FX's LEGION Series Won't Include Iconic X-Men Characters

Fargo showrunner Noah Hawley received some good news this week when FX ordered his new comic book show Legion to series. The show will star Dan Stevens (above), Aubrey Plaza, Rachel Keller, Katie Aselton, and more, and in case you're unfamiliar with the premise, here's the synopsis:

Legion centers around David Haller (Stevens); 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.

In the comics, David is the son of X-Men leader Professor Xavier, but Hawley won't confirm that's the case in this show. In fact, it seems like this series is going to be quite unexpected, approaching the superhero TV genre from a different angle and avoiding the structure of its contemporaries. In a new interview with HitFix, Hawley says that this show will be a "standalone kind of thing." When asked if it took place in continuity with the X-Men movies, or in a world in which mutants have been public with their powers, he answered:

No, it's not. It's a little more of a fable in my mind. If you were to say, "Where is it, and when is it?," it's not exactly clear, I think. And a lot of it is because [David's] not exactly clear. It's the world as perceived subjectively on some level. The recent X-Men movies, starting with First Class, are rooted in a time period and a world and playing with history in interesting ways. This isn't doing that.

As for whether or not we'll see major X-Men characters pop up in the show, don't count on it:

Yeah, it's none of the iconic characters from the movie franchise. I think that's a strength on some level, because those characters come with rules. It's hard. You don't want to be handcuffed, when you're trying to explore something. The power of making something unpredictable is really an important thing to preserve.

Hawley also described his approach as "taking this character and set-up, and just playing with it," which means it probably won't end up resembling the comics too much. But since Hawley hasn't given me any real reason to doubt his skills yet (at least where Fargo is concerned), I'm willing to go with him on this ride and watch his unique take on this material.