Category: TV
The X-Files and the steamroller of pop-culture
It’s surprising just how fast the TV series The X-Files went from one of the cornerstones of pop-culture to being crushed to gravel on the entertainment super highway in just a few short years. Literally The X-Files went from tens of millions of people watching each new episode in the late 1990s to releasing a failed feature film not many would see within a decade.
How does this happen? There was a time that The X-Files was everywhere; on the covers of magazines, on all the big TV news shows, parodied on The Simpsons, being talked about online when that was a rarity and even fans being hurt in a crush when too many showed up for signing events to meet the starts of the show.
All this in just a few short years to the series not even running in wide syndication is astonishing.
To be sure, The X-Files didn’t start as a popular show. In its first season the series aired in the dead-zone of Friday nights and it didn’t get great ratings for that time. What started as a series watched by about 8 million people would dip to a little over 5 million before eeking back up to 8. Its second season would start off a bit better but about the same. Then something amazing would happen — by the end of the second season 10 million people were watching the show. By the start of the third a whopping 20 million were tuning in.
The X-Files wasn’t a show anymore, it was a phenomena.
And these ratings would grow to the high of the nearly 30 million who watched the ’97 post Super-Bowl episode. And it’s not like today when ratings take into account people watching shows days later on their DVRs or on-demand. Those 30 million people were watching the same show on the same night.
All of which makes me wonder; why was The X-Files forgotten and discarded so quickly?
Well, I suppose the fate of being forgotten is what awaits all TV series, even the successful ones. And it’s only because I was a huge fan of The X-Files that I noticed that it was slowly turning from “phenomena” to “footnote.”
The X-Files didn’t spring from the earth fully formed. Series creator Chris Carter was building a foundation on series that had come before The X-Files. Shows like Twin Peaks and Kolchak: The Night Stalker are all in the DNA of The X-Files in one way or another. Twin Peaks was another phenomena where 20 million people were watching each new episode and the original Kolchak TV movie that came before its series was the most watched TV movie in history.
But this kind of popularity can’t last. Twin Peaks lasted two seasons before being cancelled for low ratings while Kolchak was all but forgotten by anyone but the most ardent fans after the series that came after the TV movies was cancelled after just one season. Like The X-Files, those series went from the highest of highs to mostly forgotten in the span of a few short years.
Thinking about it now, being mostly forgotten is actually probably a normal thing for popular shows like Twin Peaks and Kolchak and, yes, The X-Files. We’re always on the lookout for new and different series. If we weren’t we’d never checkout new and different shows like The X-Files since we’d still be watching The Honeymooners and I Love Lucy.
I guess what’s different about shows like The X-Files is that why they may seem to be mostly forgotten, their DNA lives on in other TV series today. Without The X-Files we’d never have shows like the CSI franchise or Lost or Sherlock or The Walking Dead and on and on and on.
Now comes a renewed and updated The X-Files with the original creator, writers and cast in place for a limited six episode run starting Sunday, January 24 on Fox then moving to Monday nights. Will this new The X-Files be as good and as influential as the original? Only time will tell.
The Highwayman (1987) opening credits
Direct beam comms #5
TV
So there’s the Classic Doctor Who series that ran from 1963 to 1996 and a modern Doctor Who of ones from 2005 to present. Is there now a Classic The X-Files of shows that ran from 1993 to 2002 and a modern The X-Files of ones from now on? I suppose much of if the “classic” and “modern” labels will only have any meaning if the new Fox series is limited to just the six episodes or if there’s more than one season.
TNT is working on a TV series version of the film Animal Kingdom. That movie is one of my favorites, I thought it was one of the best of 2010, about a lives of a family of crooks that’s slowly unravelling after one is killed by the police and in retribution the family kills two cops. I think that’s why the movie is so interesting — it’s about something coming apart, destroying itself. It’s still too early to tell, but I don’t think that a (reportedly) series about a family of criminals that’s not coming apart but instead lasts season after season would be as interesting as the latter. Then again I’d be happy to eat my words since I didn’t think Hannibal or The Americans would be any good either and those two shows turned out to be two of my favorites.
Comics
The comic series Aquila, which ran in the pages of 2000 AD, is available in a collected edition January 12. Aquila: Blood of the Iceni is a sort of mashup of Conan the Barbarian and the writings of H.P. Lovecraft with the title character living in Roman Empire times in the place that will one day be the UK who’s brought back from the dead with one catch; he must provide souls to the ancient hungry god Ammit the Devourer. A god that’s always hungry!
In finding these souls, Aquila must do battle with winged creatures, an insane Nero trying to become a god himself and the natives of England who are out to push all foreign invaders off their land.
Books
CUNNING PLANS: Talks By Warren Ellis is a book of talks collected as essays by Warren Ellis who’s best known for his work in comics. Ellis has a knack for describing the times we live in from almost a future historical perspective. He comments on are everyday mundane things from cell phones to Instagram to traveling. But it’s how he sees them that’s so unique.
“Our ghosts are our history. Their voices are what we learn from. Our rituals are our methods, and our castings and workings are our scientific experiments, magical practices to learn the true names of things that mane the world. Because, in magic, when you name something you can control it.” — Warren Ellis
Apps
For the last few months I’ve been writing most everything in Scrivener using Markdown. I like how Scrivener organizes everything — I have one document for these Direct Beam Comms articles, one for my 2016 columns, one for random stuff… — and how I can export the finished product in just about any format I want.
And Markdown, a “…text-to-HTML conversion tool for web writers…” is a nice way for me to format copy without having to worry about future-proofing my work. I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few years trying to figure this out. If I save everything as a Word DOC and in 20 years there’s no easy way to open the files then I’m screwed. What I’ve been doing over the last five years is saving all my work as rich text format (RTF) figuring that while this might not be the best way to save things, it’s got to be better than the proprietary Word format. Then I thought about saving out everything as HTML files, since those are essentially easily readable text files that anyone at any time in the future will be able to open.
Scrivener solves all these problems for me. I write things once using Markdown and then can export into whatever file format fits my preference. I’ll usually export a RTF if the piece is being published somewhere else and HTML so I can copy and past this content into my website. But I can also save PDFs, ebooks or a host of other file formats too.