New TV show Alien: Earth has hit a significant milestone for the sci-fi horror franchise: it’s the installment that’s been the best received by critics in nearly 40 years.
Ahead of its release next week, the show debuted to a score of 89% on Rotten Tomatoes today, based on 37 reviews. That’s the third-best score in the franchise after 1979’s Alien and 1986’s Aliens, which have scores of 93% and 94%, respectively (and if you’re going to come in third place to anyone, you can’t get more worthy competitors than Ridley Scott and James Cameron). By comparison, the last installment in the series, 2024’s Alien: Romulus, has a score of 80%.
Created by Fargo’s Noah Hawley, Alien: Earth is set two years before the events of the original Alien and follows Wendy (Sydney Chandler), a hybrid who volunteers to retrieve the mysterious cargo from an intergalactic vessel after it crash-lands on Earth. It’s the first installment in the franchise to be set on our own planet.
Our own four-star Alien: Earth review says the show is “bold, ambitious, and often brutally violent” and, despite its flaws, is “never less than ferociously entertaining.”
Rolling Stone writes, “As he did with Fargo, turning a classic and beloved movie into a long-running, award-winning anthology series, Hawley has taken a concept that has no business working for television and shaped it into something thrilling, strange, and surprising.”
Meanwhile, The Hollywood Reporter calls the show “a heady, sprawling, occasionally unwieldy but eventually thrilling epic about personhood, hubris and, of course, the primal pleasure of watching people get absolutely rocked by space monsters.”
“Nearly 50 years after Ridley Scott introduced the xenomorph, Alien has rarely felt this alive,” argues Paste Magazine.
Not everyone was so positive, though. “Unfortunately, Alien: Earth gets the balance wrong,” says the Seattle Times. “The prequel series […] spends too long setting up a story that only barely gets going by the time the eight-episode season comes to an end.”
You can make up your own mind when Alien: Earth premieres on August 12 on Hulu in the US and on August 13 on Disney Plus in the UK. For more, check out our guide to the other best new TV shows still to come in 2025.
