FX chairman John Landgraf is having a very good day, with the programmer scoring 93 nominations at the 76th Emmy Awards. He spoke with Variety about FX’s good fortune and dropped a few details about some upcoming shows, including the possible title of Noah Hawley’s Alien TV series.
“Noah is deep in work on Season 1 of ‘Alien: Earth’ right now,” Landgraf said. “We’re in post-production, and we are talking to him and watching cuts every week.“
Landgraf continued, saying he’s very optimistic about the series and hopes Hawley will write at least two seasons before returning to Fargo season 6: “We’re pretty bullish on ‘Alien: Earth’ and we’ve told him that assuming, as we hope, ‘Alien: Earth’ is a returning television series, we want him to focus on on at least writing two seasons of it before returning to a possible sixth season of ‘Fargo.’“
Sydney Chandler, who stars in the Alien TV series as Wendy, recently revealed that she has finished shooting the series. Her character is said to be a hybrid meta-human with the brain and consciousness of a child but the body of an adult. The series also stars Essie Davis, Alex Lawther, Kit Young, Adarsh Gourav, Timothy Olyphant, and more.
Noah Hawley has teased that the series will open up the typically confined stakes of the franchise. “The alien stories are always trapped … trapped in a prison, trapped in a spaceship,” Hawley said. “I thought it would be interesting to open it up a little bit so that the stakes of ‘What happens if you can’t contain it?’ are more immediate.“
Corporations, including the infamous Weylan-Yutani, are also said to play a major role in the series. “In the movies, we have this Weyland-Yutani Corporation, which is clearly also developing artificial intelligence—but what if there are other companies trying to look at immortality in a different way, with cyborg enhancements or transhuman downloads?” Hawley said. “Which of those technologies is going to win? It’s ultimately a classic science fiction question: does humanity deserve to survive? As Sigourney Weaver said in that second movie, ‘I don’t know which species is worse. At least they don’t f*ck each other over for a percentage.’“
What do you think of Alien: Earth as the title of the TV series?