Noah Hawley is one busy showrunner. Besides helming the ultra-popular show Fargo for FX, he’s found time to do something else that’s seemingly incredibly time-consuming – he finished all the scripts for an upcoming series based on the legendary sci-fi franchise Alien.
FX CEO John Landgraf revealed the news at the Television Critics Association summer press tour, according to Collider. While we don’t have any specific plot details about the new show just yet, we do know that production will start on the show sometime next year.
In a recent interview, however, Hawley said that the show was moving along slowly due to “the scale of it.”
“Alien is a fascinating story because it’s not just a monster movie; it’s about how we’re trapped between the primordial past and the artificial intelligence of our future, where both trying to kill us.”
The show will be based on Earth and Hawley said it would illustrate how technology companies compete for fiscal and technological dominance.
“At this moment, I describe that as Edison versus Westinghouse versus Tesla. Someone’s going to monopolize electricity. We just don’t know which one it is. 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? Which of those technologies is going to win?”
The show was originally announced in 2020 and is expected to premiere on Hulu. The Alien franchise dates all the way back to the original theatrical release in 1979 with Sigourney Weaver playing the main character Ellen Ripley. James Cameron directed the classic sequel Aliens and David Fincher helmed Alien 3.
A fourth movie called Alien: Resurrection came out in 1997. There have been a number of offshoots and crossovers as well over the years.
Hawley recently told Vanity Fair that setting the show on earth lets him work with a broader palette than if it were humans confined in a closed space.
“The Alien stories are always trapped… Trapped in a prison, trapped in a spaceship. 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.”
The new show will also reportedly touch on another very human aspect – class equality. The aliens in the show will reportedly attack everyone indiscriminately, including the upper class and corporate class, and in a mirror of real life lower class marines are sent out to deal with the problem.
There’s no release date just on the show yet but we’ll let you know when something comes up.