What lessons did Noah Hawley learn from mind-bending Legion?

The Hollywood Reporter

Hawley explained his series finale, described by The A.V. Club as a "beautiful messy bow." "I think the original idea was let's take the genre out of it and think about it as a story," he told The Hollywood Reporter. "And if it works as a great drama, then when you add the genre back into it, it'll only be more exciting because you'll be able to play with all those tools that you don't have in a traditional dramatic story. And as I explored it in those opening weeks of figuring out what the show wanted to be, I was very adamant that if we were going to tell a mental illness story, we were going to tell it. We weren't going to use it as a launching pad into like, 'Oh, he's not crazy. It's a superhero show.' But the layers of that are what was really interesting." Asked if he learned any lessons from Legion and specifically if the X-Men series will influence Season 4 of Fargo, Hawley said: "That it's important to play with this material, and to be open to what the show wants to be. And, obviously, you have to use your skills as a storyteller to make sure you're always telling a dramatic and character driven story. But I wouldn't have made any other story the way that I made Legion, and yet that was exactly the right way to make Legion, which was whimsically, and playfully, and exploring the subjective nature of storytelling, and being able to play with the genre. And you can solve a character through genre filmmaking in a way that you just can't do in a traditional drama. And so I always want to approach every story like no one has ever told a story like this before, and go, 'Well, what's the best way to tell it?' Not just asking, 'What is the story,' but asking, 'What's the way to tell the story?'" ALSO: Hawley: "Maybe if you watch it a second time, something completely different will happen."