The “dangerous” TV show that inspired Noah Hawley’s career: “The series was a revelation”
With the release of Alien: Earth, acclaimed TV writer and novelist Noah Hawley’s career is poised to go stratospheric.
Creating a television series based on the Alien franchise was always going to boast a certain amount of built-in interest. After all, regardless of how you feel about many of the sequels, few would argue that Ridley Scott’s Alien and James Cameron’s Aliens are two of the greatest sci-fi films of all time. The slavering, acid-blood-dripping Xenomorph is also one of the most iconic movie monsters in history, so the prospect of seeing it on TV is undeniably intriguing, in and of itself.
Anyone who has kept up with Hawley’s oeuvre across his previous two shows will know that Alien: Earth is far from the first time he’s applied his particular oddball genius to a known property, turning it into something much more than the sum of its parts in the process. He is the man behind the acclaimed Fargo TV show, which tells a different story set in the Coen brothers’ quirkily folksy yet darkly sinister Midwest in each season, and Legion, just about the weirdest, most avant-garde show to ever be associated with a major IP (X-Men).
In a Hawley show, established tropes are regularly turned on their heads, and there are wild swings in tone that simply shouldn’t work, yet somehow do. His stories always teeter on the edge of a tonal tightrope, never quite tipping over into oblivion, and emerging on the other side as something worthy of discussion, interpretation, and dissection.
Interestingly, though, Hawley would be the first to admit that he isn’t the first TV creator to utilise this left-of-centre approach to material that seems straightforward on the surface. In fact, he can trace his subversive style back to a “dangerous” show he watched in his early 20s that opened his mind to what can truly be accomplished in TV, if a creator is afforded the time and space to push boundaries.
“Nobody expected Twin Peaks,” Hawley said during a 2017 interview. “In 1990, networks didn’t take risks on unconventional filmmakers like David Lynch. For me…the series was a revelation. On the surface, it seems to be just another show about a dead girl. A logger finds the homecoming queen’s corpse. The police show up. An FBI investigator is called in. It even looks like your average series. Except it is different.”
As Hawley watched Lynch’s seminal mystery, which over the years has influenced such cultural touchstones as The X-Files, Lost, and even The Sopranos, he realised that Twin Peaks wasn’t subversive because it had a dark tone and frightening subject matter. It was its beautiful oddness that made it different from everything else, and therefore impossible to look away from. The show could vacillate from serious drama to horror to comedy at the drop of a hat, and that always kept the viewer off-balance, grasping at mist.
“These tonal shifts are so abrupt that they are disorienting,” Hawley explained. “They make it harder for the viewer to pin down how he or she is supposed to feel about the story, because some elements are totally horrific, some are so dramatic, and some are completely absurd, and it’s never predictable what’s going to come when.”
When trying to describe Lynch’s off-kilter tone, Hawley settled on the word “uncanny”, and this uncanniness is precisely what he has endeavoured to apply to his career ever since. To him, an uncanny tone emerges when something we are familiar with behaves in an unfamiliar way, such as when a house is haunted. It’s a surrounding we know well, our home, but something inexplicable has entered our frame of reference, and that gets under the skin.
According to Hawley, this kind of uncanny happening in a story makes an audience think, “This shouldn’t be doing what it is, and I don’t know what to do about it, and now the hair on the back of my neck is standing up”, and he’d be lying if he didn’t admit Twin Peaks opened his eyes to it in the first place, as it did for a lot of us.
