After Five Seasons of ‘Fargo,’ Noah Hawley Is Still Rooting for America

This interview includes spoilers for the fifth season of “Fargo.”

When Noah Hawley debuted the FX series “Fargo” a decade ago, it wasn’t yet clear that instead of simply telling a longer version of the 1996 Oscar-winning film by Joel and Ethan Coen, he was going to spin the brothers’ entire oeuvre into a thread that examines modern American life while also reconfiguring a few other cultural touchstones. With the fifth season’s conclusion on Tuesday, Hawley has doubled down on “Wizard of Oz” references, turned Rush and Britney Spears songs into anthems of toxic masculinity, and used Tim Burton’s “The Nightmare Before Christmas” and John Hughes’s “Home Alone” as plot devices.

The canvas is still a 10-episode arc, and the paints are, as usual, a large cast of marquee stars and scene-stealing character actors. But this time around, Hawley has used the Coens’ original tale — a woman (Juno Temple) being kidnapped in a plot orchestrated by her husband — as a lens on patriarchy, domestic abuse and the very American trait of being in debt. The season also has 16th-century sin-eating practices; Jon Hamm as a misogynistic Constitutional sheriff with nipple rings; and Dave Foley as an eye-patched lawyer for one of the biggest donors to the Federalist Society, played by Jennifer Jason Leigh.

“The feedback I kept getting from FX about the scripts was that this was our funniest season,” Hawley said last week in a telephone interview. “Then, of course, when you put it up on its feet, it’s the story of a woman who’s abducted with domestic violence undertones.”

These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

This season of “Fargo” felt much darker than the others, which are already dark. Did you feel that while you were writing it?