” saga around themes of domestic abuse, debt and biscuit batter.
Season 5 takes place.
