Noah Hawley is known for his hit FX series Legion, but it was primarily considered too strange and aimless in some critic’s eyes. But Hawley knows the criticisms, so he is taking a more solid approach in the future with his very own Alien series coming to FX.
Speaking to Collider, Hawley spills the details on handling the long-term story, and it seems there are plans for quite the Alien TV journey.
Hawley compares this process to Legion and how he knows planning is critical. He notes, “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. 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,” Hawley adds. “That’s where we ended up not pitching them having a bible or pitching them blow-by-blow, but saying, ‘Big picture: this is the first movement, this is the second movement, and we’re ultimately going here.'”
One of the best takeaways from this is that Hawley and FX know not to overstay their welcome: “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… It’s just better if the story itself can drive how long it is. We want quality, not quantity.”
SEE ALSO: Noah Hawley’s Alien series will ignore the events of Prometheus and Alien: Covenant
Timothy Olyphant, Sydney Chandler, Alex Lawther, Samuel Blenkin, Essie Davis, Adarsh Gourav, Kit Young, and David Rysdahl will star in the series, which is being produced by 209th Television and Ridley Scott’s Scott Free for FX on Hulu.
