The X-Files’s Chris Carter

Amid the sea of reboots, remakes and sequels in the TV drama landscape today, perhaps none is more hotly anticipated than The X-Files. The series, starring David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson as a pair of FBI agents investigating paranormal phenomena, premiered quietly on FOX in 1993 and eventually became a cult hit in the U.S. and abroad. The series ran for nine seasons and spawned two films, the first in 1998 and the second in 2008, well after The X-Files had wrapped its FOX run. In the intervening years the show’s cult popularity has lived on, driven in part by its availability for binge-viewing on streaming services across the globe. In January, FOX is bringing The X-Files back as a six-part limited series, with Duchovny and Anderson reprising their roles as Fox Mulder and Dana Scully. The show’s creator, Chris Carter, has also assembled a number of other returning cast members—including Mitch Pileggi as Walter Skinner and William B. Davis as the Smoking Man—as well as original production staff and writers for the miniseries. The first episode was screened at MIPCOM to a packed Grand Auditorium. Carter sat down with TV Drama Weekly to talk about how the new season came together and weigh in on The X-Files’s enduring appeal.

***Image***TV DRAMA: How did the idea for a new limited series of The X-Files come about?
CARTER: I got a phone call one day and it was from Dana Walden [co-CEO and co-chairman of Fox Television Group], who said that FOX wanted to do a short series of episodes. I guess it wasn’t exactly unexpected, because you see they brought back 24, and other shows were being, for lack of a better term, rebooted. The call was unexpected, but the idea wasn’t necessarily unexpected.

TV DRAMA: What can you tell us about the story you plan to tell in these six episodes?
CARTER: We decided to do what we’d always done, which is have some mythology episodes and then some stand-alone episodes, which people sometimes call monster-of-the-week episodes. We decided to bookend the six with mythology episodes, so episode one and episode six are really a two-parter. And the ones that come in the middle all stand individually.

TV DRAMA: Having done more than 20 episodes a season for so long, was it liberating to just do six, or was it constricting to have to pack in the story you wanted to tell in such a small number of episodes?
CARTER: I felt it was not dissimilar to our original approach to the show, but we just did it in a tighter arc. Emotionally I think the story makes a really nice sweep through the characters’ lives. Every episode owes something to the ***Image***one that came before it and illuminates the one that comes after it. So I think we hopefully have done something satisfying through and through.

TV DRAMA: Why do you think these characters, Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, have remained so popular?
CARTER: I think it’s that relationship. It’s simply David [Duchovny] and Gillian [Anderson]. If it weren’t for them and that relationship, this show wouldn’t be what it is. It’s about Mulder and Scully.

TV DRAMA: Getting to nine seasons is pretty unheard of today. Very few shows have that kind of longevity now.
CARTER: We talked about this when we were ending the show. We were saying that there were still so many other X-Files stories to tell and yet we were bringing the show to an end. We were bringing it to an end in a changed television landscape and a changed cultural landscape in America. We all said that there were plenty of X-Files stories to tell, and it was a shame to have to go.

TV DRAMA: Do you envision doing more episodes after this initial six?
CARTER: I think that if we do well on this outing, that will bode well for those prospects.

TV DRAMA: There are a lot of shows being rebooted, a lot of older movies being mined for TV potential. Why do you think that’s happening so frequently?
CARTER: [Broadcasters and studios are] trying to capitalize, I believe, on titles that have immediacy and a familiarity with an audience. It’s intellectual property; it’s taking advantage of your own library. You see the same thing happening in movies. It’s not uncommon to see [studios] remake something. Everything has its time, and everything has its time again.

TV DRAMA: And thanks to Netflix, Hulu and other platforms, it’s so much easier to access shows that are no longer on the air.
CARTER: It’s amazing. Streaming now has opened up a whole new approach to our business. Take a show like Breaking Bad—they say it wouldn’t have been the hit it was without Netflix.

TV DRAMA: The X-Files was a slow build too, wasn’t it?
CARTER: It was a slow build. It wasn’t until we moved to Sunday nights that we really got what I would call a mainstream audience. I still say it was a cult show—it was just a very big cult show.

TV DRAMA: How many of your original crew members were you able to bring back?
CARTER: I brought back three of the original writers of the show, which was really exciting. I brought back the production designer who had done three years of Millennium and the second [X-Files] movie. I brought back the director of photography who had done the last few years of The X-Files in Vancouver. As far as the writing staff, I brought back some people who had written the best X-Files episodes from the early years.

TV DRAMA: The television landscape has changed so much since the show went off the air. Was the process of making the series different today than it was in the 1990s?
CARTER: No, it wasn’t exactly different, but it is a different landscape and a different time, and we’re older and wiser now, hopefully! We’re making the show with Mulder and Scully and we’re being honest to the passage of time, so that’s different. And we had to be honest to where they were in their relationship, and that’s different. But is it a different experience? Not exactly. It’s been hard work, with some different people but also with some of the same people. There were people who had actually worked on the pilot episode of the show who came back to [work on the new episodes].