Legion creator Noah Hawley has been chatting about his scrapped Alien TV series…

Legion and Fargo mastermind Noah Hawley has offered more information on his Alien TV series, which he says is no longer happening. Hawley was speaking to The Observer about some of his lingering and lost past projects at the time, including his new Star Trek movie for Paramount, and his Doctor Doom movie, which was ultimately swept off the table when Marvel acquired Fox last year.

“Alien is on some level the complete opposite of Star Trek,” Hawley explained of his proposed TV show. “It’s sort of about humanity at its worst. There’s this moment in the second film when Sigourney says, ‘I don’t know which species is worse. At least they don’t screw each other over for a percentage.’ If you look at what Aliens tends to be, it’s usually a trapped story – trapped in a ship, trapped in a prison, etc. And because the Alien has this life cycle to it, where it goes from egg, to chestburster, to xenomorph, there becomes a certain routine to it.

“I thought it would be interesting if you could expand. If you’re going to make something for television, you’ve got 10 hours let’s say. Even if you have a lot of action, like two hours, then you’re still going to have eight hours left. So what is the show about? That’s what I tried to talk to them about. As I did with Legion, the exercise is: Let’s take the superhero stuff out of the show and see if it’s still a great show. What’s the show about? 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!’”

We’ll never know if the Alien series would have been any good, but Hawley has certainly proved to be a dab hand at creating unique TV shows in the past.