Alien TV series to follow the original and surprising tone of the first two movies

We recently learned that Noah Hawley’s Alien TV series would start shooting next year. The Fargo creator has turned in all his scripts for the upcoming series, and FX chairman John Landgraf shared a few more details while speaking with THR.

John Landgraf was asked if Weylan-Yutani would play a big part in the Alien TV series, and while the mysterious corporation is involved, Landgraf said a new corporation would be featured. “The Alien cinematic universe is that it’s a world where that’s sort of dominated by large corporate entities, and Weylan-Yutani has been an important component of the movies,” Landgraf said. “There are references to that corporation in this show. But it actually takes place in the territory of a different corporation that Noah invented.” Landgraf went on to compare the series to the first two Alien movies.

I’m a big fan of Alien and Aliens, and I remember watching both of them in the theater and how shockingly original and surprising each of them was in its own way. And so, similar to his approach to Fargo, Noah decided not to take Ripley or any character from Alien — except perhaps the xenomorph itself — but go back and figure out what made the franchise so great and so durable in the first place and see if he could find an experience that felt like walking into a theater and seeing one of those first two movies, where you get caught off-guard. That’s all I can say at this point, though.

Ridley Scott’s Alien and James Cameron’s Aliens are clearly the most popular and successful installments of the long-running franchise. They’ve also served as an inspiration for nearly every movie in the series, but while it sounds like Noah Hawley will certainly use those films as an influence, he’s aiming to be just as different from them as Aliens was from Alien. I look forward to seeing what he has cooked up.

As John Landgraf mentioned, the TV series won’t include any familiar franchise characters aside from the xenomorph. It will take place on Earth around 70 years in the future, and Noah Hawley has previously teased that it will open up the stakes from the typical “trapped” storylines. “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.”

What are you hoping to see from the Alien TV series?