Far Cry's Showrunner Calls Game Drama 'Irrelevant'

"When you play a video game, you only really move forward through the gameplay section, and then you have these cutscenes that you can skip, so when you go to adapt those games you have to be aware that makes the human drama kind of irrelevant to the storyline."

That's Noah Hawley, the showrunner behind the upcoming Far Cry TV series for FX, speaking to Deadline about his approach to adapting Ubisoft's open-world shooter franchise. He's the creator of the Fargo TV series, he ran Alien: Earth, and he's now steering Far Cry toward Hulu as part of FX's streaming deal. His credentials aren't in question. His understanding of video games might be.

Hawley confirmed that the show won't adapt any existing Far Cry game. No Vaas. No Pagan Min. No Antón Castillo. Instead, he wants to treat the franchise the way he treated the Coen Brothers' Fargo: take the spirit, ditch the specifics, build something new. "I'm not specifically adapting any of the games that they've put out," Hawley said. "I'm saying much as I did with the Coens or X-Men, or Alien, 'let me have a dialog with this franchise, because this is what I think a Far Cry story is.'"

The anthology angle makes sense for Far Cry. Every game already tells a standalone story in a new setting with a new villain. Hawley sees that as an invitation to place each potential season somewhere different, which is exactly how the games work. On paper, this is a smart read of the franchise's DNA. But then he kept talking.

"Death for a Show"

Hawley's argument boils down to this: because you can skip cutscenes in a video game, the narrative is functionally disposable. "That is death for a show," he said, referring to the idea of directly translating game stories to television.

I think this is a bad take, and I'm surprised it came from someone as sharp as Hawley. The logic collapses the moment you examine it. You can skip dialogue in a Blu-ray menu. You can fast-forward through every conversation scene in a prestige drama. The existence of a skip button doesn't make the content behind it meaningless. It means the medium gives players a choice. That's a feature, not a flaw.

Far Cry 3's Vaas Montenegro is one of the most quoted, most memed, most culturally sticky villains in gaming history. His "definition of insanity" monologue has been referenced in everything from Reddit threads to actual psychology lectures. Far Cry 4's Pagan Min was written with enough charisma that the game literally lets you skip the entire plot by waiting at a dinner table for him. Far Cry 6 cast Giancarlo Esposito and built an entire authoritarian regime around his performance, earning a 74% recommendation rate on OpenCritic. These aren't games where the story is wallpaper. The villains ARE the product.

To flatten all of that into "skippable cutscenes" suggests Hawley either hasn't played the games or played them with his thumb hovering over the skip button. Either way, it's a strange foundation for a pitch.

What makes this frustrating is that Hawley's actual creative instinct here isn't wrong. An original Far Cry story set in a new location with a new charismatic antagonist? That's exactly what the franchise does every time. He doesn't need to retell Vaas's arc beat for beat. Nobody was asking for that. But dismissing the source material's drama as irrelevant while simultaneously asking fans to trust your version of it is a weird needle to thread. HBO's The Last of Us proved that game narratives can translate almost scene-for-scene into prestige television. The Fallout show on Amazon proved you can build something original inside an existing world without insulting the games that inspired it. Both approaches worked because the people behind them clearly respected the source material, even when they diverged from it.

Hawley's framing doesn't communicate that respect. It communicates someone who sees games as mechanics delivery systems with some skippable fluff stapled on. And look, maybe the show will be fantastic. Hawley has earned the benefit of the doubt with Fargo alone. Rob Mac's involvement from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia adds another layer of creative talent. But the messaging here is doing the project no favours.

No casting has been announced yet, and there's no premiere date. The series was officially revealed in November 2025, and Hawley will direct the first two episodes in addition to serving as showrunner. Given that each season could theoretically stand alone with a new setting and villain, the anthology structure gives the show room to course-correct if the first season misses. Whether Hawley's vision connects with the audience that actually cares about Far Cry will depend entirely on execution, because right now, telling those fans their favourite stories were "irrelevant" is not exactly a rallying cry.