“Legion” and “Fargo” Creator Noah Hawley Explains the General Approach of His ‘Alien’ TV Series Pitch

As you may recall, it had been reported last year that Noah Hawley, creator of the “Legion” and “Fargo” television shows, had at some point in the recent past pitched Fox on a potential Alien TV series for Hulu, which was reportedly shot down because Fox (at the time, at least) was only interested in Alien as a feature film franchise. While the future of the franchise continues to hang in the balance, with Disney’s recent acquisition of Fox leading many to wonder if the franchise even has a future at all, Hawley dishes on his vision in a chat with Observer.

The general gist of Hawley’s pitch for an Alien television series is that he wanted to put the majority of the focus on the human characters rather than the Xenomorphs.

“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!’”

We can be pretty sure that the Alien franchise will some day return, but will it take the form of a TV series, a remake, or maybe even a sequel to Ridley Scott’s Alien: Covenant?

At this time, your guess is as good as ours.

source https://bloody-disgusting.com/tv/3633879/legion-fargo-creator-noah-hawley-explains-general-approach-alien-tv-series-pitch/