In some ways, it’s pretty difficult to get excited about an X-Men TV show revolving around Legion. After all, of all the X-Men characters fans would like to see get some small screen attention, the deranged son of Professor X probably wouldn’t have been too near the top in a list of their suggestions.
However, Noah Hawley’s involvement makes it a lot easier to look forward to this one becoming a reality following his incredible work on Fargo. Of course, there’s been a lot of speculation about how Marvel and Fox actually reached a deal to make these X-Men TV shows happen, and the producer offered some insight into that during a recent interview.
“Fox has rights to make movies and sort of tacitly the rights to do TV, but they’ve never done it before so they had to work out all the details. FX Productions is the lead studio. My relationship is with FX primarily, and I’m just getting to know Jeph Loeb and the people at Marvel, and I think it’s going to be collaboration in the best sense.”
It’s sounding less and less likely that Marvel regained those Fantastic Four rights as part of this deal, eh? Regardless, Hawley then went on to describe what it is about Legion that grabbed his attention:
“What I really like about him is, here’s a character who is schizophrenic on some level, a character struggling with mental illness. Is he crazy or does he have these powers? The answer is, kind of both. I’m a big believer that the structure of a story should reflect the content of the story. And so I liked the idea that if you have a character that doesn’t know what’s real and what’s not real, that is also the audience’s journey.”
Some interesting material is clearly going to be addressed in the series then, but what of the character’s relationship to Professor X? Are we going to see some major ties to the world of the X-Men? That could be a challenge if Legion is set in the present day; the current X-Men movies haven’t explored that time period in this new timeline yet, though we will get a glimpse of it in Deadpool of course. Either way, it doesn’t sound like they’ll be too closely linked together:
“I don’t want to say too much more about it on that level, but certainly it’s not constructed as a back-door anything. It’s more just that there’s a story that I want to explore that has to fit into that larger universe, which is exciting.”
So, no major crossovers in that respect then, but what about between Legion and Hellfire?
“We certainly haven’t had any conversations about crossovers. I don’t know anything about it, but I think that one is more linearly taken out of the world of the movies. Ours has its own world to it.”
That makes sense considering the fact that Hellfire will be set in the 1960s, though it is a shame that Fox hasn’t come up with two shows which could crossover in some way, especially when you look at how much fun Arrow and The Flash have had with that.
Tell us, are you looking forward to seeing how these X-Men TV shows develop? Let us know your thoughts in the usual place.
