The X-Files

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The X-Files (1993–2002, 2016–18) is an American science fiction drama television series, which is a part of The X-Files franchise, created by Chris Carter. Starring Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny as FBI agents Dana Scully and Fox Mulder, investigators of X-Files; unsolved cases involving paranormal phenomena. On May 2002, Fox cancelled the series after 9 seasons. On March 2018, Fox cancelled the series after 2 seasons.

For the 1998 film with the same name, please see The X-Files: Fight the Future.

Seasons

About The X-Files

Somebody at one point said something about the fact that I’ve ended up with, or have chosen, these roles where it’s me. . . not necessarily against, but rivalling these [male] characters: the triptych of Mulder, Hannibal and Spector [the killer from The Fall].
That I find myself in those situations, those roles. I mean, Mulder’s not really a predator, we’re not in that dance, but there’s tension. Various forms of both intellectual and sexual tension.
- Gillian Anderson, "Gillian Anderson: 'I've never been romantically involved with David Duchovny’", Tim Martin, The Telegraph, (February 15, 2016).

It's a curious time to be doing the show because everything is upside-down. There's been a flip since we were first on the air. Now it's as though people don't trust science anymore. In fact, they don't trust anything! Although they do believe in something: They believe in conspiracy theories, more than ever, it seems.
- Chris Carter, “David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson Have a Love-Hate Relationship With Their X-Files Characters”, Jeff Slate, Esquire, (January 3, 2018).

There is a lot of soul there. But, you know, I do think there's also something to the fact that we kind of flip-flopped the gender roles early on, before it was ‘smart,’ or whatever, to do. Mulder was kind of this guy being instinctual, emotional, irrational, while Gillian—Scully—was rational and stoic. At least in TV terms, I think that was revolutionary, and it strengthened our performances because it was something Gillian and I could both sink our teeth into.
- David Duchovny, “David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson Have a Love-Hate Relationship With Their X-Files Characters”, Jeff Slate, Esquire, (January 3, 2018).

The frame of The X-Files, which started out as a pretty much straight-ahead thriller/mystery/horror genre science-fiction show, kind of started to mold and get more flexible as writers like Glen Morgan and James Wong and then Vince [Gilligan] and then Darin Morgan took it into a more comedic area, sometimes into a more horror area. And the show started to bend and it never broke, and I think that's a testament to the vision that [showrunner Chris Carter] had in the beginning, which I don't think he had consciously. But he created a show that could bend and could grow, and he had the luck or the foresight to hire writers that were going to take his baby and turn it into something else from time to time.

I think [Carter] made two characters who were complementary to one another, and kind of completed one another in the romantic comedy sense. You know, they had aspects of a personality that the other was lacking, and I think because it took so long for them to be physical in any way there was a certain ache to the show. ...
That wasn't what the show was about. The show was about the cases; the show was about the quest. Whatever the show was about, it wasn't about this relationship. That's kind of, I think, the magic of the relationship and the show, is that it was never the point of the show — it always happened in the spaces of the show.
- David Duchovny, "Mulder And Scully On Why The World Is Ready For An 'X-Files' Reboot", NPR, (January 23, 2016).

The X-Files form of American folk paranoia wasn’t just part of the zeitgeist. It was a lot older and a lot deeper. It’s very much part of American culture. I’d been reading Fortean Times [the journal of unexplained phenomena, named after one of Mulder’s spiritual antecedents, the paranormal researcher Charles Fort, who was born in 1874] almost since it began and The X-Files was a gloriously pulped-out version of that.
- William Gibson, "Can The X-Files exist in a post-9/11 world?", Andrew Harrison, New Statesmen, (December 29, 2015).

The very idea that the corrupt and the murky could be centred on something as crazy as a government cover-up of aliens in Area 51 now seems almost quaint. The X-Files is actually a naively optimistic show from a time when America hadn’t been so deeply threatened and could turn its attention inward. Any show that opens every episode by asserting ‘The truth is out there’ is fundamentally pretty optimistic and open-minded.
- Robert Shearman, "Can The X-Files exist in a post-9/11 world?", Andrew Harrison, New Statesmen, (December 29, 2015).

The Gothic tradition concerns things lurking in the beyond and monsters that often represent ourselves. It’s traditionally looked at how big institutions like the church and state are in fact fundamentally corrupt. That idea of the evil within is a very X-Files thing. Both Gothic literature and The X-Files are about taking that walk into the dark woods and facing what we can’t define. That’s essentially what Mulder does in the show.
- Sharon R. Yang, "Can The X-Files exist in a post-9/11 world?", Andrew Harrison, New Statesmen, (December 29, 2015).

External links

Encyclopedic article on The X-Files on Wikipedia
Media related to The X-Files on Wikimedia Commons
The X-Files quotes at the Internet Movie Database