Its important to make clear that no one, not
even Chris Carter himself, ever thought The X-Files was going to
succeed, much less become one of the greatest cultural phenomena in the history
of television. Indeed when he was gathering writers for the first season of the
show one of them referred to it as 'the beginning of the adventure'.
Fittingly for a show that would be known
for collaboration and teamwork in the writers room Carter's first writing staff,
other than himself consisted of two teams
of collaborators: James Wong & Glen Morgan and Howard Gordon & Alex Gansa.
Both teams of writers had been working in TV and Vancouver television during
the early 1980s, some of them in cult series some in shows that were short term
hits. Prior to the joining The X-Files Gordon & Gansa's biggest
success had been CBS' Beauty & The Beast with Linda Hamilton and Ron
Perlman famously playing the title roles.
When the show was unexpectedly renewed for
a second season despite low ratings Gordon chose to stay with the series but
for reasons that are unclear his collaborator did not. Gansa would try to work
on his own, producing and writing the short-lived Maximum Bob then
working then moving on to Dawson's Creek for a season. Gordon chose to
stay for the second season.
With Morgan & Wong making plans to
leave the show during Season 2 to create the series Space: Above &
Beyond Carter began a process he would end up doing every season: finding new
writers for the staff. Part of it involved getting freelance writers who would
often do one script and be done with it. Late in Season Two one was submitted
by a man known at the time strictly for screenwriting.
In 1995 Vince Gilligan had been known for writing
Glen Gordon Caron (himself a TV writer then best known for Moonlighting)
directorial debut Wilder Napalm. The
movie featured Dennis Quaid and Arliss Howard as two brothers capable of
starting fires with their minds while they try to woo the same woman played by
Debra Winger. While the film does have a
certain mix of genres that The X-Files became known for it can
charitably be described as uneven and messy in its subject and was both a
critical and box office failure. Gilligan was essentially looking for work when
he submitted his teleplay 'Soft Light'. The episode deals with a physicist who after
becoming affected by a particle accelerator develops a shadow that acts independent
of his body and ends up devouring innocents incapable of the control of him and
can only be contained when he stays in the 'soft light' of train stations.
Frank Spotnitz, who had been hired as a
writer that year himself, remembered how impress both he and Carter with
Gilligan's contribution:
"His episode…which did not go
untouched, was nonetheless extraordinarily good for somebody who wasn't in the writer's
room and didn't know where all the tripwires were. And so Chris asked him to
join in Season Three. And I think for
(Gilligan), having been alone in Virginia writing movies, he loved being in a
collaborative environment and loved being in that writer's room. He was a terrific
writer on the page, his dialogue and cinematic vision were always remarkable,
but I think his sense of structure and plotting…all those things grew. We were
doing twenty-four episodes a year. That's a lot, and every one had its own set
of rules."
Gordon was already used to these rules and
continued to work on The X-Files for the next two seasons, sometimes
working on his own, just as often collaborating with other writers as part of a
team.
At the end of Season Four he chose to leave
and tried to spread his wings in genre television. For awhile he did freelance
work for Joss Whedon, first for Buffy, then Angel. He would eventually
collaborate with Tim Kring on a show called Strange World which aired
three episodes in 1999 then ten more three years later. By that point, however,
Gordon had been recruited for by another team of showrunners Joel Surnow &
Robert Cochran for their first network series on Fox: 24.
This show more than anything else put
Gordon officially on the map as a creative force. He and Alex Gansa would
reunite to work on 24 both as writers and producers. When Surnow and
Cochran left the series in Season 4, Gordon would take over as showrunner. At
that point he said that he thought the series was creatively exhausted and going
into Day Five he thought they could only go downhill. In 2006 24 had one of the greatest
seasons in the history of television as it won its only Emmy for Best Drama and
winning a total of five. Gordon had been nominated for producing eight times to
that point, including one for Beauty and The Beast and three for The
X-Files. This would be the first time he won.
He has been a force in television ever
since, always producing and /or writing some of the most successful and often
fascinating TV series in the last twenty years. By far the most successful of
them was Homeland which he and Alex Gansa created and was one of the
great critical and ratings hits of the 2010s. But many of his other series have
been just as fascinating from TNT's Legends to the flawed but
fascinating Tyrant to the brilliant but cancelled to soon Fox series Accused.
As for Gilligan he would stay with The
X-Files to the end of its original run. Eventually he got a chance to work
on The Lone Gunmen a spinoff that had been anticipated for too long and
by the time it aired the show was well passed its expiration date. He wrote
some spec scripts for television, such as Night Stalker (written by his
old colleagues Morgan & Wong) and writing the Will Smith Hancock, a
flawed but frequently fascinating superhero send-up. (In hindsight it might
have served as a dry run for The Boys.) But his mind kept coming back to
an idea that had come when he and his colleague Thomas Schauz had been between
jobs after The X-Files ended. As a joke Schnauz mentioned an article he
had read about a man who put a meth lab in an RV lab and suggested they could
try it if their careers kept going in this trajectory.
Gilligan's old friend (the two had worked
together on both The X-Files and Lone Gunmen) had just caused a
click to go off in his head: "coming up with a character who was very much
like myself: law-abiding, and who would nonetheless do such a thing, and put a
meth lab in an RV and willfully transform himself into a criminal."
Gilligan actually had to talk himself into
pursuing this as he later said: "On paper, this show doesn't make a
lot of sense. We're talking about a fifty year old man, and right there, TV
executives aren't going to want to build a show around (him) and you find out
by the first-act break he's dying of cancer, that's another strike against you.
And if you realize that his means of amassing money for his family is to cook
crystal meth, maybe you say to yourself: 'Man that's three strikes right there."
Just as with The X-Files fifteen years earlier it took a lot for this
idea to even get to the screen. When Gilligan famously made this pitch to Zack
Van Amburg and Jamie Erlich, who'd he work with on a CBS pilot (Robbery
Homicide Division) Gilligan recalled five to ten minutes he had an out-of-body
experience where he thought he was absolutely bombing and that the executives
thought he was crazy. He expected to be rejected. When they took it their boss
a few days later that boss also thought it was the worst single idea for a
pitch he'd ever heard but because Van Amburg and Erlich liked the idea he
greenlit it.
Selling it was even harder. TNT and Showtime
both rejected, the latter with an excellent reason: they were already working
on Weeds. Gilligan had no idea
this show existed until he made the pitch to FX's head John Landgraf. (When he
asked what it was about Gilligan said he could feel all the blood leaving his
face.)) FX told him to write a pilot. Ten months later, he had one – and FX
chose to greenlight another series called The Riches about a family of
gypsy con artists with Eddie Izzard and Minnie Driver playing the parents.
(That show was a critical hit for two seasons with Izzard and Driver receiving
Emmy nominations before it was cancelled.
This should have been the end of the story,
the proverbial third strike. Then Christina Wayne, the head producer at AMC,
got a hold of the script. Mad Men had
yet to debut when they wooed Gilligan and he had no idea what AMC was. His
first reaction was: "Why not send it to the Food Network?" He didn't take them seriously but they were
serious and they greenlit it even allowing Gilligan to direct it.
In June of 2007 just a short while before Mad
Men debuted Breaking Bad was officially greenlit for a season. AMC –
and television – would never be the same.
For all of the brilliant shows associated
with Peak TV there have only been a handful of showrunners for whom lightning
struck twice. None of the three Davids associated with HBO ever had a series at
the level of The Sopranos, The Wire or Deadwood ever again in
their careers. Matthew Weiner's follow-up
to Mad Men The Romanoffs never got past the first season. Alan Ball managed to find popular success
with True Blood. It took Shawn Ryan nearly fifteen years to have any
series even get renewed for a second season after The Shield left the
air. Joss Whedon's struggles after Buffy
and Angel were well-known even before his full history became known.
Gordon and Gilligan have been the most consistently
brilliant showrunners during the 21st century. Since leaving The X-Files in 1997 24
and Homeland were nominated for Best Drama a total of nine times (24
five times; Homeland four). Since creating Breaking Bad in
2007 Gilligan has received twelve nominations for shows in that world (five for
producing Breaking Bad, six for Better Call Saul, one for the TV Movie
El Camino). During the first half of the 2010s Gilligan and Gordon would
frequent compete against each other in many categories. In 2012 Gordon's Homeland
would defeat Breaking Bad for Best Drama as Gordon would also win
Best Dramatic Teleplay. The following year Breaking Bad would win for
Best Drama and again the following year. (The two would compete against each
other in 2015 and 2016 when Better Call Saul was nominated, though in
both cases they would be swamped by Seasons 5 and 6 of Game of Thrones. )
It might merely be coincidence that the two
greatest showrunners of this era both cut their teeth on The X-Files even
though if coincidences are coincidences why do they always feel so contrived?
(Darin Morgan joke.) More seriously having watched all of their episodes of The
X-Files, every episode of their dramas at least once , there are clearly
things that both men learned when working with Chris Carter that they are
clearly present in not only the work they have done.
Gilligan will almost certainly be returning
to the awards stage very soon for his new series Pluralus and Howard
Gordon is never gone from TV screens for long. Earlier this year he was one of
the writers-producers for The Beast in Me on Netflix, which is also looking
like an end of year awards contender.
And with significant anniversaries for both of Gordon's masterpieces coming
in 2026 – the 25th of the debut of 24, the fifteenth of the
debut of Homeland – it is fitting to pay tribute to his work as well, because
there is clearly a more direct link to The X-Files in those two series
than Gilligan's.
In this series I will look at the
influences, direct and indirect, that both men's tenure on The X-Files had
on their later masterwork. It should be noted that both men were also among The
X-Files best writers though devotees agree that Gilligan was by far the more
brilliant and iconoclastic one on that series.
And considering that these two men would be masters in mythology series
in a way that Chris Carter never truly was its worth noting what both men learned
not to do while working for Carter as well.
Of course I don't need an excuse to write
about any of these series as all of them are among the greatest of all time and
are on my personal shortlists of TV masterpieces. Some were more perfect then
others but they were all works of art and I would gladly write about them forever.
So come and join me on another 'adventure'.
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