Noah Hawley's work on TV shows like Fargo and Legion has proven to be unmissable, so it's hardly surprising to see such a great deal of hype surrounding his plans for an Alien TV series on FX. Very little has been revealed about the project, though shooting started shortly before last year's WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes brought Hollywood to a standstill.
Work is expected to resume imminently (if it hasn't already), and Hawley has already assembled an impressive cast which includes names like Timothy Olyphant, Essie Davis, Alex Lawther, and Sydney Chandler.
Talking to Collider (via SFFGazette.com), Hawley revealed he was informed by FX fairly early on that the cable network wanted multiple seasons, meaning he's been able to plan out a story with a definitive ending the show will build towards. "I think that endings are what gives a story meaning, and so you should never start a story without some sense of where it's going because then you can really build that meaning into it," he explains.
"With Legion, I had what felt like a three-act structure to it that I didn't know if that would be three seasons or five seasons, or whatever it was, but I sort of knew what a beginning, middle, and end was. And here, similarly, I knew that their desire was for a recurring series, not a limited series, and I had an idea that I was excited about, that I could see the escalation of it from one year to another."
"That's where we ended up not pitching them having a bible or pitching them blow-by-blow," Hawley continued, "but saying, 'Big picture: this is the first movement, this is the second movement, and we're ultimately going here.'"
Explaining that he's taking a "quality, not quantity" approach to telling this Alien story, the prolific filmmaker added, "Obviously, they trust me after all these years, and the writing was on the page for the first year. So, in success, you tell the story and tell the story until the story is done. They're very good at that at FX, of not wanting you to milk something that feels like it's over."
With Disney now in control of the Alien franchise, multiple projects are in the works including a new movie, Alien: Romulus, which is directed by Fede Alvarez and will be released in theaters next August.
Earlier this month, Hawley confirmed he's had conversations with Sir Ridley Scott and that his upcoming TV series will largely ignore the events of Prometheus and Alien: Covenant in order to stand on its own two feet as a prequel to the original 1979 movie.
FX's Alien doesn't currently have a confirmed release date.