FX's Alien showrunner says it's 'not a Ripley story,' will be about 'inequality'
Xenomorphs are coming to FX, and Legion and Fargo showrunner Noah Hawley is offering up some new details on what to expect with his next project, the Alien TV series.
First announced during that big Disney investors conference in December, the show will be the first story from the franchise set on earth. Hawley confirms in a recent interview with Vanity Fair that means "it's not a Ripley story."
Sigourney Weaver's sci-fi horror heroine will forever be an icon, but the executive producer says those films from directors Ridley Scott, James Cameron, and David Fincher have "been told pretty perfectly" and he doesn't "want to mess with it." His show is, "on some level," "about inequality," he says.
"One of the things that I love about the first movie is how '70s a movie it is, and how it's really this blue collar space-trucker world in which Yaphet Kotto and Harry Dean Stanton are basically Waiting for Godot," Hawley explains. "They're like Samuel Beckett characters, ordered to go to a place by a faceless nameless corporation. The second movie is such an '80s movie, but it's still about grunts. Paul Reiser is middle management at best. So, it is the story of the people you send to do the dirty work."
"In mine," he adds, "you're also going to see the people who are sending them. So, you will see what happens when the inequality we're struggling with now isn't resolved. If we as a society can't figure out how to prop each other up and spread the wealth, then what's going to happen to us? There's that great Sigourney Weaver line to Paul Reiser where she says, 'I don't know which species is worse. At least they don't f--- each other over for a percentage.'"
Now we know what Hawley was talking about when he mentioned to The Observer last September, "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!'"
It's about time the corporate devils who don't want to get their hands dirty are faced with man-eating, face-hugging xenomorphs.
Related content:
