Today through Thursday, I'll be posting on the blog about Chris Carter's The X-Files (1993 - 2002), a genre series that turns twenty on September 10th, tomorrow.
During this two-decade span, The X-Files initiative has been adapted to film, comic-book form, original novels, and had TV spin-offs made. It has also been ripped-off innumerable times by individuals possessing far less intelligence and imagination than the brains at Ten Thirteen. Those who wrote for the show in the nineties have, in turn, created beloved TV programming for the next generation.
Like its famous alien "Erlenmeyer Flask," The X-Files is really a two-decade old well-spring of creativity.
The series' unprecedented success on television -- and it is still the highest rated, most watched genre program in American network history -- paved the way for genre programming such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Millennium, and more recently, Fringe. In some sense, the series opened up a new golden age in genre programming which came to include such efforts as Farscape, Firefly, Nowhere Man, Dark Skies, and more. None of those shows would exist at all if The X-Files hadn't proven on its original run that mainstream audiences were willing to watch (good) science fiction and horror in prime time.
I have re-visited and re-watched the Carter program from start-to-finish at least twice, and it is amazing -- and unprecedented -- how the best episodes of The X-Files don't seem to age at all. I credit this sense of freshness to the sharp, moody cinematography, to the writing which is endlessly clever and which never talks down to audiences, and to the two central characters/actors, who are individuals that we want to spend more time with, and whom we feel that we genuinely "know."
Unlike much television, The X-Files also boasts a consistent double lens through which it views the world: the twin perspectives of belief/skepticism. Virtually every episode is parsed to through two brilliantly-argued view-points, each expressing important ideas about the world.
So join me today through Thursday to celebrate this X-Files anniversary. I'll be posting new reviews, re-posting others from my retrospective, looking at series collectibles and so on. The truth is right here!
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