The 1990s’ Best Sci-Fi Show Was So Good, It’s Getting A Reboot 33 Years Later

While the best sci-fi series of the ‘90s has already been revived more than once, the Fox show’s enduring popularity makes it unsurprising that it’s now due to receive another reboot soon. It is tough to overstate the impact that David Lynch and Mark Frost’s small-town mystery/psychological thriller Twin Peaks had on TV history. The show’s unique blend of offbeat character comedy, small-town soap opera, murder mystery plotting, and moments of truly dark psychological horror shaped countless shows in the decades that followed.

After Twin Peaks became a mainstream hit, the show inspired another hit series on Fox that blended the police procedural format with paranormal mysteries. This series was soon even bigger than Twin Peaks, a bona fide pop culture phenomenon that helped shape shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Evil, Grimm, Fringe, Lucifer, and Supernatural. By mixing creepy paranormal plot elements borrowed from the fantasy, sci-fi, and horror genres with a detective drama setup, this show managed to feel both familiar and innovative at the same time.

Lasting 202 episodes across nine seasons, Fox’s original run of The X-Files set the gold standard for supernatural police shows. As Gillian Anderson’s resident skeptical Agent Scully and David Duchovny’s earnest conspiracy theorist Agent Mulder investigate everything from cryptids to shapeshifting serial killers to alien abductions, The X-Files balanced monster-of-the-week stories with more ambitious Mystery Box plotting that would later be borrowed by innovative shows like Lost. Considering how successful the show’s original run was, it should come as no surprise that The X-Files is soon to be rebooted.

The X-Files Holds Up Surprisingly Well 33 Years After Its Debut

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The show’s original run began in 1993 and ended in 2002, with the franchise’s first theatrical movie spinoff, The X-Files: Fight the Future, arriving in 1998. Six years after the series finale, Anderson and Duchovny reprised their roles in a standalone theatrical sequel, The X-Files: I Want to Believe, and the show’s two-season revival aired another eight years later, in 2016.

Admittedly, the revival was unable to recapture the magic of the original series, but its two-season run didn’t dull the shine of the original show. While much has been made of the incredible chemistry between its stars, the biggest innovation that The X-Files brought to TV was its careful balance between serialized season-long story arcs and episodic weekly outings. Before the overarching conspiratorial mythology of The X-Files kept viewers hooked, most cop shows relied entirely on standalone storytelling.

In an era when ambitious shows like Foundation and The Expanse have taken full advantage of the complexity that TV storytelling can accommodate, it can be hard to explain just how innovative the approach of The X-Files was in the early ‘90s. However, without The X-Files drip-feeding clues to its larger mystery throughout the course of its show’s run, viewers would never have gotten Lost’s infamously complex story, which, in turn, influenced everything from Yellowjackets and Stranger Things to Silo, Severance, and Dark.

The X-Files’ Reboot Has An Impossible Task, But Some Exciting Names Attached

Since The X-Files was such an influential series, the thought of rebooting the show for a new generation is a daunting task. Luckily, Sinners director Ryan Coogler is perfectly suited to the job. The director has displayed a deep love for sci-fi, horror, and fantasy with the Black Panther movies and Sinners, while Creed proved that he can take well-worn Hollywood franchises and give them a fresh, original new story while still honoring the original story.

The news that The X-Files reboot will replace its main stars with Himesh Patel and Danielle Deadwyler is equally exciting, since the franchise’s 2016 revival proved that Mulder and Scully’s story needed to come to an overdue end. Meanwhile, the announcement that Oscar winner Amy Madigan, Ben Foster, Steve Buscemi, and Riverdale‘s Lochlyn Munro are all set to guest star in the pilot of The X-Files reboot shows that the series will have no shortage of star power.

Release Date

1993 – 2018-00-00

Network

FOX

Showrunner

Chris Carter