16 Great TV Shows, Part 8: The X-Files

Part 1: The Wonder Years
Part 2: The Simpsons
Part 3: Star Trek: Deep Space Nine
Part 4: Seinfeld
Part 5: The John Larroquette Show
Part 6: ER
Part 7: Newsradio


The X-Files is a show that I often compare to one's first serious girlfriend. You become infatuated with her, you give her everything and in the end she breaks your heart into a thousand pieces.

Despite that, your car keys are in your hands within seconds of receiving a "U up?" text, no matter how bad it ended last time.

By my count, this series broke my heart AT LEAST four times:

1) The revelation of what happened to Mulder's sister. Seriously, what was that?

2) The finale, which somehow managed to spend half its running time in a courtroom and still offer no real answers that hadn't already been revealed by the show. This was capped off with the Smoking Man coming back AGAIN, and a really unsatisfying open ending with Mulder and Scully on the run.

3) X-FILES: THE TRUTH IS OUT THERE, when they tried to tell a movie about paranormal investigates working a case with no paranormal elements.

4) The finale of the recent revival. Another open ending, this one a major cliffhanger, coming on the heels of mytharc stories that only made the conspiracy even MORE incomprehensible.

But it's coming back again next season and I can't wait.

I'm not sure even I appreciated how different The X-Files was when I started getting into it at the top of its third season. I knew that it was cooler looking than most shows on TV and had a vibe and a concept that hadn't really been done before, a sort of sci-fi procedural about FBI agents who investigate the paranormal. The more I learned about TV history, the more I realized that at most points in the past, if a show like this had been done, it would have leaned into the silliness. (EERIE, INDIANA - another excellent show - is probably a good citation of how the paranormal was usually treated with a wink rather than solemn seriousness.) There are a lot of things that define The X-Files, but it's serious-as-hell tone probably ranks near the top. It's determined to take its cases as seriously as Clarice Starling takes hunting Buffalo Bill.

Another rarity for the time was the utter lack of closure that many cases got. Try to imagine the reports that Mulder and Scully must have filed each week and you realize that rarely do they even get as far as taking a suspect into custody or finding an explanation for events that would be taken seriously by any bureau. This is probably the cusp of TV challenging its audience by not tying up everything neatly.

Genre TV had been ghettoized for a long time. Look up the history of any genre show from the 80s or early 90s and odds are that most of them were relegated to first-run syndication. Network TV wasn't inclined to take sci-fi seriously, nor did they see their audience as particularly sophisticated. The X-Files changed all that. Not every attempt to clone the series worked (Fox had a LOT of stone-serious sci-fi failures in the back half of the decade), but it seemed to let the genie out of the bottle. You can draw a straight line from The X-Files to LOST, and in turn, the wave of genre TV that the latter show spawned.

So what keeps me coming back to The X-Files despite increasing dissatisfaction with the creative direction? David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson. I was never a hard-core Mulder and Scully "shipper" in that I was desperate to see them hook up, but their relationship was always the core of the show. Mulder never met a circumstance he didn't have a bizarre left-field explanation for, a complete opposite to Scully's conviction to finding answers in science. In retrospect, it's notable that though they had a conflict of methods, they were always professional. Today I wonder if writers might make the mistake of amping up the conflict between the two to the levels of a buddy cop movie. These two were partners, first and foremost, and that harmony was always more fascinating than whether or not they were schtupping. Also, on all counts, its the more interesting and less obvious tone for their dynamic. Conflict is the essence of drama, but that doesn't mean that opposing characters need to be irrevocably polarized in order to be fascinating.

Personally, I always preferred Scully to Mulder and though I'm in the minority, I really liked Season 8's notion of finally making Scully more of a believer and pairing her with the no-nonsense former cop John Doggett. I could have seen that partnership lasting a few more seasons had the show been able to make a clean break from the Mulder era.

So this leads perhaps to one of the biggest impressions the show made on me: Know when to resolve long-running storylines. What really caused the show to stagnate was its insistence on tying EVERYTHING back to the main alien mytharc. Thus, each subsequent year, that mythology acquired more baggage and more detritus. Had they tied off the storyline definitively in season 6 with the end of the conspiracy, the show might have moved forward. Certainly the full-time departure of Mulder at the end of Season 8 should have been the cue to tie off the uber arc and let next season begin with Scully, Doggett and Reyes investigating entirely new paranormal storylines.

The X-Files's lack of closure once made it a breath of fresh air. By the end, it was just an exercise in frustration. The show is scared to leave an element this big behind and so it makes the storyline confusing and impenetrable for even those of us who've followed it from the start. It was a little like if Buffy spent seven seasons with The Master as the Big Bad behind it all. At a certain point, a writer has to be willing to close the door on some threads and play a few new notes.

When I was younger, it was the mytharc episodes I loved the most. Those were the episodes that really seemed to matter because they dangled the possibility of revelation and change. In reruns, however, knowing that the path that show takes leads only to a lot of red herrings and narrative cul-de-sacs, I now favor the well-crafted standalones.

I didn't need The X-Files to tie everything up in a neat bow, but the occasional resolution would have gone a long way to restoring audience goodwill. This is probably one of the few shows on this list that has nearly as many "don't do this" lessons as "steal from this."

But what do I know? As I said, I'll be there on premiere night for the next limited-run revival. I just can't quit Mulder and Scully.

Part 9: Law & Order

Part 10: Homicide: Life on the Street

Part 11: Buffy The Vampire Slayer

Part 12: Gilmore Girls

Part 13: Everwood

Part 14: The Office

Part 15: Breaking Bad

Part 16: 13 Reasons Why

My KsiteTV post: "What serialized shows like The Vampire Diaries should learn from Buffy’s third season."

I've got another column over at KsiteTV today, this one discussing some things to consider when structuring an entire season's worth of shows.  In the course of doing so, I examine the Klaus arc from the last season of The Vampire Diaries and see how it stacks up against one of the best seasons of genre television - the third season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

The CW premieres this week are about to send the new season of genre programming into full swing and you know what that means: season long arcs, new Big Bads, devious endgames, and angst by the barrelful. Serialized arcs are the bread-and-butter for genre TV, which is interesting because as recently as a decade ago, writers and producers were encouraged to be more episodic in their storytelling. (For those not in the know, this means that every episode was more of a standalone, with the stories being resolved in a single show with few continuing threads.) The thinking was that serialized arcs were a harder sell in syndication because they meant that the TV stations couldn’t show episodes in any random order. 

Personally, I never understood why this was such a problem but at the same time, it’s hard to argue with the success that episodic shows like Law & Order, CSI and their various spinoffs had on the syndicated market. For the longest time, producers worked to find the right balance between telling a season-long story that had forward momentum through the season while also making as many of those components as standalone as possible. 

Aside from the syndication argument, there’s probably a case to be made that it’s not bad on a creative level to take a break from the uber-arcs now and then. Just to name one example, as captivated as I was by the conspiracy arcs on The X-Files during their original run, in reruns I’m far more apt to settle in for a standalone rerun like “Jose Chung’s ‘From Outer Space’” or “Bad Blood.” And let’s face it – sometimes it can get a little tedious if a show spends its entire season in strict serialization. Done right, it can lead to rich storytelling. Done wrong… and there’s a sense of treading water while the writers drag out an inevitable conflict between the good guys and the bad. 

Check out KsiteTV for the rest of the article!

Friday Free-for-All - The Tommy Westphall Multiverse Theory

Some of you might remember that a while back I noted that actor/comedian Richard Belzer has appeared as Detective John Munch on six different shows: Homicide: Life on the Street, Law & Order, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, The X-Files, The Beat and The Wire. The obvious implication of this is simple - via the transitive property, Law & Order and The X-Files exist in the same universe.

Better still, since Law & Order has crossed over with several other spin-offs (Criminal Intent, Trial by Jury, Law & Order: Los Angeles and Conviction) and The X-Files crossed over with Millennium and The Lone Gunman, that means that this TV universe contains at least 12 distinct TV shows.

And yet, Homicide has a few other crossovers to add to the mix - notably St. Elsewhere, and here's where things get interesting. See, St. Elsewhere crossed over with Cheers (no, really!). Cheers spun off Frasier and crossed over with Wings, and because of NBC's ubiquitous crossover and cameo stunts in the 90s, Frasier is linked to many other sitcoms.

So in theory, it's possible that Fox Mulder could have stopped into Boston and had a beer with Norm and Cliff, then headed to New York and butted heads with Detective Lennie Briscoe over jurisdiction.

(These are the things I spent my days thinking about when I was in college. All of this is from memory - not from research.)

Ready for me to blow your mind? In the final episode of St. Elsewhere, we were shown that the entire series had actually been a fantasy existing only in the mind of an autistic child named Tommy Westphall.

So in theory, not only do all of these shows exist in the same universe - they ALL exist in the mind of an autistic child!

One night in college I was poking around the internet, and I stumbled onto a site discussing this very phenomenon... but their take on the Tommy Westphall Universe was far more comprehensive than mine. I established connections based only on direct contact between the shows - they tend to be a bit looser, using common references between different series as enough to establish a link. Currently, the site alleges a link between 282 series!

So if you're into TV geekery and want to see just how you can get from All in the Family to CSI: NY, head on over to Tommy Westphall's Mind - A multiverse explored and drink in the TV trivia. They even have a handy chart showing how each show connects to the others.

UPDATE: Thanks to poster Nat G on Ken Levine's site, I've rediscovered another TV crossover site.

The Five Worst Series Finales

As with yesterday's season finale list, I have decided to confine this list to shows within my lifetime. Like I said yesterday, this is a purely subjective list, and hopefully it will spur some of you to comment with your own picks that I missed.

In retracing all the TV finales I've watched over the years, I've realized there are a lot of final episodes that range from "meh" to "okay." Most shows manage to turn out a sendoff that is at least passable. In the cases where there's greater pressure on a finale to wrap up a major epic, or a more demanding premise, that's usually where you'll see shows fall on their face.

With that in mind, it's not surprising that there are few sitcoms on this list. In a lot of ways the bar is lower for them. Most of the episodes on this list are ones that provoked epic amounts of "Fan rage" upon their original airings.

5) Quantum Leap: "Mirror Image" - I debated if this one was fair, as the creators shot it when the future of their series was in doubt. Still, this was intended as a launching pad into the next season and they had supposedly been warned it could be the final episode. The episode is a bizarre bore that has Sam leaping into his own adult body and finding himself in a strange metaphysical bar on the exact day of his birth. Others in the bar appear to be either leapers or odd echos of previous leaps, along with a bartender who might be the God/Time/Whoever that sends Sam on his leaps. There's a nice moment near the end where Sam uses his one "free leap" to fix things for Al rather than go home, but then the episode concludes with the biggest middle finger to fans it could have had: a caption reading "Dr. Sam Beckett never returned home."

4) Enterprise: "These Are the Voyagers" - Poor Scott Bakula. He's a great actor but is the star of two of the worst finales of all-time. This episode was a slap in the face to the Enterprise cast, as the whole story is framed as a holograph simulation being played by Next Generation's Commander Riker (Jonathan Frakes) and Counselor Troi (Marina Sirtis) in a segment that's meant to take place during TNG's seventh season episode "The Pegasus." The regulars play second-fiddle in their own finale with an utterly boring story that pointlessly kills off Engineer Tucker, and then denies the audience any real closure by neglecting to show a historic speech the captain is supposedly fated to give.

3) 7th Heaven: "Goodbye and Thank You" - I didn't watch the show regularly, but I couldn't resist tuning in for this trainwreck. Not only does all the interesting stuff happen off-screen (such as a bride and groom canceling their wedding while at the altar). Not only does the show eat up time with three badly staged, acted and written fantasy scenes that seem to be there only to incorporate Jessica Biel into the show. Not only does the twist that all three Camden couples are pregnant with twins cause eye-rolling of epic proportions. But the ratings for this episode (no doubt from people like me who came to dance on this show's grave) were high enough to motivate the CW to bring the show back for yet another year. The casualty: Everwood.

(I know the mere fact that this wasn't really the end should disqualify it from this list, but it's MY list and it was fully intended as the end right up until the week after it aired. I say it counts.)

2) Star Trek: Voyager: "Endgame" - The entire premise of the show was about a Starfleet ship, stranded decades from home. For seven seasons, we watched as the crew struggled to find a faster way back, even as they pulled together. I could have forgiven the time-travel cheat that sends them home 17 years ahead of schedule, essentially amounting to a deus ex machina. I could have looked past yet another use of the Borg, a once-threatening enemy that Voyager declawed through overuse. I even could have looked past the complete lack of sacrifice or consequence here. What I can't ignore is that the audience waited seven years to see what would happen when the crew made it back - and the show fades to ending credits before Voyager reaches Earth orbit.

And the Worst Finale of All-Time (in my humble opinion)....

1) The X-Files: "The Truth" - The only thing the show got right here was bringing back David Duchovney. To really explain everything wrong with the finale would probably mean discussing what went wrong with this series as a whole. Suffice to say that at least half - if not more - of the episode is taken up with a trial that serves only to lecture to the audience about what they already know of the alien conspiracy. The main character is passive, sitting there while everyone else is stuck rehashing old territory (not unlike the Seinfeld finale, actually.)

Worse, though the episode was advertised as explaining everything, it's clear the writers can't fold all their red herrings into a single coherent conspiracy explanation. The one bit of the conspiracy that never made sense to me was the whole super-soldier plot, which emerged from thin air in season eight. The trial scenes attempt to skirt this, but it's clear those twists can't be made to work with the bees, the black oil, the alien embryos and all the other malarkey we were asked to swallow for nine years.

With "The Truth" as its valedictory address, The X-Files makes an excellent case for why one shouldn't follow a series that's based on a never-ending circle jerk of mysteries and conspiracies - or at the very least, why one shouldn't expect any satisfaction out of the ending. After being burned on this show, I watched the first two seasons of Lost, always on guard that nothing would ever make sense. I finally quit during the third season when I realized that not only was I completely indifferent to the mysteries, but that I actively hated 2/3 of the characters.

I know there are people who would argue that Seinfeld's finale deserves to be on this list. My feeling is that Seinfeld never had anything it needed to resolve. That last episode was surely a disappointment, but it feels so unlike a normal episode that it's easy for me to divorce it from the series. It doesn't taint the rest of the series for me.

What are your picks?