Ihave a vivid memory of the premiere of “The X-Files.” It was September, 1993, and I was thirteen years old. That summer, I’d discovered horror movies and watched “The Thing” and “The Silence of the Lambs”; I’d also read “Communion,” Whitley Strieber’s best-selling memoir about being abducted by aliens. Like a lot of people back then, I was fascinated by U.F.O.s—in the late eighties and early nineties, alien abduction was a thing. Whole episodes of “The Sally Jesse Raphael Show” and “The Maury Povich Show” were dedicated to it. I couldn’t wait for “The X-Files.” I was so certain that the series would be great that, when the pilot aired, I taped it (a rarer, more labor-intensive undertaking in those pre-DVR days).
The weaknesses of “The X-Files”—tendentious dialogue, an alien conspiracy that made no sense—were obvious from the beginning. Still, the show had two real strengths, and they grew with time. The first, of course, was the gentle, intellectual romance between Mulder and Scully. The second was a vibe of improvisational zaniness that remained undiminished for nearly nine years. Fox’s advance publicity had made “The X-Files” look like a straight-faced, alien-themed procedural. (What a drag that would have been.)
In fact, the show was sly, hilarious, and unpredictable—it was, in a word, unprofessional, in the best sense. Often, it achieved that rarest of artistic virtues, a genuine feeling of spontaneity. Using the same basic setup, “The X-Files” could present all sorts of stories: a gross-out episode about a giant humanoid flukeworm (“The Host”); a satirical, Rashomon-style retelling of an alien abduction (“Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space’ ”); a B-movie story about a possessed tattoo, voiced, cheekily, by Jodie Foster, which urges a man to commit murder (“Never Again”); even an episode filmed in the style of the reality-TV show “Cops” (“X-COPS”). Against this material, Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny turned out to be ideal straight men. They could carry the show anywhere, even as they communicated, through a slight strain in Mulder’s voice or a small twist in Scully’s lip, that they were in on the joke. Nine seasons of flying saucers would have been unbearable. Because of its playfulness, the show was a joy.
The main problem with the two “X-Files” movies, “Fight the Future” (1998) and “I Want to Believe” (2008), was that they were formally incapable of capturing the series’ madcap diversity: they could tell only one story at a time. But the new, six-episode “X-Files” miniseries, which premières this Sunday, is as weird and spontaneous as the original show. The first episode, “My Struggle,” isn’t good: it’s all leaden, paranoid exposition—a too-accurate evocation of the show in its ponderous, alien-conspiracy mode. (Perhaps, as with Karl Ove Knausgaard’s opus, we’ll find out why it’s called “My Struggle” in the sixth installment.) The next two episodes, however, recall vintage “X-Files.” The second, “Founder’s Mutation,” is a gothic mashup of “Rosemary’s Baby” and “Carrie,” in bad taste to just the right degree; the third, “Mulder and Scully Meet the Were-Monster,” is a meta-farce in the tradition of “Jose Chung’s.”
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