During Tuesday's Walt Disney Company Upfront Presentation (covering ABC, ESPN, Freeform, FX Networks, and National Geographic), fans of FX's Fargo received two interesting updates on the upcoming fourth season.

● First up, season star comedian/actor/author Chris Rock (Top Five) appeared during the presentation via video to reveal that his character is called Loy Cannon – and that his kids still ask him why he was picked.

● FX boss John Landgraf announced that production on Noah Hawley's series gets underway in the fall, and is expected to premiere in early 2020.

It was at the August 2018 Television Critics Association's (TCA) summer press tour event where Landgraf announced that Rock will headline a fourth season of Hawley's Emmy award-winning anthology, as head of a crime family in 1950's Kansas City, Missouri.

In 1950, at the end of two great American migrations — that of Southern Europeans from countries like Italy, who came to the US at the turn of the last century and settled in northern cities like New York, Chicago — and African Americans who left the south in great numbers to escape Jim Crow and moved to those same cities — you saw a collision of outsiders, all fighting for a piece of the American dream. In Kansas City, Missouri, two criminal syndicates have struck an uneasy peace. One Italian, one African American. Together they control an alternate economy — that of exploitation, graft and drugs. This too is the history of America. To cement their peace, the heads of both families have traded their eldest sons.

Rock plays the head of one family, a man who — in order to prosper — has surrendered his oldest boy to his enemy, and who must in turn raise his son's enemy as his own. It's an uneasy peace, but profitable. And then the head of the Kansas City mafia goes into the hospital for routine surgery and dies. And everything changes. It's a story of immigration and assimilation, and the things we do for money. And as always, a story of basically decent people who are probably in over their heads. You know, Fargo.

Interestingly, Hawley wasn't sure what direction Fargo would take if there was a fourth season of the series when he spoke to The New York Times in June 2017:

"I don't. It's a big challenge, every one of these — to come up with both a crime to hang it on and a large cast of characters on a collision course — each has to be new and interesting and have a different point of view. But we are exploring certain archetypes that are inescapable on a moral spectrum: There always has to be a Marge and a Jerry and a [Steve] Buscemi and a Peter Stormare, those kinds of pure good and pure evil and moral challenges in the middle. At a certain point, you don't want to repeat yourself, so the question becomes: 'What's left to say? What's interesting to say?'"

Deadline Hollywood