The Cutprice Guignol

With The X-Files making a return, I decided to hand over this fine blog to my delicious writing partner and X-Files fanatic Kevin for a reaction as a follow-up to his wonderful Monsters of that Week series. Let’s get into it!

The X-Files ran for nine seasons – the shortest of which was nineteen episodes – two movies, and two revival seasons. It’s been a pop culture phenomenon (as well as my favourite show) for thirty years.

In the space of those three decades, creator and showrunner Chris Carter, with the help of a brilliant writer’s room, produced some of the best horror and science fiction storytelling seen on the small screen. Earlier this month, it was announced that the show was getting the reboot treatment with Black Panther director Ryan Coogler updating the show with the backing of Disney. This is such boring news, such obvious money grabbing that I’m tempted to put a bet on how long it takes for some Marvel alumni to suggest that rebooting Fringe is the next great leap forward.

So, I’m not thrilled about this news. Not because I don’t think Coogler is a great director, and not because I’m a disgruntled superfan (I love Doctor Who and that gets rebooted all the time) but because when you really get down to it, The X-Files might be too iconic to have another crack at. Here are some reasons why I think this is a bad idea.

Mulder and Scully

The most obvious point first. Beyond all of the alien conspiracies, Tooms-es, and vampires, The X-Files is Mulder and Scully: it is Duchovny and Anderson. Doing a straight reboot and using them would be a fools errand on par with trying to recast Friends or Breaking Bad. The new versions would never be able to match up to the best partnership in genre television. Equally, if Coogler and co. decided to create new characters, they would face similar comparisons.

Conspiracies are not what they used to be

We live our lives on the internet, where conspiracy theories have become mainstream and a genuine talking point for normal people as well as lunatics like myself. But they’re not the conspiracy theories of old – they’re conspiracies invented and propagated behind screens, a far less interesting investigative approach that the more procedural storytelling in The X-Files. I can see Disney taking the wrong message from this and thinking that The X-Files – the original conspiracy show – would thrive in this new landscape. The opposite would be true. The fact is that this stuff isn’t as interesting as it once was. Case in point: the first revival series had an entire episode (Mulder and Scully vs the Were-Human) where Mulder himself bemoans that so many cases in that oh-so-sacred filing cabinet have either been solved or debunked by ordinary people in the time that he and Scully were away. Do we even need the X-Files?

There’s already so much of it

Chris Carter himself has wished Coogler good luck since, apart from never satisfyingly ending the alien conspiracy, The X-Files covered so much ground, dipping into aliens, monsters, urban legends, dreams, and tech. You name it, and the show did it, and if they didn’t, 15 years of Supernatural in the interim did.

The X-Files is a fantastic show, despite it’s failings (every time it tried to deal with race, it was a disaster) but its time is over. Spend your time and money on making a good paranormal investigative show designed for the modern TV landscape that sinks or swims on its own quality rather than stealing the sometimes-questionable merit of a show that has long-since had the chance to prove itself in the modern canon.

Check out the rest of Kevin’s X-Files writing here, and hop over to No But Listen for more of his pop culture writing!

(header image via The Guardian)