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He’s been called a tv genius, a master who can seemingly make sky-high ratings and awards gold appear with a snap of his fingers.

An Emmy Award, Golden Globe, Pen, Critic’s Choice and Peabody Award winner, Noah Hawley has had two hit shows this season on one network. FX airs Fargo and has already ordered a second season of the new Marvel series Legion.

Given Hawley’s current success, one might assume the ascent of this former Bones scribe to the Hollywood stratosphere has been a snap. As someone on Fargo might say: Aw, heck no. His 20-year path to “overnight success” has hardly been direct, but it’s taken him on the kind of detours that create a distinctive storytelling voice.

“Working with him, I got the real sense of Noah’s skill in finding characters and connections that were unexpected and so unusual,” says Warren Littlefield, who executive-produces Fargo and first worked with Hawley on a short-lived ABC series in 2010.

“On My Generation, I got to see the brilliant mind he had…. I could sit with a writer and they could say, ‘Well, there’s a bird in this story, and okay, the bird’s in the tree.’

“But when you listen to Noah,” Littlefield says, “what he has discovered is the bird is part of a family, and the bird flies off and that’s a journey in the life of that bird, and there are also predators who want to kill this bird who are invested in his life and family and his journey. To me, it’s kind of an example of the depth, dimension and quality his characters have. He sees so much more than anyone else.”

Hawley initially learned how to dive deep into a subject as a student at Sarah Lawrence College. “Looking back, it was like going to graduate school,” he recalls, speaking from his Austin, Texas, home base.

“You take three classes a year, and you and your professor invent an independent study plan. You choose a subject that’s interesting to you and basically build another class around it. Learning that way, being responsible for both the question and the answer, shaped how I thought about the world and gave me the skills and the kind of brain to help me try to understand the world that I live in.

“It’s what the writing process is for me,” he explains. “It always starts with a question or something I don’t understand. Then I’m trying to re-create a world fictionally, so I can ask myself, ‘Is this it? Have I gotten it right?’”

That commitment to getting it right has resulted in an expansive approach to world-building. It isn’t just about character development or complex plot turns, though those are there, too. Giving viewers a sense of place, whether that’s 1970s Minnesota or the intentionally puzzling mash-up of past and present in Legion, is a Hawley trademark. Every detail is carefully considered, from vintage hairstyles to an environment that can be heard as well as seen.

“I find that sound design is very important, in terms of the finished product,” he says. “In Fargo , the idea was that we would be outside, and the sound design would tell the entire story. If you read a script of mine, you’ll see there are rarely music cues in the script, but the sound of the place is described, because a huge part of the experience of watching something is the sound design of it.”

Credit that finely tuned sense of sound to his first career path.

“I started out as a musician,” Hawley says. “That was my goal in high school and college, but musicians don’t make a lot of money.”

Today, music is an integral part of his projects. While Fargo’s first season featured relatively little licensed music, the second was flush with evocative ’70s classic rock. In Legion’s mind-twisting world, songs by The Who, Pink Floyd and the Rolling Stones have echoed main character David Haller’s (Dan Stevens) psychedelic journey into memory and mental illness.

Hawley hasn’t shied away from returning to familiar turf himself. He composed the theme for his short-lived 2009 series The Unusuals, and for Fargo’s first season, he performed a mournful version of the traditional lullaby “Didn’t Leave Nobody but the Baby.”

Though Hawley’s passion for music serves him well today, it didn’t pay the bills back then. Cue another very non-Hollywood detour.

“I was a legal aide in the family courts, in the juvenile rights division, and they had never had paralegals before, so I was making up the job as I went along,” he says. He handled cases of childhood neglect, abuse and juvenile delinquency. “I had thought, Oh, I’ll get a job to support myself as I try to make it as a musician. But you can’t do that work in an amateur capacity and feel good about yourself.

“Looking back on my identity as a writer, having a job that was that important and meaningful, and where the stakes of the work that you did were so high, it really deepened my outlook on life. It moved me away from writing and playing pop music on some level, to tell stories that were more adult.”

Those grown-up stories weren’t for Hollywood — at least, not initially. “The first book that I wrote, I wrote while I was working in Legal Aid, and it went into a drawer. I didn’t get an MFA, and I had to learn by doing. That means it’s not always pretty how you start. But if in a 300-page book you can write 10 great pages, you take that and move on to the next.

“There’s a discipline to being a novelist. There’s an understanding that you’re going to live with the subject and characters and story for a long time, and you’re going to dive into a story and work on it day in and day out with no promise of success.

“There are a lot of novels in drawers in the world, and rarely can a novelist pre-sell a book. Usually you have to write the whole thing before you can sell it, so this creative undertaking has to be its own reward. What drives you every morning isn’t commercial or financial — it’s creative. That outlook on the work is what sustained me. And it also teaches you to create complex and intricate stories that stay in your head, which is what television is, right?”

Three novels would be relegated to the drawer before one was published; he now has five. “I was working on a second book and was in this writers’ collective called the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto in this old, converted dog and cat hospital,” he recalls. “I’d go to work every day with my dog and write. One of my friends had started screenwriting and demystified the process for me, so I sat down and wrote a script that became Lies and Alibis, and off of that I got a feature agent.”

Paramount, which had bought his first novel, A Conspiracy of Tall Men, also called. Unhappy with another author’s first-draft screenplay, the studio wanted Hawley to adapt his own book. “In six months I went from struggling novelist to an in-demand feature writer.”

This is where many first-time writers celebrate with a flurry of ego-gratifying indulgences, or at least become Hollywood clichés, burning brightly before fading away. “It’s very heady, but because I didn’t live in town and I wasn’t 21, plus I was happy where I was, I had a sense of perspective on it,” Hawley says. “I didn’t move to L.A. for five or six more years.”

He didn’t stay, either, moving instead to New York for The Unusuals and ultimately relocating to Austin for My Generation. “I convinced ABC to shoot it in Austin, because you should push these corporations to do it the way you think it should be done. And it didn’t get a second season, but by then I had a three-year-old in preschool and I wasn’t going anywhere.”

Having some non-Hollywood perspective came in handy when he was asked to turn the 1996 movie Fargo into a series. When the Fargo TV project was announced, fans and critics seemed disinterested at best, disparaging at worst. Prior to the show’s debut, a red carpet for the new series at New York’s Paley Center for Media drew more publicists than fans or journalists.

Hawley’s ability not only to honor the original movie, but to create a distinct yet movie-adjacent world paid off.

“This was before the anthology form was popular,” Littlefield recalls, “and Noah said, ‘I think we [should] tell a complete story each season, like they’re chapters in a book.’ Early on, he had this sense that there might be a book somewhere that could be discovered, True Crimes of the Midwest, and that each chapter — each season — would be related but unique and individual. That felt right, and felt like a brilliant, inspirational take.”

With a fully fleshed-out spin on making Fargo an anthology, Hawley was able to handle MGM’s suggestion that Marge (the pregnant sheriff played by Frances McDormand in the film) stay out of the series.

“We have a responsibility to give the audience an experience that’s fully thought out,” Hawley says. “What made the movie so powerful was that Marge has seen the worst things in life she’d ever see, but when the movie ends, we understand that tomorrow is a normal day. That’s her reward. But if tomorrow was another crazy case, it wouldn’t be credible. It would just turn into television.”

Instead, Hawley started from scratch, creating characters like sociopathic hitman Lorne Malvo (Billy Bob Thornton) and insurance salesman Lester Nygaard (Martin Freeman) for the first season, and determined state trooper Lou Solverson (Patrick Wilson) and unlucky hairstylist Peggy Blumquist (Kirsten Dunst) for the second.

In season three, Ewan McGregor plays mismatched brothers Emmit and Ray Stussy. Set in 2010 in the world of competitive bridge, the season follows self-made real estate tycoon Emmit and disgruntled, pot-bellied parole officer Ray as their sibling rivalry devolves into murder.

As with his other TV, film and novel projects, Hawley doesn’t create some interesting characters and simply release them to see where they might wander. To Hawley, his grown-up stories require a long view.

“I don’t think it’s good enough anymore to wing it,” he says. “We have a responsibility to the audience to give them an experience that’s fully thought out. Because I know in season one of Fargo I’m going to use a bear trap in the last episode, in the first episode I’m showing it to you hanging on the wall. I’m setting it up for you.”

Cast members say that Hawley’s vision, as unpredictable as it might be for viewers, has been easy to trust — if tough to execute. “It was the first time I was playing a role where I didn’t totally know what I was going to do next,” Dunst admits. Her character careened from hit-and-run motorist to murderer over the course of the season. “This required a lot more work than a film for me, in terms of preparation.”

Dunst, who earned an Emmy nomination for lead actress, found that Hawley’s attention to detail and character freed her to create an indelible character. “Sometimes you get lucky and you get into a rhythm with a role, and you never second-guess your decisions. Noah wrote that role for me,” she says.

“I remember Noah wrote all of us individual emails the night before we started shooting. He said more often than not, people’s lives are what happen to them while they’re waiting for opportunity to knock.”

Putting his stamp on the Marvel universe with Legion has freed Hawley from Fargo’s more realistic confines. He’s creating something that is in many ways one-of-a-kind, despite its superhero association. Because the X-Men franchise is at Fox, Hawley has no directive to tie his story to any other part of the Marvel universe.

“I think as lovers of the genre, Marvel is just really excited to play. There’s no corporate strategy here,” he says. “It’s just me trying to access my inner child and get back to that place that I loved as a teenager, when these stories blew my mind and taught me the world could be a really intense and magical and creative place that mixed science fiction and fantasy and action and wonder.”

Hawley, who took so many detours to reach the specific creative place he’s in, is building his distinctive worlds exactly where he wants — far from Hollywood. “I like L.A. I don’t have any problems with L.A., and when I went there, I got everything I wanted,” he says. “But I like that I’m not a coastal person. I grew up in New York City and I’m as urbane as anybody, but now I’m out here in the middle of the country with everyone else.

“I’m trying to do something different, and the last way you should try to do something different is doing it the same way everyone else is doing it.” He pauses. “It works for me.”

This article originally appeared in emmy magazine, Issue No. 5, 2017