Mike Lowery
An “Alien” TV series? why HASN’T that been done yet!? seems like a surefire dead-set winner, right!?
Noah Hawley, the “Legion” and “Fargo” creator who has been circling all sorts of franchises in recent years, pitched FOX such a series that they could insert over at Hulu. When Fox was sold off to Walt Disney, the new brass had other ideas for “Alien” (I’m guessing film plans – if only because what’s been announced with “Predator” in recent weeks) and the idea went away.
Speaking to Deadline about the latest season of FX’s “Fargo”, Hawley said the pitch is now a couple of years old, suggesting there’s no shot in hell the “Alien” series will come to be now.
“I know that there’s an effort to reshuffle a lot of things post-Disney takeover and it was a conversation that I had a couple years back. And I have not in the last few weeks been having those conversations about it. But I know that like any studio that there’s a great desire to make the most of one’s library so I wouldn’t be surprised to see something like that.”
In a recent interview with Observer, Hawley said the series would’ve concentrated more on the humans as opposed to the aliens themselves.
“Alien is on some level the complete opposite of Stark Trek. It’s sort of about humanity at its worst,” Hawley tells the site. “There’s this moment in the second film when Sigourney says, ‘I don’t know which species is worse. At least they don’t screw each other over for a percentage.’ If you look at what Aliens tends to be, it’s usually a trapped story – trapped in a ship, trapped in a prison, etc. And because the Alien has this life cycle to it, where it goes from egg, to chestburster, to xenomorph, there becomes a certain routine to it.”
He continues, “I thought it would be interesting if you could expand. If you’re going to make something for television, you’ve got 10 hours let’s say. Even if you have a lot of action, like two hours, then you’re still going to have eight hours left. So what is the show about? That’s what I tried to talk to them about. As I did with Legion, the exercise is: Let’s take the superhero stuff out of the show and see if it’s still a great show. What’s the show about? Let’s take the Alien out of the show. What’s the show about? What are the themes, who are the characters and what is the human drama? Then we drop the Aliens back in and we go, ‘This is great. Not only is there great human drama, but there’s Aliens!’”
