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postguiltypleasures · 8 months

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Thoughts on The X-Files as it turns 30 Years Old

I have not written much about The X-Files here because I have not revisited it in many years. The last time I rewatched any episodes was way back in 2015, after the revival was announced. I had no intention of watching the revival, but I wanted to see how the series had aged. My reactions were kind of mixed. I didn’t continue to rewatch it was that I didn’t feel the spark that I got from it watching during the original airing. The show’s influence is such that there has always been something regularly on air that has been doing what a contemporary version of TXF should do, and doing it without the show’s baggage. And these later shows have all been unique programs that stand on their own. Only now there really is one show that does that I watch that fits this description, Evil. Do to world changing circumstances, including the COVID pandemic and the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes, it does not air that regularly. So I find myself looking to who is posting about TXF now. What do they think? Do the things that made me not want to watch the revival bother them? How do they relate to the context in which it was made? How is that different for people who did watch it during the original run and bring hindsight vs. those who were too young or not born? What does any of this have to do with a potential reboot?

Much More Under the Cut

I remember TXF becoming uncool. It’s bizarre to me that it has any cultural presence because being disenchanted with it as it lost it’s cool was so painful. That said, I was a teenager at this time, so my emotions around it were stronger than they would be if I watched at another time of life. I am certain of this because of how much I hated the original series finale, and how I have been fine with a lot of controversial series finales since then.

Speaking of endings, these days discussions of television are too focused on ending. The idea that for most of the existence of television, shows were just supposed to go on until they became too expensive to produce and/or lost their audience seems to have vanished from people’s comprehension. This is a result of more television becoming more serialized and with short seasons. When an episode doesn’t work as something self contained, it has to lead to something. While it aired, TXF was celebrated for helping television become more serialized, making bigger, more epic stories. Now when it’s celebrated it’s for some wonderful self contained episodes, the kind they don’t make anymore. Even in 2015, when I had Person of Interest and Grimm satisfying the sci-fi/fantasy procedural itch for me I could see that.

I know that there is too much tv for anyone to watch in one life time, but many the shows that TXF was compared to in it’s original airing seem notably absent in comparative discussions now. For instance, it was nominated for Outstanding Drama Series in 1995, 1996, 1997, and 1998. The other series nominated those years were NYPD Blue, Chicago Hope, E.R., Law & Order, and The Practice. While there is good reason to see TXF as more closely related to Twin Peaks or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, those fellow nominees provide some necessary context about how TV was made, in particular the alternating goals of making something for the syndication market and making something edgy that could elevate the medium. Also notable, most these shows went through a lot of cast changes over the years. It makes more sense that TXF would try to do that kind of transition in seasons 8 and 9 when you think of the series they considered their peers.

Also worth considering earlier shows it was compared to, but the producers would likely discourage the comparison. I am thinking of Moonlighting and Remington Steele. At the time TXF aired people still talked about the “Moonlighting curse” as if it was just a given that once the couple on a show where the male and female leads solved mysteries while maintaining a will they/won’t they flirtation, would fail as soon as they got together. TXF writers were divided on whether or not it was a will they/won’t they, and definitely didn’t want to invite comparison to shows that had huge nosedives in popularity during their run. But in a lot of ways that was unfair to the earlier series. It denies how clever, inventive and experimental they could be. It also ignores how much behind the scenes strife contributed to on screen failings, especially on Moonlighting, where that has been better publicized. (And occasionally become newsworthy again such as when creator Glen Gordon Caron was fired from his job as the show runner of Bull.) I think there are episodes of Remington Steele and Moonlighting that are worth watching on there own just to get what the big deal was. But as always, how to bring knowledge of some behind the scenes study to it, is a difficult question to answer.

Another show people associated with TXF probably didn’t want to be associated with is Touched by an Angel. But for a while they both aired on Sunday nights and I know I watched it and TXF back to back a few times. A parental figure would have turned on 60 Minutes, and the ads for TBAA could be very intriguing. Then I’d watch the episode and be underwhelmed, especially because of the deus ex machina resolutions. So I didn’t make it a regular thing. But still as cases of the week that played on the news of the times with supernatural notes, they made an interesting case study.

I also sampled a few episodes of JAG: Judge Advocate General, a different CBS show that was frequently compared to TXF. The comparison had a sort of precursor to today’s periodic “why don’t publications write about shows people actually watch?” flair ups. It often had better ratings than TXF and a lot in common structurally, but had an older audience who was less likely to seek out writing about their show. It had a huge affect on the development of CBS procedurals from the late 1990s on, which is one of the areas where you can (arguably) see a lot of TXF’s influence.

I recently came across a post saying that David Duchovny wanted TXF to move to Los Angeles to facilitate his movie career. This is not true, he wanted to move to LA because he was with Téa Leoni at the time and she was staring in The Naked Truth, a sitcom that was shot in LA. The show was about a news photographer forced to work at a tabloid after an ugly divorce. It lasted three seasons, the first on ABC, the other two on NBC where it was essentially noted to death over two seasons. I am not surprised that it doesn’t have much hold on the cultural memory, but Duchovny was always open about this being his motivation so I am kind of surprised that it has been erased from TXF historic memory.

Speaking of Duchovny and LA, the current season of the podcast, You Must Remember This, focus mostly on erotic films of the 1990s, but also included an episode about erotic TV from the era that focused on The Red Shoe Diaries, an anthology series in which Duchovny’s played a character named Jake, who was essentially the framing device. I didn’t quite appreciate that for the first four seasons of TXF he was flying to LA on weekends to shoot his parts in TRSD back-to-back. Between that and Gillian Anderson having a very young child at the time, it’s no wonder they developed reputations as cold and standoff-ish. It sounds exhausting.

Other places I have come across TXF referenced lately:

finally reading Bruce Campbell’s memoire Hail to the Chin in which he declare that it is best to be a guest star in one of the first seasons of a show, mentions that his late in the series stint on TXF the whole cast and crew was tired of it;

learning that there is a show on the History Channel called The Proof is Out There;

the Only Murders in the Building episode where Mable flashed back to watching the show with her father near the end of his life;

Maureen Ryan in her Burn It Down reminisced about visiting TXF set in Vancouver as her first trip to a TV set, saying two important people were awful to her, one of whom gave her nightmares;

Some how the show coming up in a lunch conversation at work.

Jennette McCurdy mentioning in I'm Glad My Mom Died that her first job as an extra was on TXF

Ryan’s book is as good a place as any to segue into discussing the show’s legacy via former writers and producers. It’s worth noting that Chris Carter has been unable to get another series off the ground. While TXF ran he tried to launch three other shows, Millennium, Harsh Realm and The Lone Gunmen, and only one of them got to a full season. There was an Amazon pilot that didn’t go anywhere. Frank Spotnitz was the writer with the second most credited episodes of the series and most high profile gig since was the not well received Amazon adaptation of The Man in The High Castle. Kim Manners’ time with Supernatural is something of an anomaly, in that it feels directly related to TXF and ran a much longer period of time. (I’ve only seen one season of Supernatural. It was fine, but I was late to the show, felt I’d never catch up and gave up.) Glen Morgan and James Wong wrote some of my favorite episodes, but between them they have the Final Destination film franchise, some one season series and American Horror Story, which is more attributed to Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk than Wong. (I’ve never watched AHS.) Darin Morgan was something of a special star on the show, his episodes being singled out for awards and fan favorites. But he never got this kind of response to any of his subsequent work, including on Fringe where he was a consulting producer early on. The most high profile shows that feature alumni from TXF are the ones that feel most like they were made for a era of television that wanted to distance itself from the procedural aspects of TXF. Among the most famous are Breaking Bad created by Vince Giligan and its spinoff, Better Call Saul, which he co-created with a non-TXF alumn, Peter Gould. Also notable is Homeland, whose creators Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon worked on early seasons of TXF. Most of the shows that I think of as sharing a lot with TXF in the outline for, don’t have much of a direct connection to the series alumni in writers/producers/directors.

Earlier this year I briefly wrote about how I liked seeing both William B. Davis and Nicholas Lea in Continuum. While thinking of that series as a successor to TXF is interesting, I don’t generally think of the cast’s later roles as directly related to the show. Maybe this is because I watch so little of what they’ve done since. The greatest impression any of them is Anderson in Sex Education and Bleak House, both of which were pretty far away from TXF.

When news came out that Chris Carter was working with Ryan Coogler on a potential reboot I decided I did not know enough of Coogler’s work to say if he’d be a good fit, or have any idea what his take on the subject matter would be. But I am familiar with Disney, TXF current owner, and in particular there current “milk all recognizable IP for ever and ever” ethos, so the probability of a reboot seemed inevitable. I mostly hoped the new crew would take the title and try to create something very different under it. Then the WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes started and nothing seemed inevitable about a reboot. Hollywood as it’s been known, feels like its ending. All I can say is that I hate the idea of TXF being made with AI, or for that matter, scabs.

When I did my rewatch back in 2015, the episodes included “War of the Coprophagens” and “Syzegy”, episodes that are both are partially about mass hysteria. They’re comedic, but I didn’t find them funny. I thought this is probably something that didn’t age well. In the nineties, just pointing and laughing and people getting upset over stupid stuff sort of felt like enough to defang the danger. By now that seems hopelessly naive.

I know how people are now more willing to say that the plots of “Small Potatoes” and “Post Modern Prometheus” treat serial rapists as sympathetic outsiders, and rape as something to be brushed aside. Neither were part of my 2015 rewatch.

Some of my disenchantment during the original run was that while I was watching I was also becoming more aware of the movies that influenced the show. I hated how Fight the Future made the black oil alien possession turn into something that would claw its way out of the host body, reminiscent of the Alien franchises’s xenomorph. I also hated all of the Mulder and Scully as a couple teases from episodes like “The Rain King”, “The Ghost Who Stole Christmas”, “Arcadia”, et al because it was too much like things I was seeing in romcoms that I didn’t like. (I can’t remember any specific examples of these romcoms while writing this.) Any specificity as to what it meant to Mulder and Scully’s and their relationships at that moment was lost on me.

I might as well admit, during the shows original run I was a NoRomo. I did not tune in to TXF hoping for Mulder and Scully’s relationship to become romantic, and I kind of hated when episodes explicitly flirted with the possibility. I tuned in because I wanted to have first hand knowledge of what it was like to watch my generations version of The Twilight Zone. (In retrospect, I don’t think its a good comparison.) As the relationship now feels like what people think of when they think of TXF, I have wondered if the show now only appeals to those on the shipper side of the debate. I was really surprised while listening to Not Another X-Files Podcast Podcast when one of the hosts of the TXF Preservation Society admitted to not being a shipper on an episode.

Similar to what I said about being fine with many controversial series finales, I am also fine with many controversial television series couplings. As long as the writing is direct, I don’t really care if the actors have chemistry or if the show “needs” to pair these characters. To the extent that what relationships on screen one likes reflects on what one wants to have in real life, I really want people to be direct with me, and make me comfortable being direct with them.

A few years ago started wondering if it would have been more emotionally healthy if I spent the years I watched TXF watching Beverly Hills, 90210 instead. I started wondering this while coincidentally coming across of couple of personal essays that reflected warmly on watching BH90210 and how it affected the writers at impressionable ages. As someone who doesn’t exactly reflect warmly on TXF, and has a hard time putting how I feel about things into words, I was kind of jealous. I know there was some overlap in the audiences. There isn’t a “If you were a teen in the 1990s you either watched BH90210 or TXF and it affected you in this way…” But coming across those essays does have something to do with why I am writing this now.

Around that time I also started worrying about how TXF’s popularity lead to today’s age of dangerous conspiracy theories. Before I gave up on the site formally known as Twitter, I’d occasionally look at who was still discussing it online with the fear that it’s been used by right wingers looking for ways to justify their persecution complexes. I didn’t find much. There was something of peak in these posts around the time Trump announced that the FBI had been searching for documents at Mar a Lago. This past decade has been wild as far as guessing how things will be read along partisan lines. If anything the posts were mostly about nostalgia and it’s appeal as a brand.

Given that I’m so uncomfortable with that potential aspect of the show’s legacy, a how did I end up watching so many shows that in some way are direct successors to the show? And the answer is, mostly not consciously. I was reluctant to start Fringe and Evil because from the outset their premises looked too much like TXF, though ultimately they’ve gone in directions TXF would never. I still want something that can excite me, and has hints of the epic. And I am going to seek it in vaguely familiar formats.

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