‘Fargo’ takes a detour to unusual place: LA

LOS ANGELES — On an overcast midwinter day, Noah Hawley — the man who has reimagined “Fargo” for television — stood in a seedy motel room on Hollywood Boulevard.

As he scanned the room, his eyes stopped at the floral comforters draped over the two full-size beds, each appearing as if it could write a colorful memoir of hopelessness.

“You can really smell the despair in here,” Hawley said.

Since launching in 2014, the FX anthology series — loosely based on the 1996 Coen brothers movie of the same name — has set its offbeat noir in the snow-covered Midwest. But with the current third season of the show, which follows feuding brothers (both played by Ewan McGregor) whose tense relationship quickly escalates to murderous levels, it recently ventured beyond its Minnesota framework to Los Angeles.

“The Law of Non-Contradiction,” shown last Wednesday, spanned two eras: present day(ish) in 2010 and in flashbacks to the 1970s. (The episode can be seen at www.fxnetworks.com/shows/ fargo).

Viewers watch as sort-of, kind-of local Police Chief Gloria Burgle (Carrie Coon) travels to Los Angeles to investigate her deceased stepdad’s mysterious past as sci-fi author “Thaddeus Mobley.”

She stays at the same motel where he did while caught up in a scheme to make his book into a major motion picture.

“This is not the world we inhabit,” executive producer Warren Littlefield said of the on-location shoot. “So it looks and feels quite, quite different.”

Shooting for much of the third “Fargo” season took place in Calgary, Alberta, which stands in for the show’s snowy Midwest setting.