"I Can't Believe It's Television": Sigourney Weaver Reacts to Alien: Earth

Sigourney Weaver just gave her verdict on Alien: Earth, Noah Hawley’s TV spin on the franchise she helped build. Short version: she’s in. And she sounds genuinely impressed.

Weaver’s take from TIFF

While promoting Dust Bunny at the Toronto International Film Festival, Weaver told Collider that the show she’s been watching is, yes, Alien: Earth. She went beyond a casual nod and actually broke down why it works for her.

"I can’t believe it’s television."

Here’s what she says the series is doing right:

• It isn’t obsessed with the Xenomorph itself; it’s not Alien-centric in the usual way.
• It is looking ahead a century and asking what kind of world we’ll be living in.
• The scope is bigger than a typical Alien project, tilting toward societal questions.
• It digs into themes like what will actually matter in the future and the role of greed.
• It takes long-running Alien ideas and blows them out to a larger scale.
• She thinks it’s beautifully cast and beautifully executed.

What the show is

Alien: Earth is the latest entry in the franchise, now on the small screen from Fargo creator Noah Hawley and FX. The premise: after a mystery spacecraft crashes on Earth, a young woman (Sydney Chandler) and a rough-and-ready team of tactical soldiers stumble onto something that puts them up against what might be the planet’s biggest threat. It’s a different angle for Alien, and Hawley clearly isn’t shy about world-building.

Early reaction: big swing, promising, not a slam dunk yet

In his pilot review, Chris Bumbray called Alien: Earth a contender for the most ambitious TV series of the year. He points to top-tier production values and a budget that looks massive on screen, with FX very obviously trying to turn Alien into a prestige tentpole show in the vein of what Game of Thrones and The Last of Us did for HBO. He wasn’t fully sold out of the gate, but he sees the upside: the launch is promising, it’s just too soon to know if it can hold. Bumbray praises Hawley as a showrunner but calls this a big swing that, for now, leans heavily on scale and world-building instead of the human core that made Fargo so sticky. It doesn’t grab as instantly as The Last of Us pilot, but he’s curious to see where it goes.

So you’ve got Weaver, the face of Alien, thrilled by the scope, and early critics intrigued but cautious about the heart. If Hawley can weld those two halves together, this could be a legit evolution for the franchise — and not just another trip down the same air ducts.