In the summer of 1979, a just-turned-12 Noah Hawley fancied the idea of seeing Ridley Scott’s new film Alien at his local movie theatre in New York. His parents took him to see Alan Arkin and Peter Falk’s unpredictable comedy The In-Laws instead. “That explains a lot about my writing,” says the showrunner known for his charismatic, high-calibre dramas with chaotic twists; see Fargo, the five-season series based on the Coen brothers’ film, and the X-Men show Legion. “But I did see it shortly after. And then the James Cameron movie [Aliens]. They’re arguably two of the greatest horror and action movies ever made.”
More than 45 years later, Hawley is making his own mark on the saga with Alien: Earth, the first television show to be set in Scott’s dystopian universe. He quips that it’s taken nearly that long to bring the eight-episode series—which stars relative newcomer Sydney Chandler in the lead role (her dad is the actor Kyle Chandler), alongside an ensemble that includes Timothy Olyphant and Alex Lawther—to fruition, thanks to Covid, the 2023 actors’ strike and a lengthy post-production process. He says it felt like “working on something that people will never see”. Nevertheless, it has landed.
Alien: Earth unfolds in 2120, two years before Sigourney Weaver’s Ellen Ripley first slayed (a xenomorph), though Hawley says he took an older historical period as inspiration. “The moment in time when we enter the story in my mind was an echo of around 1900, when you had Edison and Tesla and Westinghouse and they were all battling for who was going to control electricity,” Hawley says. “I thought, ‘Let’s talk about immortality and a battle between corporations’; whether it’s increments in cybertechnology, transhumanism or AI, what’s the next step for humanity? Whoever wins that race will control the universe.”
True to the show’s title, the events are happening not in a spaceship or an isolated colony as in previous chapters, but down here. Coming to Earth was an enticing prospect for Hawley, who says he was fascinated by how little we find out about the state of humanity in the original seven-film franchise (no, he doesn’t count the Noughties Predator crossovers). Of course, he couldn’t predict the planet’s exact fate a century from now, so he started with the grim guarantees: “It’s going to be hotter, it’s going to be wetter, and the billionaires will be trillionaires.”
A danger of heading home was that the series might lose the “trapped-in-a-prison quality” that brought such a sense of claustrophobic horror to the first two films. For Hawley, the environment matters little, as “so much of what’s horrifying about Alien is what’s happening inside of you. As creature horror goes, we still don’t have a better monster—it’s parasitic; it’s very penetrative. It’s really stuck with me all these years.”
At its core, Alien: Earth is about Hawley carrying out a mission to “recreate the feelings you had while watching Ridley’s movie and Cameron’s movie”. A transmission to that just-turned-12-year-old that it would all be worth the wait.
