Alien: Earth isn’t just bringing the Xenomorph back—it’s taking the franchise into bold new territory: Television. Noah Hawley (Legion) explained his approach to reigniting the primal fear that made Ridley Scott’s original Alien so iconic. “The one feeling you can’t get back from watching the original Alien is the discovery of the life cycle of this creature—how it starts as an egg and ends up as a 10-foot-tall Xenomorph, and every step along the way is worse than the one before,” he said. “So the only way to create that feeling was to introduce new characters, and you don’t know how they breed or what they eat, so you can get back to that feeling of genetic revulsion that we all felt watching Alien for the first time.”

That creative gamble works exceptionally well with the format. Unlike a two-hour survival movie, Hawley now has eight episodes in Alien: Earth to stretch out the suspense. “Each hour has to build and have its horror elements,” he said. “But my feeling is that it really just has to work as a drama, and then all the genre elements can be built on top of that.” It’s not just about jumpscares—it’s about tension, unease, and dreading who might die next. “A television show has to be more than that. It has to be a character journey, thematically rich, and in which you really start to worry that I might kill some of these people—and I might. You’ll have to tune in and see.”

Set on Earth in the year 2120, the series drops us into a future ruled by five competing corporations: Prodigy, Weyland-Yutani, Lynch, Dynamic, and Threshold. But everything begins to unravel when Prodigy unveils a new hybrid—human consciousness fused into synthetic androids. Just as it seems like this tech will upend the power balance, a Weyland-Yutani ship crashes into Prodigy City. And if you’ve seen an Alien movie before, you know what usually comes crawling out of those.

Babou Ceesay plays a cyborg tasked with protecting the alien species at all costs. He’s more than a glorified bodyguard—he has a Swiss Army knife-like arm and spent over 60 years away from Earth. “He’s coming back to a planet where he’s essentially an iPhone 1 in an iPhone 20 world,” Ceesay joked.

Sydney Chandler stars as a new kind of lifeform. Wendy is a human-synthetic hybrid adult with the consciousness of a young girl, augmented with superhuman strength and speed. When asked how it felt to face the franchise’s most famous monster in person, she lit up: “I almost peed. I became a kid again. A Xenomorph was in my night terrors as a kid.”