There's a huge amount of excitement for FX's upcoming Alien TV series, particularly with Noah Hawley at the helm. After all, he's proven himself a powerhouse talent in the television realm, spearheading hits like Fargo and Legion.
Very little has been revealed about the show, though we do know it will be set on Earth in the not-too-distant future.
Talking at the Austin Film Festival (via Slash Film), Hawley elaborated on his decision to bring the Xenomorphs to our planet and revealed one key moment in the big screen franchise which informed his approach to telling this story.
"Look, a two-hour movie, you can set it up and then it's just about, 'Are they going to survive?' But if you're making a series, 'Are they going to survive?', you can't sustain it," he says of changing how we typically think of Alien to make it fit into an episodic format. "Even if you have 60% of the best action-horror on television, you still have 40% of 'What are we talking about?'"
"I had some conversations early on with Peter Rice, who used to run all of television at Fox and then the first couple of years at Disney, where it was like, 'The thing with Alien is, it's always trapped in a spaceship, trapped in a prison. What if it wasn't that?'"
"What is this moment on Earth, technology-wise? And where are we?" Hawkey said of bringing the iconic aliens to Earth. "And the question science-fiction always tends to ask is, does humanity deserve to survive? So that seems like a really interesting question to continue to explore."
It's a really interesting point and a crew of heroes being killed one after the other for the duration of an entire series, while a fun-sounding premise on paper, doesn't sound sustainable for a TV show.
As for the Alien moment which is driving his vision, Hawley pointed to the moment when Ian Holm's Ash is revealed to be an android.
He'd add, "And then it always mimics the life cycle of the creature, right? Which is egg, slow, Facehugger, starts to get faster - you know what I mean? And of course, that's great for a horror movie to build that way. So I found a way to kind of innovate around that structure and play with it."
The Alien franchise has been very hit-and-miss in recent years, so we're hoping that both this and Fede Álvarez's movie, Alien: Romulus, put it back on the right - and suitably horrifying - track.
Stay tuned for updates.