The Alien franchise has given us a few great movies, and few bad ones too. There’s also been some terrific Alien comic book series over the years. But what we need is a TV series based on the Alien franchise. We will have to keep waiting because the one under consideration by 20th Century Fox was killed. But now we have some details about the show.
Back in 2018, rumors started to swirl in the entertainment business that an Alien TV series was being kicked around 20th Century Fox. Rumor was the studio was trying to decide if the series would go to one of their cable channels like FX, or to one of the streaming services.
It was speculated at the time that the series would focus more on human stories than relying on xenomorphs driving the narrative. Putting realistic xenomorphs in the series too frequently would absolutely drive up the cost for production. It was expected the series would either follow colonists or colonial marines, or maybe both.
Then talk of the Alien TV series dropped into a blackhole. Then in 2019, news surfaced that Stacey Snider, Chairman and CEO of 20th Century Fox before Disney’s acquisition, had been working against the Alien series going to FX for some unknown reason. It was then that a name got attached to the project: Noah Hawley.
NOAH HAWLEY PITCHES ALIEN TV SERIES
Hawley, the writer, director, and executive producer of hit shows like Fargo and Legion, was the one who originally pitched the Alien TV series to Fox.
More recently, Hawley has been doing the media circuit talking about the Star Trek movie he wrote and hoped to direct, among other things. He was also forthcoming about the Alien TV series he was working on. In a recent interview in Observer, Hawley opened up about where he was planning to take the series:
“Alien is on some level the complete opposite of Star Trek. It’s sort of about humanity at its worst. 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.”
Hawley continued, “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!’”
Unfortunately for fans of the Alien franchise, we’re going to have to wait longer for a TV series. After the merger of 20th Century and Disney, the project was apparently buried even deeper in development hell. With recent successes of other hard science fiction TV series like The Expanse and HBO Max’s Raised by Wolves, we may get an Alien TV series eventually.
