The X-Files was one of those shows that transcended genre. There were many people who weren’t sci-fi or genre nuts who loved The X-Files when it had its reign in the 90’s, and it boasted nearly a decade of success before it finally went off the air in 2002.
The X-Files was very much a show of its time, which is not to say that it’s “so ‘90’s” and it doesn’t hold up today, but you do wonder if today’s audiences would relate to it or not. It’s indeed odd to think of the 90’s being retro today, but the debut of the show is now twenty years behind us, and the last X-Files movie, 2008’s I Want to Believe, didn’t do all that well.
Considering there are many fans out there who wish Firefly would come back, maybe David Duchovny is taking a cue from them, because he recently hoped that a letter writing campaign could help bring the X-Files back again.
This is clearly not a desperation tactic from an actor who can’t get work. Duchovny has done fine after Files with Californication, and while promoting his film Phantom on Jay Leno, he mentioned that everyone involved would love to come back if the opportunity arrived.
Indeed, as Duchovny said, “[Show creator] Chris Carter, Gillian Anderson, and I, we’re always on board. If you wanna write to Fox and get ‘em going…You could wheel me out. I’ll be Fox Mulder forever, sure.”
And what I didn’t realize until I was finalizing this story is Duchovny was actually talking about doing a third X-Files movie, but if a resurrection of the series could happen, we doubt the fans would turn that down either. But again, will today’s audiences rediscover the X-Files, or would it be nostalgia for those who loved it back in the 90’s?
These days, there’s so much rebooting going on, maybe the X-Files can be rebooted, but Duchovny and Gillian Anderson are such recognized faces from the show, it would be tough to imagine other people in those roles. Whether the X-Files ever returns or not, it definitely left its stamp on modern genre TV, and it’s also nice to see a genre show last as long as it did, which was not an easy feat.
