Alien TV Series: Noah Hawley Confirms Talks With Ridley Scott About New Show

A new TV series set in the world of Alien is in the works from Noah Hawley, and the show is expected to return to production soon after it was put on hold during the WGA and SAG strikes. Hawley has talked about how the original Alien serves as a big inspiration for the new story. Previously, Alien director Ridley Scott criticized the new series, saying, “It’ll never be as good as the first one.” However, Scott is a producer on the new show, and Hawley revealed in a recent interview with The Business podcast (via The Playlist) that he has talked to Scott about bringing the series to life.

“The thing with Alien is that it’s not just a great monster movie; it’s the story of humanity trapped between its primordial, parasitic past and the A.I. future, and they’re both trying to kill us, so there’s nowhere to go,” Hawley explained. “So it’s really a story of: does humanity deserve to survive? Does humanity’s arrogance in thinking that we’re no longer food, and its arrogance in creating these A.I. beings who we think will do what we tell them, but ultimately might lose their minds- is there a way out?”

“Ridley and I have talked about this and many elements of the show, but I think for me, this perfect lifeform, as it was described in the first film, is the product of millions of years of evolution that created this creature that may have existed for a million years out there in space, and the idea that it was a bio-weapon created half an hour ago is inherently less useful to me,” Hawley continued. “In terms of the mythology and what’s scary about this monster.”

“There’s something about that doesn’t compute for me,” Hawley added about the style Scott used in the more recent Alien films like Prometheus. “I prefer the retrofuturism of the first two films, and so that’s the choice that I’ve made to embrace that. There are no holograms; the convenience of beautiful Apple store technology is not available to me.”

When and Where Does the Alien Series Take Place?

Hawley previously teased the show would be set on Earth in the future, and he recently appeared on a panel at the Austin Film Festival and spoke about the choice to set the series here (via /SlashFlm). 

“Look, a two-hour movie, you can set it up and then it’s just about, ‘Are they going to survive?’ But if you’re making a series, ‘Are they going to survive?’, you can’t sustain it. Even if you have 60% of the best action-horror on television, you still have 40% of ‘What are we talking about?’” Hawley explained. “I had some conversations early on with Peter Rice, who used to run all of television at Fox and then the first couple of years at Disney, where it was like, ‘The thing with Alien is, it’s always trapped in a spaceship, trapped in a prison. What if it wasn’t that?’”

He added of bringing xenomorphs to Earth, “What is this moment on Earth, technology-wise? And where are we? And the question science-fiction always tends to ask is, does humanity deserve to survive? So that seems like a really interesting question to continue to explore.”

Stay tuned for updates about the Alien TV series.