Thirty Years Later, The Joy Is Still Out There: An Ongoing Series on the X-Files, Introduction

 

On September 10, 1993, on a network that was still considered not worthy of true broadcast status, The X-Files debuted.

And everything changed.

That’s a very broad statement. The thing is, you can add certain words to the end of that one, and it is only modified by degree. I’ll now do just that.

…for Fox. Undeniably true.  Even with the existence of groundbreaking shows like The Simpsons and Beverly Hills, 90210, Fox was still basically considered a pretender to the Big Three. Not long after the debut of The X-Files, the world could no longer deny it was a creative force. The series would dominate the Emmys and other award shows for the next five years and from that point on, Fox would be one of the biggest boundary pushers on network TV well into the next century and only recently beginning to edge away from its initial brilliance.

…for sci-fi on TV. Also undeniable. In 1993, sci-fi was basically considered a non-starter for broadcast television outside the limitations of Star Trek, which back then wasn’t even given the dignity of a network broadcast.  No one was willing to venture outside the idea of the space opera or the future when it came to sci-fi. After The X-Files became one of the biggest cultural sensations in history, everybody would try to imitate or duplicate it (Fox in particular). Few series, even those developed by the creative forces behind the series, would enjoy anywhere near the level of popular success but the groundwork is there and still is.

…for TV in general. I don’t think anyone would argue with that either. The idea of the mythology series, unheard of in television at the time, would slowly but surely take root across network TV, cable and beyond. Furthermore, it’s almost impossible to believe the idea of any serialized television at all being marketable if The X-Files hadn’t existed: I can’t see shows as disparate as Buffy the Vampire Slayer or The Sopranos being greenlit without the serialized stories of the X-Files being in existence. (The fact that those same serialized stories would become the Achilles heel of The X-Files is one of the great ironies of television, as well as the fact that the show’s vast popularity in syndication and streaming has almost nothing to do with its mythology.)

Even if you don’t hold with that concept, you can’t deny that some of the first generation of great writers to come out of Peak TV essentially cut their teeth working for The X-Files.  I will go into great detail on this in later articles, but for now I’ll just state something point blank: Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul would not exist without The X-Files.

…for the way we see the world. This may be an unintended consequence, and its one of the more debatable points.  It’s hard to argue that the conspiracy driven culture that manifests far too much of the world we can’t seem to escape is The X-Files’ fault. There are far too many parts of the 21^st century that are more responsible for it – the rise of the Internet, social media, cable news, talk radio and technology in general isolating us more and more from each other. To lay so much of what has happened at the feet of a mere television series would seem to be giving Chris Carter and his writers far too much credit: they themselves were alarmed at how the culture was beginning to mirror the world of Mulder and Scully the longer the decade went on.  Furthermore, considering that the series essentially went off the air (in one incarnation) less than a year after 9/11,  an event which was a far more driving force to this era than anything that happened on The X-Files, makes it hard for us to put it at the feet of the series.

I don’t believe, fundamentally, that The X-Files drove the bus in this regard. During the 1990s when the Cold War was over, the unifying drive that America had been forcing towards the Soviet Union for half a century was gone. And we never were able to fill that void. One could argue we still haven’t found a way. Trusting the government was becoming more a feature of pop culture than a bug and I think the X-Files just gave a voice to all of that. That’s also one of the key reasons it didn’t last long after 9/11 and 24 became a sensation of that decade. (There’s a direct link between those two series which I’ll get to as well.) Both shows fundamentally argued ‘trust no one’ – not even the people you worked with – but 24 made it very clear that the villains were acting against America. The X-Files, by contrast, argued the entire institution was rotten from bottom to top, and that the people you thought were in charge were little more than puppets.  24 also fundamentally argued that while some of the people were rotten, the system itself was worth defending. Jack Bauer might end up being fired or suspended by CTU countless times over his career, but no one questioned his loyalty, only his methods.  Mulder and Scully were stuck in the basement, sacrificed every aspect of their professional and personal lives in favor of some ideal they believed in, but that the higherups suppressed and the general public didn’t care about.  Not only did everybody question their loyalty, but their sanity was also frequently being questioned. The series actually acknowledged this very close to the end: (Mulder’s) crazy for believing what you believe,” and ‘(Scully’s) crazy for not believing what he believes.”

To be clear that was to be expected when half the time they were chasing down an alien conspiracy and the other half they were chasing down what became to known by their own fan base as ‘monsters of the week’. But in a larger sense, you got the idea that they were being punished because they would not go along with the status quo. I don’t just mean in believing in UFOs, werewolves, vampires, or everything else, but rather from getting away from the ‘mission statement’ of, well, America. That mission statement is almost always: “Don’t rock the boat.”  You might argue that there’s a difference between protesting institutional racism in society and you know, the idea that theirs an international conspiracy by old men in rooms collaborating with aliens, but I’d argue at the end of the day, there isn’t much of a difference. There’s going to be a certain group of people who will vehemently berate you, call you disloyal and, worse, un-American and they will do everything they can to make you a non-entity. Of course, if you told your truth on The X-Files you were more likely to get killed by an alien bounty hunter or a nameless assassin.

So in that sense, maybe, The X-Files did sort of mainstream a lot of the theories to conspiracies throughout the world. All that said, looking at the world we live in today and some of the conspiracy theories that so many public theories have no problem making part of public discourse, it almost seems quaint to watch an episode of the series and seeing Mulder and Scully being regulated to a basement office with one desk, traveling across the country in business class, investigating an alien abduction in the middle of nowhere.

But that is also the reason why The X-Files, unlike so many series of that era doesn’t seem so much of a relic of its era.  Part of this is no doubt because science-fiction, as a rule, doesn’t become as passe as quickly as the police procedural (which in a way, the X-Files is) but it’s also because it was also a deeply philosophical show at the core of it. I’m not the kind of person who believes readily in the idea that there is some kind of deeper philosophy at the center of every other series on TV these days – I find it hard to believe even great series like Mad Men and Dexter have some great moral lessons to teach us about society. The reason I think the X-Files lasted so well is because at the center of so many of its episode were so many fundamental philosophical debates that only science fiction can tell us: not just the obvious argument between belief and skepticism, but determinism and free will, science and religion, loneliness and loss, the search for intelligent life other than humanity, and perhaps more than anything, death and how we deal with it.  That’s a lot to get from any series, so its not only impressive that these questions could be asked and pondered in such an entertaining (and often, hysterical) way and that they could be posed while you were running through the sewers chasing a Flukeman or a lake looking for a sea monster or maybe just in a rented car, waiting to see if a mysterious informant will tell you what our government is hiding from its society this week.

In the weeks and months to come, I will be looking back on The X-Files. Not so much on the alien mythology (not even the most rapid lover of the series would suggest that it was either the highpoint of the show or was the reason they watched it) but about some of the questions it asked and some of the revolutionary talents that it produced. I’ve already told you (in a way) who one of them was and there are quite a few other legends out there… as well as one man who may be the greatest television writer in history you’ve never heard of. (Unless, of course, you’re a devoted X-Files fan and in that case that still doesn’t do him enough justice.) I’ll also try to deal with some of the overriding themes of the series as well as a few episodes that may stand as some of the benchmarks for great television then, now, and forever.

I should mention that I have written to a huge extent about The X-Files. My first writing as a critic was various reviews on X-Files websites not long after I got out of college. Then, a decade ago, I did an X-Files rewatch in which I did one of the most detailed episode guides I’ve done to date and may, in some time, publish in book form. I’ve also written a fair amount of here and there through many of my other columns at this site. But I still feel a strong passion for the series and I feel, even more than thirty years later, that there are elements still worth writing about. That’s the thing about great television and its true about The X-Files. So let’s start seeing that the greatness is still out there.