Progress continues on the Fox series Legion and a bit of news surfaced at the TCA this weekend about it from overall FX Networks president John Landgraf. With plans for it to air by the end of 2016, we learned that the series is going to be disconnected from the film X-Men universe and is essentially going to play like we see with the CW series in that the big tier characters simply don’t exist.
“It’s not in the continuity of those films in the sense the current X-Men films take place in a universe in which everybody on planet Earth is aware of the existence of mutants,” he said. “The series Legion takes place in a parallel universe, if you will, in which the US government is in the early days of being aware that something called mutants exist but the public is not. I wouldn’t foresee characters moving back and forth because they really are parallel universes.”
As for where things are in terms of characters and who they’ll be using:
“It’s still in process but I think at the moment they’re all new characters… But I’m not 100% sure thatll be the case by the time it airs.” As for how it’s developing, he said: “We’re quite well along. We’ve had a writing staff working. We’ve seen not only the pilot but several episodes and we’re well in process of casting. I would anticipate that Legion would go on the air some time in 2016, this year. We don’t tend to order series straight out the gate because I still really believe in the pilot process. We really think of it as a series. We’re already in active prep. We’re building sets, and our writers room has already been assembled. … The vast majority of things that we pilot do go forward to series. I’m pretty optimistic about Legion. The scripts are extraordinary.”
Noah Hawley wrote the pilot and serves as an executive producer with the film franchise’s director/producer Singer, producer Lauren Shuler Donner, writer/producer Simon Kinberg as well as Marvel TV’s Jeph Loeb and Jim Chory, John Cameron and Steve Blackman.
Plot concept: Since he was a teenager, David has struggled with mental illness. Diagnosed as schizophrenic, David has been in and out of psychiatric hospitals for years. But after a strange encounter with a fellow patient, he’s confronted with the possibility that the voices he hears and the visions he sees might be real.
[Source: IGN]
