'Alien: Earth' FX Share on Facebook Share on X Share to Flipboard Send an Email Show additional share options Share on LinkedIn Share on Pinterest Share on Reddit Share on Tumblr Share on Whats App Print the Article Post a Comment Logo text "Sorry," says Noah Hawley dryly as the lights abruptly pop back on. The Emmy-winning showrunner has just screened the first 15 minutes of his upcoming FX series Alien: Earth for a group of reporters. It's fair to say the room was pretty engrossed when the footage abruptly ended. The new series brings the 46-year-old Alien film saga to television for the first time and expands the franchise with a prequel set two years before the events in the original 1979 film. Alien: Earth tells the story of a space vessel that crash-lands on our planet and sets loose the collected samples of several different alien life forms (and not just familiar ones). A human-synthetic hybrid (Sydney Chandler) and a ragtag group of tactical soldiers race to contain the crisis. Related Stories TV 'Alien: Earth' Screens Blockbuster First Episode at Comic-Con TV New 'Alien: Earth' Trailer Reveals Monsters Gone Wild After Spaceship With Hybrid Life Forms Crashes For nearly an hour back in March, Hawley took questions from the media about the series, which tackles several big ideas ranging from AI to class struggles to tech company greed. Hawley also talked about the challenge of expanding the horror concept into an ongoing series - including a couple of lessons learned from HBO's Game of Thrones. Alien: Earth (trailer below) premieres Aug. 13 on FX. The show's origins and biggest challenge: "The biggest challenge is how do you take a monster movie - a two-hour survival story ... and turn that into something that can [run] for many years. It's a character that you can invest in emotionally and a larger structure that pulls the audience through. [I also] tried to figure out what the first two films [Alien and Aliens] made me feel and why. How can I create those feelings in an audience by telling a totally different story? The way that I thought about it originally was: Imagine that there have been six movies about the White Walkers and then they said, 'Make a television series out of that.' And they made Game of Thrones. The monsters are definitely a critical part of it. But what's the show about? If you go back and watch the pilot of Game of Thrones, it starts with the White Walkers. They exist and linger through the series. You can argue whether taking seven seasons to get to that confrontation was too long, but it's like what I did with Legion - take the superpowers out of it and what is the show? With [Alien: Earth], it has to be a great dramatic show. Then the monsters become this bonus that you get versus just doing monster action and horror. The first two Alien films have a lot of big ideas about humanity and and artificial intelligence and our primordial past that we can't seem to escape. So that's what went into it for me." How AI factors into the franchise and the new series: "When I wrote these scripts, there was no ChatGPT. What elevated [the original] Alien above a monster movie was that at a critical moment in the story, there's a twist where you realize there are two monsters in this movie - and one of them was [an android] created by people, while the other was just us running into [space] scorpions. So there's this idea of: Does humanity deserve to survive? If so, how are we going to survive? Is AI going to replace us? Can we amend our own bodies to extend our lives? The idea of placing this story at a moment like 1900 where you had Edison and Tesla and Westinghouse were all competing for who was going to control electricity seemed like a really interesting place to be." The show's lead character, the human-hybrid synthetic Wendy, who is a child placed in a grown-up android body: "Alien is, for me, a female franchise. The question 'Does humanity deserve to survive?' led me to a place where I thought, 'Well, who's more human than a child?' They don't know how to pretend they're not afraid. They're bad liars. The idea of watching this child grow up having to face all the problems of the adult world and the choices that they make ... there's that moment in Aliens, where, where Sigourney Weaver says, 'I don't know which species is worse, at least [the aliens] don't fuck each other over for a percentage.' This kid is going to have to discover what human morality is and that horror exists in many forms. In the show, it's not just body horror or creature horror; it's also the moral horror of what people do to each other. If Wendy is a human being in a synthetic body, she has a choice to make. Is she going to choose human or other?" How Alien and Aliens were both about the working class vs. the elite: "One of the things that Alien is to me is a movie about class. You start the first movie with space truckers, and then the second movie is [Marine] grunts. [Paul Reiser's character] is middle manageme