The new season of Fargo is so handsome, convoluted, and stately in its pace that it almost feels as if writer-director Noah Hawley were taking the series on a long detour. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. The works that inspired the series — both the landmark 1995 Coen brothers film of the same name and to a lesser extent their entire filmography — represented a kind of darkly hilarious Coen-Hawley mind-meld. Now with the new season, he’s headed into a Hawleyverse of interesting but somewhat ponderous dignity.

He’s even moved the show’s action from the icy prairies of Minnesota and the Dakota states to a mid-century Kansas City that looks not unlike the urban locales from Miller’s Crossing (1990), another Coen crime epic about warring criminal syndicates. Once again, purporting to be “a true story,” this season is set in 1950 and concerns the latest in a series of turf wars between the Italian mob run by the Fadda family and a black syndicate moving up from the Jim Crow South, run by Loy Cannon (Chris Rock with graying hair and a nicely dangerous glitter in his eye).

The title of the first episode, “Welcome to the Alternate Economy,” spells out a classic gangster trope on how those shut out of opportunity because of race, ethnicity, and/or immigrant status will be pushed toward criminal byways toward the “American Dream.”