When The X-Files premiered on Friday, Sept. 10, 1993, there was already talk the show would be quickly canceled. Sci-fi/horror shows didn’t last too long on the boob tube. In the 1980s, shows like Misfits of Science (featuring a young Courtney Cox), Automan (which seemed to resemble Tron) and Manimal (in which Simon McCorkindale played a man who can change into animals) all were canceled during their first seasons.
The 1990s didn’t fare any better. Even though it was more of a mystery drama, people can argue Twin Peaks had sci-fi/horror elements. But it was canceled after two seasons. And Eerie, Indiana, a pre-cursor to Goosebumps, starring a pre-Hocus Pocus Omri Katz, was well received by critics and had Joe Dante working behind the scenes, but it was also canceled after one season on NBC.
So, when Entertainment Weekly called the show a “goner” in the Fall Season 1993 preview, a lot of people probably agreed judging from what Fox had showed in the previews looked like a show about alien abductions. The network was finally finding its footing with shows like The Simpsons, Martin, Beverly Hills 90210 and Melrose Place, as well as Married…with Children. But early shows like Werewolf had been a casualty. Besides, The X-Files starred an actor, David Duchovny, who also appeared on Twin Peaks and the Showtime soft-core porn anthology show Red Shoe Diaries. Hehad been mostly a character actor in forgettable roles in movies like Beethoven and Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead.
And his co-star was Gillian Anderson, who didn’t have much of a resume as it was and looked like she had been cast just as eye candy. Worse, the show was given the kiss of death time slot on Friday nights at 9 p.m. Eastern Standard Time/8 p.m. Central and Mountain. There’s no way in Hell it was going to compete against ABC’s TGIF line-up and those out watching high school football games. Besides, even if you don’t like Family Matters, Full House or even football, who the hell is going to stay home on a Friday night to watch a show about FBI agents chasing aliens, monsters and other oddities surrounding government conspiracies in what is obviously British Columbia doubling as various areas in America.
But the first season got good reviews and drew in some good views, even though the first season ending with a 105th rank out of 128 shows. But Fox held fast that they had a “cult show” on their hands and kept it on the air, probably because they really didn’t have anything else to replace it with. More people tuned in during the second season and the show ended in 63rd place. It was still nowhere near it the top but that was quite an improvement for a show on a Friday night, especially competing against Urkel and the Olsen Twins.
I think the show benefitted from the emergence of conspiracy theories in the mainstream mainly following the release of JFK in 1991 and people using the Internet more in the mid-1990s where lots of strange things could be found with little filter. The show in its earlier seasons was mostly a straight-forward sci-fi/horror show as Agents Fox Mulder (Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Anderson) along with their supervisor Walter Skinner (Mitch Pileggi) investigated strange supernatual and extraterrestrial occurrences. Throughout the mid-1990s, the show gained some popularity and some infamy.
The season four episode “Home” dealt with a very controversial topic for network TV at the time as it involved a violent inbred family in rural Pennsylvania. The show carried the recently branded TV rating, TV-M (later changed to TV-MA). It was so controversial Fox didn’t rerun it and only aired it a second time in 1999 for Halloween. But during the fourth season, Fox made a very smart decision, moving the show from Fridays to Sundays to run at 9 p.m. EST following The Simpsons which was still riding high. This brought The X-Files in the Top 20 for the next three seasons where it finishes 12th in its fourth season.
The series also began to shake up its format in season four with the additon of a young writer, Vince Gilligan, who was able to added some much needed humor and Twin Peaks-style vibes to the show. Duchovny had always brought a type of hipster suaveness to the role to contrast with Anderson’s more reserve serious approach. But Gilligan’s best contribution this season was “Small Potatoes” in which babies in a small town are being born with tails and a man who is a shapeshifter, Eddie Van Blundht (Darin Morgan), is able to change his identity to more or less sexually assault women and impregnate them.
While the show’s non-chalant way of dealing with a rapist wouldn’t work today, it gave the show a more lighter tone by showing how pathetic the rapist is. He later changes into Mulder and tries to hit on Scully, a nice play on the Will-They-Or-Won’t-They? tropes of TV shows in which a male character and female character start off with a platonic relationship.
Season Four would also have “Musings of a Cigarette Smoking Man” which played on Forrest Gump style nostalgia as it focused on the Cigarette Smoking Man (Wiliam B. Davis) as he recalls his earlier life while spying on a meeting between Mulder, Scully and The Lone Gunmen, John Fitzgerald Byers (Bruce Harwood), Melvin Frohike (Tom Braidwood), and Richard Langley (Dean Haglund). The episode presents Smoking Man, who originally appeared as a mysterious ancillary character, as one of the most powerful men in America, having been the actual shooter that killed President Kennedy as well as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The irony is that Smoking Man was an aspiring writer who had been struggling for years to get his works published. It made the character more three-dimensional and included a reference to Gump that was handled well by Davis’ performance.
The X-Files continued to have success through its fifth and sixth seasons as a movie was released in 1998. However, many fans called “X-Philes” felt the movie was nothing more than a bigger budget episode with more violence than network censors would allow at the time. Rumors were also that they wanted Anderson to do a nude scene even though it would be her bare bum, but she refused. The 1998 movie, which became a hit, would unfortunately become the beginning of the end.
While the show remained successful in its sixth season going into the seventh, cracks began to show. A show mostly devoted to Scully’s personal life written and directed by Anderson was poorly received. Fans were divided over the concept of doing a X-Files/Cops cross-over in which all of the show is in the format of the Cops TV show. While this concept was probably written, greenlit, financed and maybe even filmed before the popularity of The Blair Witch Project in the summer of 1999, it still felt like it was copying that movie.
But behind the scenes, an even bigger problem was brewing. Duchovny was starting to get film roles. His first lead was 1993’s Kalifornia alongside Brad Pitt and Juliette Lewis, but he wouldn’t appear in a movie again until 1997’s Playing God. In the spring of 2000, he had appeared in a romantic comedy Return to Me. And by this time, Duchovny was getting fed up with the Fox network and 20th Century Fox which produced the show. He said that he had a contract through the seventh season but he had been denied royalties and monies he was owed.
Also, it was revealed years later that Duchovny and Anderson were getting to the point they couldn’t stand to be in the same room with each other. “Familiarity breeds contempt,” Duchovny said in a 2008 interview. “It’s nothing to do with the other person. All that fades away and you’re just left with the appreciation and love for the people you’ve worked with for so long. We used to argue about nothing. We couldn’t stand the sight of each other.”
Anderson echoed his comments saying there were periods during filming where they “hated each other.” But she immediately backtracked on using the “hate” word. “We didn’t talk for long periods of time,” she said. They both admit they have both put their differences aside and now are good friends. But the damage had already been done.
The seventh season ended with a cliff-hanger as Mulder is abducted by aliens as it was still left in the air if Duchovny would return for the next season. The eighth season began with a new FBI agent John Doggett (Robert Patrick) with Duchovny appearing in only half the season, sometimes in only a few scenes per episode. The show was really going off the rails as they killed off Mulder and then brought him back. Agent Monica Reyes (Annabeth Gish) was brought on as a recurring character who would eventually become more active in the ninth season.
But ratings and reviews were slipping. Scully basically became a supporting character in the ninth season and the show didn’t benefit at all from airing in the post-9/11 world where some people might not be too keen on watching a show about government conspiracy theories. The show’s supposed series finale didn’t really feel like an ending but a a season ender that had hastily been re-written, re-shot, and re-editted to function as a series finale.
Duchovny and Anderson would return for the 2008 movie The X-Files: I Want to Believe which took on a mad scientist story. But it wasn’t a success like the 1998 movie and was released a week after the blockbuster The Dark Knight. In 2016, it was revived for six episodes during the winter months but received a mixed reception. In 2018, there were 10 episodes aired during the winter months but the show received the worse average of viewers during its 11 seasons and the final episode of the season received mostly negative reviews for its lackluster ending.
But the show’s legacy remains as helping sci-fi shows like Lost, Fringe and PSI Factor. Even the popularity of American Horror Story owes a debt to X-Files and its creator Chris Carter. Off screen, the show is credited with an increase of women getting involved in science and medicine or STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math). This theory is called “The Scully Effect.”
Yet, probably the show’s best contribution to pop culture is in the creation of the AMC hit drama Breaking Bad and its spin-off prequel Better Call Saul. Gilligan wrote the sixth season episode “Drive” in which Bryan Cranston plays a desperate Nevada man suffering from a painful brain pulsation in which he has to constantly being heading west. Gilligan was use this episode as a way to convince AMC to greenlight Breaking Bad.
And finally, the show proved that you can’t underestimate fans of sci-fi and horror. When X-Files started, being a nerd and liking comic books or sci-fi shows like Battlestar Galactica or Star Trek wasn’t considered popular. By the time the series ended its first run in 2002, Galaxy Quest, which explored fandom while being respectful, was popular on the home video and cable market. X-Men had proved that if a superhero movie is done correctly it can be great even though it would take a few more trial and errors before Christopher Nolan would present The Dark Knight Trilogy and the Marvel Cinematic Universe would begin with Iron Man.
Yes, the tide was changing. TV dramas didn’t have to feature tough-as-nails hard-broiled cops in the 1980s like Hunter or B.L. Stryker. I’d argue that Scully’s forensic work on the show helped inspire the CSI: Crime Scene Investigations franchise that became an unexpected hit in the 2000s. Mulder and Scully, despite how Fox tried to make Duchovny and Anderson eye candy, were nerds. And it was a show where the nerds got to be the heroes and save the day for a change.
It inspired Gen Xers and Millennials to realize they didn’t always have to be the jocks or the cool kids. Mulder and Scully were often on the outside, the fringe of the FBI evem where no one had much faith in them. And yet, they still were able to very effective agents. That’s why the show couldn’t work when Doggett and Reyes were added. They were too much of the same generic style of characters audiences had seen many times before. Shows like Law and Order and ER might have been able to bring in new characters and new cast members, but it didn’t work here.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 