Mulder and Scully were always in search of some dark secret, some monster that needed stopping. If nothing else, week after week, it sent its two central FBI agents out into a scarier, more cinematic America than had ever been seen on the small screen.
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But it was the rare series that could follow up an episode that barely worked with an episode that made it seem like the best show on television. It had bad episodes and good episodes, and its overarching storyline about an alien conspiracy to take over the Earth eventually stopped making sense.
In an age when most other big TV programs were workplace ensemble dramas that discussed the major issues of the day (see: ER, NYPD Blue, Chicago Hope, Law & Order), The X-Files was one part coolly deliberate throwback and one part forward-looking masterpiece. The X-Files aired in an awkward time, between other more obviously notable shows.
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But that oversimplification still helps people who think about television figure out how to classify various artistic movements within a medium that moves quickly and often responsively to events within both the medium itself and the world at large.īut this mode of thinking means that the influence The X-Files had on our modern television era has been largely ignored. No TV series arrives without precedent, and no show so completely defines an era that every other contemporaneous show lives in its shadow. This is, of course, an oversimplification. Shows are seen and assessed in terms of their influences, or in terms of what “era” they roughly fell into. TV as a medium, maybe even more than film or literature, tends to define itself in terms of landmark programs. Or of The Sopranos, paving the way for an era of morally complex dramas starring men (yeah, almost always men) who rarely worried about doing the right thing. Think of I Love Lucy, discovering a way to produce very good TV comedy with speed and exactitude. The history of television can be told through certain shows, as surely as it can be told through certain personalities or events. The following is an excerpt from Monsters of the Week: The Complete Critical Companion to The X-Files, by Vox.com critic at large Todd VanDerWerff and Zack Handlen.
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