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Sorry this is so long, but I wanted to get all my thoughts out at once.

TL;DR: I’m rewatching The X-Files.

Perhaps some of you have seen my “kitchen rewatches” before. Basically, I put on shows I’ve already seen while I’m cooking, which means I can enjoy them without having to give every minute my undivided attention.

This time around, I’m doing The X-Files from scratch.

I’ve just started Season One, and watching those first few episodes brings back a lot of memories of what it was like when this show first appeared. It holds up incredibly well.

I think there’s something that’s probably difficult to appreciate for people who didn’t watch The X-Files when it was originally on television: just how incredibly pervasive this show became in the zeitgeist. You couldn’t go anywhere without stumbling over it. I wouldn’t quite call it X-Files mania, but it was pretty close. Everybody was talking about it. Everybody was spoofing it. It showed up in comic strips, other television shows, and of course The Simpsons eventually did their wonderfully bizarre X-Files episode with Mulder and Scully.

It was everywhere.

And I think that enormous popularity is part of the reason people keep trying to figure out how to bring The X-Files back. The problem is that, unlike something like Doctor Who or Star Trek, where you can swap out major characters and reinvent the thing, The X-Files was enormously dependent on Mulder and Scully. The chemistry between David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson wasn’t just part of the show. In many ways, it WAS the show.

And part of the secret sauce, strangely enough, may have been that Duchovny and Anderson didn’t always get along particularly well while they were making it.

Both of them have been pretty open about the tension that existed between them, particularly during the grind of those early years. Somehow, though, that tension translated beautifully onto the screen. Mulder and Scully felt like two actual people dealing with each other rather than two television characters who had been engineered to have “chemistry.” They could irritate each other, disagree, tease each other, protect each other and obviously care enormously about each other without it ever feeling forced. Even during the long will-they-or-won’t-they period, their relationship felt remarkably natural.

I recently listened to David Duchovny’s podcast episode with Gillian Anderson, and I really recommend it. It’s an incredibly open and sometimes surprisingly raw conversation about what their relationship was actually like while they were making the show. They clearly have enormous respect, affection and appreciation for each other now, but they’re also quite candid about the fact that working together back then could be difficult.

And somehow, all of that made it onto the screen in exactly the right way. Whatever tension existed between Duchovny and Anderson became part of the tension between Mulder and Scully, but without making the characters unpleasant or unlikeable. If anything, it made them more human. I think that’s a huge part of why people connected with them, and also why The X-Files has proven so difficult to replicate...

...even Duchovny and Anderson themselves couldn’t entirely recreate it when the show came back for Seasons 10 and 11 in 2016 and 2018. Those seasons just felt different. At times I got the impression that neither the actors nor, frankly, the writers were taking the whole thing quite as seriously anymore. There were certainly some good moments, but that strange intensity that existed during the original run wasn’t really there.

Which makes me think that maybe The X-Files was one of those rare cases where you had exactly the right two actors, playing exactly the right characters, with exactly the right amount of real-world friction between them, at exactly the right moment.

That’s a pretty difficult formula to reproduce.

So I’m very curious to see what Ryan Coogler eventually does with his version. I hope he figures out a way to capture what made the original work without simply trying to recreate Mulder and Scully with two new actors.

Which brings me to the movies.

The first X-Files movie, Fight the Future, came out between Seasons Five and Six, right around the peak of the show’s cultural popularity. It did quite well theatrically and, more importantly, felt like an EVENT if you were watching the series at the time. You were basically being asked to leave your television, go to a movie theater, and then come back for the next season.

Then, a decade later, we got I Want to Believe.

That one was... considerably more muddled.

Rather than returning to the alien conspiracy mythology that had driven so much of the series, Chris Carter essentially made a feature-length standalone horror story. The X-Files could do horror brilliantly, of course. Some of its best episodes are horror stories. I’m just not convinced that was the right choice for the big-screen return of Mulder and Scully after six years away.

Which is actually why all of this is on my mind. Tonight I’m planning to watch the new edit of I Want to Believe, so I decided to get myself back into an X-Files frame of mind by starting the series again from the beginning.

And there is SO much goodness in these early episodes.

It’s also easy to forget how much The X-Files changed television. I’m struggling to think of an earlier weekly network series that consistently tried to give television this kind of cinematic look. The lighting, locations, atmosphere, framing and general mood often feel much closer to a movie than what we were accustomed to seeing on television in 1993.

And then there’s that Mark Snow theme.

A few notes in and suddenly I’m back in the ’90s.

Anyway, the kitchen rewatch has begun. I’ll post some thoughts from time to time as I work my way through it.

The truth is out there. And apparently it’s somewhere between my stove and the refrigerator.

best show on earth, is called hero 108 on cartoon network.

Looking for something like VIGIL in the spy/espionage/whodunnit genre

Season 3 has been absolutely incredible!

Kitchen Rewatch: The X-Files, and Why It Is So Hard to Replicate

DCTV went from having yearly releases and being the topic of conversation all the time to having trouble putting out tv shows.

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