by: S. Scott Stanikmas – Senior Staff Writer

FX has a really awesome show in Fargo. The last two seasons have told excellent stories that feel less like serialized TV and more like one giant nine hour film that you can’t help but marathon on a day off.

The only thing that’s really tough is the uneven schedule. The wait between the first and second seasons was about a year and a half. And if rumors are to be believed we won’t see a return to the Midwest until sometime in 2017. But the reasoning behind it is solid enough that I’m willing to give it a pass.

Vulture recently spoke with showrunner Noah Hawley and asked him if he feels like he might write himself into a circle come the fourth season or later. Here’s what Hawley had to say:

I guess that’s assuming there are going to be more than three years of it or more. Every time I’m in the middle of one I go, I don’t know if there’s another one. I know that big corporations don’t usually do a mic drop after a success, but one of the things I really respect about John Landgraf and FX is we did the first one and it was a huge success, and we wouldn’t have done another unless we both felt like we could equal it or top it. It was the same with this one — the bar is very high, and I don’t think there has to be ten years of something to make it great. If usually you get, what, five seasons in five years? I’ll probably have three seasons in five years given the first one was 16 months between seasons and this one will be 18 or 20 months between seasons. So at that point … I don’t know. I mean it’s gotta work. But the other thing is, maybe then you go, “Okay, great, we had three, those came relatively easily,” and you do the Louis C.K. thing and say, “Hey, it’s four years later, I have another one,” and then you just make that. If it isn’t an anthology or a limited series in that way, you can event-ize it and not stick to that TV schedule.

I like that Hawley doesn’t want to rush into things unless he has a real good story. For most shows that do a serialized story that demands attention be followed taking a two year break would kill it’s momentum. But with Fargo being a time-traveling anthology (Season One took place in 2006, Season Two followed a younger version of a character from S1 in 1979 and Season Three is reportedly in 2010) it could easily take a good long break and when it finally comes back it could be treated like a huge special event.

Even if we don’t get a fourth season I’ll be happy revisiting the previous seasons we’ve already been blessed with. At this point I’d rather have to wait two years for a quality ten episodes than get a half-assed story that contradicts the quality that has come before it on a clockwork schedule.