Noah Hawley’s track record of bold, unconventional TV reinventions of famed cinematic properties is about to get even more robust, as Variety reports that the Fargo and Legion creator has just formally signed on to make an Alien TV show for FX. Franchise launcher Ridley Scott is also in talks to hop aboard as an executive producer on the series, which was announced today as part of Disney’s big ol’ investors call to tout its just-expanded slate of products across all its TV brands.
This isn’t Hawley’s first space-based project, mind you; he previously directed the space drama Lucy In The Sky, and was working for a time on one of the many Star Trek movie reboot ideas that have been floating around for the last half-decade or so. Now he’s set his sights on a universe where astronauts actually need to wear diapers as often as they can, because if we saw a Xenomorph come crawling out of an airshaft, we’d probably shit ourselves, too.
Details about the series are extremely sparse at present, but it’ll apparently take place largely on Earth. (Which suggests either the possibility of a massive containment breach, or that the film is in the continuity of Alien: Resurrection, which, in either case: Uh-oh.) The show promises to blend “both the timeless horror of the first Alien film with the non-stop action of the second,” which, yes, does sound like it would be very cool if it did in fact happen.
Hawley’s reportedly been sniffing around Scott’s sci-fi-horror playground for a few years now; per Variety, Fox turned down plans for a show very much like this one last year, before its merger with Disney finished going through. The Weyland-Yutani of digital entertainment/largely shuttered theme parks has had a very good track record of transforming its film brands into TV shows of late, though, so it’s not wholly surprising that they’d brush off Hawley’s pitch and see what it can do at FX.