Alien TV Series Showrunner Hints at Multi-Season Plan for Prequel

The current landscape of prestige TV series means we don't always know the difference between a limited series and an ongoing storyline, and while we know we can expect one season of storytelling from Noah Hawley's upcoming Alien program, the showrunner recently addressed how he's approaching the overall length of the story. The filmmaker compared his approach to the project to his approach to the Marvel series Legion, which ran for three seasons, so while he might not have explicitly claimed the Alien show will have a similar length, he did break down how he and his team conceived of the material.

"There's definitely a place that I'm going, which I had with Legion, also. I just don't necessarily know how long it's gonna take me to get there, and on some level, I don't want to know too much," Hawley recalled to Collider. "Once you remove the play and the potential and the imagination, that's why I've stopped outlining anything. First of all, no one ever said, 'That's the best outline I ever read.' And second of all, it's just a different part of your brain, honestly. It's a different part of your brain that thinks about story that way versus the part of your brain that is writing the story. What we do is we get the writers in a room and we've got the whiteboards and we start big picture." 

He continued, "We start to write stuff in, like 'Episode 5, this might happen.' We get a loose structure to it and a sense of, 'All right, this is the episode where this needs to happen.' And then, the writing process allows more discovery and allows the characters to live on the page in a way that doesn't stifle the creativity. That said, in order to make things feel random and have coincidence and those real-life elements that we have, you do have to plan that pretty profoundly, but within that, I like to leave room to discover."

In this regard, it doesn't sound like the project will embrace an anthology premise like Hawley's Fargo, which has allowed multiple disconnected stories to be told in that world. With the project likely to have a relatively large budget, due to its sci-fi themes, the length of the series will likely be dependent upon how popular it is and whether FX opts to pursue the costly endeavor.

Stay tuned for updates on the Alien TV series.

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