Showrunner Noah Hawley Opens Up About the Prescient 'Alien: Earth'

One of the TV shows I am most excited about seeing is Alien: Earth, which debuts today on FX and Hulu. The show is helmed by Noah Hawley and is set to feature a mix of human and synthetic characters, which is a staple of the Alien universe.

The cast is led by Sydney Chandler, who will portray Wendy, a meta-human with the mind of a child and the body of an adult. She is joined by Timothy Olyphant, who plays Kirsh, a synth and mentor figure to Wendy.

The cast also includes Alex Lawther as a soldier named CJ, and Samuel Blenkin as Boy Kavalier, the CEO of the Prodigy Corporation. Essie Davis is set to play Dame Silvia, with Adarsh Gourav as a character named Slightly.

Rounding out the main characters are Kit Young as Tootles and David Rysdahl as Arthur.

The logline has me on the edge of my seat: "When a mysterious space vessel crash-lands on Earth, a young woman and a ragtag group of tactical soldiers make a fateful discovery that puts them face-to-face with the planet's greatest threat."

Noah Hawley is one of my favorite showrunners, and I have been obsessed with his reinvigoration of Fargo and his work with the X-Men on Legion.

He recently hosted an event in Austin, where IndieWire reported some of his comments on both the show and the world.

I want to dig into them today, so let's dive in.

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

Alien: Earth And Our Present

One of the things I think Hawley does sell is just sense the world around him and write about some of the most topical things into any genre.

He did that with every season of Fargo, which tackled all sorts of social and economic issues within the story.

And from what I have seen of Alien: Earth, it may tackle a lot of what we're dealing with in big tech now.

Hawley said of that idea, “I could not have predicted when I first started writing the show a few years back that we would be where we are now in terms of tech companies, etc.” Hawley said. “So it’s like if you try to hit the zeitgeist or if you try to avoid the zeitgeist, there’s kind of no way to game it in that way. So I know that one of the things that ‘Alien’ is, to me, it is a movie about class. You start the first movie with space truckers, and then the second movie [James Cameron’s ‘Aliens’] is about grunts. Paul Reiser is middle management at best, right? There’s this sense of class as a real issue, as a 1970s thing that came into it. So I wanted to bring that element into this as well. And it’s just because we’re on Earth, we are engaging with the top class and not just the bottom class.”

The Alien Timeline

We have seen lots of Alien movies, and the timeline of what happens when can get a bit confusing.

To Hawley's credit, he's not worrying too much about that and has just focused on the story.

“I think we’re telling a parallel story,” he said. “I’m not actively engaging with the films themselves in terms of who’s on the other end of the phone or that idea. So I’m not looking to connect it to those movies literally. I think it’s more taking the elements of original films and expanding them for my own purposes. And it’s sort of remarkable how little mythology there is to a franchise that’s six movies deep. … All we really know about the way humanity is organized is that it’s built around a corporation, the Weyland-Yutani Corporation. And so I just expanded that to more of a corporate power struggle.”

'Alien: Earth'Credit: FX

One of the big decisions in the series is that the movie Prometheus does not exist in this iteration. And neither does Alien: Covenant.

That was hard for Hawley to decide, but he had to go with his gut.

Hawley said, “I think that for me, other than the shark in ‘Jaws,’ this is the most iconic monster in all of film history. And I lived for whatever, 28 years of my life believing that this creature was the perfect organism that had evolved over millions of years,” he said. “And then Ridley made ‘Prometheus’ and engaged with another idea in terms of the origin of these creatures, that it wasn’t part of my DNA of what these movies were to me. And so I chose not to engage with that part of the story and to just sort of speak to the alien that I had encoded.”

Summing It All Up

All of these things are what make me excited to check this series out tonight, and to talk about it on this site for the upcoming weeks.

Hawley is an intuitive and exciting showrunner, and the story and characters look like something that will be fun to follow.

Let me know what you think in the comments.