Legion: X-Men TV Series Gets New Promos

Here's your first look at the X-Men TV series, Legion!

Talk about going outside the comfort zone for your superhero TV shows. FX has ordered eight episodes of Legion, a series about an unstable young mutant. The extra cool thing about this? Fargo's Noah Hawley is the showrunner. It's also a co-production of FX Productions and Marvel Television.

Check out the new promos that FX just dropped. They're certainly...different.

“We’ve come to expect excellence from Noah Hawley and with Legion he has delivered another major creative achievement,” said FX President of Original Programming Nick Grad in a statement when the series order was announced. “Just as he did in reimagining Fargo, he is bringing an entirely new aesthetic and sensibility to the enormously popular and richly represented X-Men world. The pilot episode is stunning, driven by incredible performances from Dan Stevens, Aubrey Plaza, Jean Smart, Rachel Keller and the rest of the cast. We join our producing partners at Marvel in congratulating the creative team for what they’ve accomplished and are as excited as the fans for the premiere of Legion’s first season.”

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"Marvel Television is thrilled to not only have our first partnership with FX go to series, but working with the enormously talented Noah Hawley makes it even better," said Executive Producer Jeph Loeb. "From the first time we heard Noah's vision to his exceptional script and cast through the extraordinary filming of the pilot, we knew the series would be incredible."

Legion Trailer

The first trailer for Legion has arrived out of SDCC 2016. It's pretty explosive, too. Check it out:

Legion TV Story

Here's the official synopsis, courtesy of FX:

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.

What's not mentioned here is that David is the son of Charles Xavier and Moira MacTaggert. Well, at least he is in the comics. Whatever FX's Legion TV series connections to broader X-Men mythology, one thing is for sure: it won't have anything to do with the movies. Given the uncertain nature of the movie universe's continuity at the moment, that might not be the worst thing.

FX CEO John Landgraf spoke at the TCA Winter Tour (via SlashFilm) about where everything fits together:

“It’s not in the continuity of those films in the sense that the current X-Men films take place in a universe where everybody on planet earth is aware of the existence of mutants. Legion takes place in a parallel universe if you will where the government is aware mutants exist but the public is not. I wouldn’t see characters moving back and forth because they really are parallel universes.”

This one will have a rather different tone, though. Noah Hawley described it as "surreal and dreamlike" in a recent interview. We have more on that here.

Simon Kinberg told Collider in November that...

“I mean the thing that’s cool and that’s the hope in branching out to TV is that we can tell these X-Men stories in a slightly different way and even with a slightly different tone...So the TV shows give us an opportunity to go even further and certainly what I’m seeing on Legion with Noah and FX is an intent to do something completely original in the genre, in some ways to sort of blow up the paradigm of comic book or superhero stories and almost do our Breaking Bad of superhero stories."

Legion Premiere Date

FX hasn't set the premiere date yet, but expect it in "early 2017."

Legion TV Cast and Production

Bryan Singer is one of the executive producers on this one, along with fellow X-Men movie universe stewards Lauren Shuler Donner and Simon Kingberg. Marvel TV's Jeph Loeb and Jim Chory are also involved.

Dan Stevens (Downton Abbey), Rachel Keller (Fargo), Jean Smart (Fargo), Aubrey Plaza (Parks and Recreation), Jeremie Harris (A Walk Among the Tombstones), Amber Midthunder (Hell or High Water), Katie Aselton (The League) and Bill Irwin (Interstellar) star.