Appointment Viewing: The shows you’ll always want to pencil in on your calendar and unpack in your group chat.
Photo-Illustration: by The Cut; Photo: Patrick Brown/FX
Scrolling through 12 streaming platforms but still can’t find something to watch? You’re not alone. Our television columnist Michel Ghanem, a.k.a. @tvscholar, watches over 160 seasons of television each year, and he is here for you. Perhaps you’re in the mood for a hidden gem that’s sitting undiscovered on a streamer or a series with mysteries so tantalizing we can’t stop thinking about them. It’s all about carving out time for the shows that are actually worth it — your “Appointment Viewing.” Fire up that group chat, because we’ve got some unpacking to do.
The last few months have brought us television perfect for the sun-soaked months of summer: Netflix’s slow-burn love story Forever, Lena Dunham’s Netflix rom-com Too Much, and FX’s hangout comedy Adults. But it’s August now, so let’s get serious. Spooky season is but a few weeks away, and we’re kicking it off early with Noah Hawley’s Alien: Earth crash-landing on FX and Hulu.
Alien: Earth will jolt you out of your smooth-brain summer-TV watching (looking at you, Hunting Wives) — and trust me, it’s not for the faint of heart. The new FX sci-fi series takes the original film’s tagline — “In space, no one can hear you scream” — and adds way more guts and blood than one would ever ask for, combining that satisfying homage to Alien with nuanced ideas about human consciousness in synthetic bodies. Luckily, with Noah Hawley (known for the Fargo series and Legion) at the helm, Alien: Earth is a terrifying, engaging, and well-paced eight-episode story that feels right at home in the extended Alien universe, a year after Alien: Romulus breathed new life into the franchise.
The series begins with the deep-space research vessel Maginot crash-landing on New Siam, Earth. We get bits and pieces of what happened in nicely edited flashbacks: A Xenomorph loose on board makes quick work of a crew of scientists, and they lose control of the vessel. On a nearby island, a research compound owned by Boy Kavalier (Samuel Blenkin), “the youngest trillionaire ever” and the CEO of Prodigy Corporation, is experimenting with transferring the human consciousness of terminally ill children into robots with adult bodies. The first of the models is Wendy (Sydney Chandler), the de facto leader of the additional five child robots who come next.
The prototypes are led by their mentor, Kirsh (Timothy Olyphant), and the team is sent to investigate the crash-landed ship. The year is 2120, and at this point in Earth’s history, five corporations control the planet. Since the Maginot, owned by Weyland-Yutani (a corporation much explored in the Alien films), lands in Prodigy territory, Prodigy now considers the ship — and its spooky zoo of alien species — its property. Chaos and mad-scientist decisions ensue when all of these creatures are brought back to the island to be studied, and Weyland-Yutani deploys the lone survivor of the crash, the cyborg Morrow (Babou Ceesay), to retrieve its priceless creatures by any means necessary.
I won’t mince words: This show is gruesome, which is a considerable achievement in a franchise made up of half a dozen films about more or less the same thing. But there are so many images I can’t get out of my head, specifically related to eyeballs and, naturally, chests bursting open. If you can handle some blood-curdling visuals and masterful tension-building, you’re in for a treat, and these frights won’t be a total surprise to anyone who has watched the 1979 original Alien film. In the first installment of the franchise, Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) fights to survive as a Xenomorph picks off the crew of a commercial vessel one by one. That film focused on the solo Xenomorph; Alien: Earth introduces a handful of new species, each with their own spooky eccentricities and some more intelligent than others. Sure, it will always make my skin crawl to watch a Xenomorph egg “impregnate” its human host, but the new monsters make for a more chaotic domino effect leading up to the inevitable chaos of being unable to contain them.
The creepy-crawlies of Alien: Earth are satisfying to watch, but it’s the springboard to a broader exploration of synthetic identity that Hawley and his writers seem interested in here. Rather than the sprawling, globe-trotting adventure the title seems to suggest, we zoom in on the lives of the various synths, cyborgs, and hybrids that are defined in the pilot’s opening text frame. Aspects of these ideas have been explored on shows like Black Mirror and Raised by Wolves, but Alien: Earth places the three robot variants in conversation with one another by unpacking their agency and ownership in a philosophical, heady way. Who are the real aliens: the creatures from outer space or the ones we’re creating at home?
At times, these more character-centric episodes can feel considerably slower in pace than the heart-pumping pilot and the exhilarating fifth episode, which explores what really happens aboard the Maginot (both written and directed by Hawley himself). But these bigger stakes showcase the advantages of this iteration of Alien’s story being told in an episodic format instead of in another film — particularly when it comes to Wendy’s relationship with her brother, CJ (Alex Lawther), who doesn’t recognize her new synthetic form but feels protective of her nonetheless. Between all of these very Alien threads, there’s still room for a bit of Hawley’s whimsy, like the ’90s rock needle drops that punctuate each episode and the clumsy naïveté of these children in robot bodies entrusted with very adult tasks. Overall, Alien: Earth is sure to stand out as one of the most well-produced science-fiction series of this decade.
The first two episodes of Alien: Earth premiere on FX and Hulu on Tuesday, August 12, at 8 p.m. ET. Episodes will air weekly after that until the finale on September 23.
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