There's no denying that Noah Hawley is talented, but he's had a lot of bad luck in Hollywood. His Star Trek movie is on hold as Paramount Pictures looks to figure out where to take the franchise next (it's rumoured to revolve around a virus which is too similar to COVID-19), while both his Doctor Doom movie and an Alien TV series planned for FX were seemingly victims of the Fox/Disney merger.
It was in March 2019 we first heard the Legion showrunner had pitched a show set in the Alien Universe, and in an interview with The Observer, Hawley shared what he had planned for a series it was reported would focus more on the people who inhabit a world with Xenomorphs.
"Alien is on some level the complete opposite of Star Trek. It's sort of about humanity at its worst," Hawley said. "There's this moment in the second film when Sigourney says, 'I don't know which species is worse. At least they don't screw each other over for a percentage.' If you look at what Aliens tends to be, it's usually a trapped story -- trapped in a ship, trapped in a prison, etc.
"And because the Alien has this life cycle to it, where it goes from egg, to chestburster, to xenomorph, there becomes a certain routine to it."
"I thought it would be interesting if you could expand. If you're going to make something for television, you've got 10 hours let's say," he continued. "Even if you have a lot of action, like two hours, then you're still going to have eight hours left. So what is the show about? That's what I tried to talk to them about. As I did with Legion, the exercise is: Let's take the superhero stuff out of the show and see if it's still a great show.
"What's the show about? Let's take the Alien out of the show. What's the show about? What are the themes, who are the characters and what is the human drama? Then we drop the aliens back in and we go, 'This is great. Not only is there great human drama, but there's aliens!'"
That certainly sounds like a strong approach to the franchise, and much better what Ridley Scott has done in recent years by heading into the past to try and tell the origin story of the Xenomorphs.
There have been conflicting reports about what Disney's Fox now has planned for Alien, though Scott has hinted that he's working on another instalment. It would be pretty nuts to leave the series on the shelf, though, and Disney would be wise to at least consider bringing Xenomorps to the small screen!