‘Fargo’ Not Returning to FX Until 2020

Fans of FX‘s Fargo should practice their patience skills, as season 4 of the series likely won’t air until 2020.

When series creator Noah Hawley said season 4 won’t start shooting until 2019 and that odds of the show returning the same year were “a long shot,” he wasn’t messing around.

Executive producer Warren Littlefield told Entertainment Weekly that the Emmy- and Golden Globe-winning crime drama anthology, inspired by the Coen Brothers’ 1996 film of the same name, wouldn’t start shooting until the fall of 2019 — meaning the absolute earliest the show could premiere would be December 2019.

However, it’s a safer bet that the acclaimed show won’t air until the next April, seeing as FX has debuted two of Fargo‘s three seasons in that month.

“We have a year, and we have a city [that season 4 takes place in],” Littlefield said. “The plan would be to go into production and start shooting in the fall of 2019. Noah has a lot on his plate. Noah knows when it is and where it is, and he’ll commence writing that after he shoots his feature with Fox Searchlight this summer. So in the fall, he’ll begin writing and with Fargo we generally have most of the scripts written before we go into production.”

Hawley’s new movie, Pale Blue Dot, is a fact-based sci-fi film starring Natalie Portman as a female astronaut who returns to Earth from a mission in space and begins to slowly unravel and lose touch with reality. Reese Witherspoon, who was attached to star at one point, will produce with Bruna Papandrea. Jon Hamm is also in negotiations to star opposite Portman as her fellow astronaut who she aggressively pursues after returning to Earth.

Hawley’s other acclaimed FX series, the Marvel-based superhero mind-bender Legion, is amid its recently-extended second season. Of working on both Legion and Fargo at the same time, Hawley said it’s difficult to separate his workload.

“You sort of have to tell yourself, ‘I’m not there, so there’s no way I’m going to get more than 85 percent of my vision,’” Hawley told Paste ahead of Fargo season 3’s debut.

While the news that Fargo likely won’t premiere until mid-2020 may be disappointing, it’s better than the alternative for fans who read the interview with FX Networks CEO John Landgraf this time last year, saying that “there may never be another Fargo.”

Season 2 Fargo stars Kirsten Dunst and Jesse Plemons welcomed their first child together, a baby boy, this week. The two met on the set of Fargo, where they played married couple Peggy and Ed Blumquist. They became engaged in January 2017, with the two mainly staying out of headlines until news of their pregnancy broke in December.