It might get pretty cold waiting for Fargo Season 4 – and that’s precisely the problem. Showrunner Noah Hawley says the anthology’s famous wintry weather could prevent them from starting production until at least 2019.

Even as FX only confirmed that Hawley would return for Season 4 a few months ago, the showrunner is walking back their projection that fresh Fargo could arrive in 2019. Hawley has not yet begun writing scripts for the apparent period piece, and their rate of completion will determine when production can actually begin. Given his schedule and the limited window for winter weather in the show’s Calgary base, Hawley tells The Wrap that airing finished episodes by 2019 is “a long shot”:

I think realistically we will certainly be filming it next year. Mostly just because it’s a winter show. You know, I have to write [the episodes], then we have to prep it, then we have to film it, which means it’s either this coming winter or next winter.

Given my schedule with making a movie and posting a movie this summer, and then gearing up to do more ‘Legion’ assuming we get a pickup. It seems like a long shot that I can launch ‘Fargo’ 4 this winter.

Last we heard, Hawley had envisioned Season 4 as a “period piece” set before the show’s second season in 1979. Exactly what period is somewhat open-ended, as Hawley told The Hollywood Reporter the region has a ripe history:

More and more as I think about telling stories in this vein and what the original film is about, these are really American stories and stories about the American landscape, and the things that people do for money. I feel like I have a very interesting and exciting direction to go in. I'm trying to find the time to get it down on paper … But if you look at the history of the region and the waves of migration and people coming in, and the things people do for money … there's something interesting to making a period version of it.

For his part, Hawley is also working on sci-fi drama Pale Blue Dot and a Doctor Doom movie, to say nothing of future Legion or an FX adaptation of Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. We weren’t necessarily expecting a fourth Fargo at all, but will future seasons get more spaced out?

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