How The X-Files sparked a revolution in television

The truth is out there — or so we were told when The X-Files first introduced itself to the world 20 years ago today.

That tagline has outlived the series that spawned it, taking its place as a permanent part of the pop-culture lexicon — a testament to the success of a series that ran for nine seasons before departing the airwaves in 2001.

The X-Files wasn't exactly an instant hit. Its opening episode was watched by just 12 million people, a number that would constitute a massive hit today, but was unspectacular for its era. The show's highest-rated moment came in 1997, when Fox aired the fourth season's "Leonard Betts" episode immediately after Super Bowl XXXI.

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

Since its run, The X-Files' influence has stretched far beyond the audience that originally consumed the show. In fact, without The X-Files, we might never have had Lost, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones, or many of the other staples of the so-called "golden age of television" we're still enjoying today.

Sci-fi and fantasy are big business in television now — but when The X-Files premiered in 1993, betting on the genre was widely regarded as a major gamble by Fox. The 1990s was a time when the sitcom was king, when shows like SeaQuest DSV and Walker, Texas Ranger were what passed as "creative" network programming. The X-Files proved an unexpected hit with the coveted 18-49 demographic — which made it an unexpected hit with advertisers. Suddenly, the "cult" was mainstream, hitting magazine covers and movie theaters — and the other networks couldn't help but notice the money their competitor was raking in.

The form The X-Files took was just as important as its content. The series unleashed a bevy of overarching storylines: What happened to Mulder's sister? What was the Cigarette Smoking Man's real goal? Would Mulder and Scully ever act on that sky-high sexual tension? Audiences' obsessive engagement with these questions offered proof that we were ready for season-spanning storylines, complex mythologies, and ever-darker subject matter. It's for good reason The X-Files was one of the first shows to make entire seasons available for purchase on DVD — a practice that has since migrated to Netflix.

The X-Files set the stage for episodic enigmas like Lost, freak-of-the-week staples like Supernatural, and horror/humor like Buffy the Vampire Slayer — which Joss Whedon once described as "My So-Called Life meets The X-Files." But it also offered a training ground for some of today's top TV talent. Homeland co-creators Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa both cut their teeth in The X-Files writers' room, and it's easy to find embryonic origins of their Emmy-winning drama in X-Files episodes like "Sleepless" and "Unrequited" — both of which involve soldiers struggling to reintegrate into everyday life after returning from active duty. Other key X-Files alumni include Darin Morgan (Fringe), David Amann (Castle), John Shiban (Hell on Wheels), Greg Walker (Vegas), and Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad), who got his big break after sending in a speculative script as a fan during The X-Files' second season.

As with any show that's two decades old, there are aspects of The X-Files that haven't aged well — but for anyone who hasn't experienced its influence firsthand, the barrier to entry has never been lower. (All nine seasons are available to stream on Netflix). And even as The X-Files finds its legacy overshadowed by many of the other shows out there, the truth — if it is indeed out there — will lead critics and audiences alike to recognize The X-Files' pivotal place in TV history.