Alien: Earth has burst on to streaming with critics praising the show and audiences racing to stream the opening episodes.
Disney have revealed that the debut pair of episodes raked in 9.2 million global viewers across FX and Hulu in the US and Disney+ internationally, making it the most-watched show last week across two of the best streaming services.
It’s worth taking the above figure with a slight pinch of salt, however, with Disney using hours watched divided by titles’ runtime as the means to measure viewers, not simply eyes on the screen. Even so, it’s an impressive number and up there with Marvel and Star Wars content on Disney+.
But strong viewership is only a part of the Xenemorph spin-off’s success, with the show also earning a 96% rating on Rotten Tomatoes from the critics, making it one of the best Hulu shows around right now. If you’re yet to catch up, you can get a taste of what all the fuss is about from the trailer below.
Alien: Earth comes from showrunner Noah Hawley, who has previously worked with FX to bring Fargo and X-Men (Legion) to the small screen and marks the franchise’s first foray into TV after a storied history.
Debuting with Ridley Scott’s space slasher Alien in 1979, the film was followed up by James Cameron’s more action oriented Aliens in 1986. While the initial two installments would be at home on any GOAT list, David Fincher’s studio-meddled Alien 3 and the bizarre Alien: Resurrection from Jean-Pierre Jeunet were less successful. After two crossovers with the Predator franchise failed to reignite interest, Scott returned to the series with Prometheus and Alien: Covenant in the 2010s, delivering two esoteric sci-fis about the nature of humanity and creation that felt at odds with what had come before. Alien: Romulus hit theatres last year, serving as a sequel to the original film, somewhat righting the ship with the sort of blood-soaked horror you’d expect from director Fede Alvarez.
Hawley’s latest installment follows Wendy (Sydney Chandler), a humanoid robot now the host of the consciousness of a terminally ill child. When Weyland-Yutani’s deep space research vessel crash lands in territory controlled by Prodigy, Wendy’s ‘owners,’ she and her rag-tag group of fellow hybrids set out on a mission to investigate, unaware of the deadly cargo on board.
In its opening episodes Alien: Earth feels like a show inspired by everything that’s come before, with the tension of Alien, the corporate espionage and military presence of Aliens, the philosophizing of Prometheus and the Xenemorph-induced bloodshed of Romulus. There’s even a little bit of Scott’s Blade Runner thrown in for good measure.
And it’s a formula that works based on the show’s excellent Rotten Tomatoes score, with Financial Times calling it “The best Alien installment since 1986 (Cameron’s Aliens”), while The Guardian praised the show’s “bristling, bewildering, overpoweringly confident aura.” Empire, meanwhile, called Alien: Earth “a rare prequel that manages to enrich its source material.”
The first three installments of Alien: Earth can be streamed on Hulu and Disney+ right now, with the rest of the series mostly coming out each week… mostly.
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