Coen brothers reveal they have no plans to venture into TV

Despite it being the small screen's 'Golden Age', the directors are simply 'not very interested'

Joel and Ethan Coen 'wouldn't know where to start' if they moved to direct a TV series (Getty Images)

Their hit 1995 movie Fargo may have been adapted for a recent small screen series starring Martin Freeman, but the Coen brothers have revealed that they lack any desire to ‘do a Woody Allen’ and dip their Oscar-winning toes into television.

Despite modern times being widely hailed as a ‘Golden Age’ for TV and many actors signing up for series such as House of Cards and Game of Thrones, the filmmaking duo are simply “not very interested”.

“We’re perfectly happy with it, we have no problem with it, it just feels divorced from our film somehow,” Joel told Radio Times when asked for his thoughts on the Fargo remake.

“Here’s the thing. We work short. Our longest movie is two hours two minutes (2008’s No Country for Old Men). So six hours, or 56 hours, episode after episode, it’s just not how we think about stories. I mean, after two hours with a character we feel we’re pretty much done with them.”

Ethan also contemplated the idea of moving into television, only to find it similarly distasteful. “Would it be interesting to do something like that at some point? I don’t even know where you’d start, frankly,” he said.

So that’s that then, the Coen brothers’ marriage to the silver screen is as solid as ever and TV’s seductive charms will have to search elsewhere for a new target.

Read the full interview with Joel and Ethan Coen in the new issue of Radio Times, on sale from Tuesday 23 February