Truth is, the audience has changed and The X-Files hasn't. That Donald Trump seems to buy into much of it (he was an eager apostle of the Barack Obama 'birther' nonsense) really is Exhibit A for that argument. When people now think of conspiracy theorists we don't think Warren-Commission debunkers or harmless 'Elvis is alive' cranks, but 9/11 'Truthers' and Sandy Hook deniers. Today, in the mainstream world, there's a greater public queasiness over conspiracy theories. Conspiracies in 1993 didn't then have the whiff of lunacy and cruelty about them that they do in 2018. Unusually smart for a network drama series of the time, it took the post-Watergate paranoia of movies such as All The President's Men and The Parallax View and gave them an intoxicating science-fiction makeover.īut mistrust in the political establishment has a different flavour today. When The X-Files debuted in September 1993 it really was like nothing else around it. With FOX looking less and less likely to renew the reactivated X-Files for a 12th season, and the now departed Gillian Anderson openly scoffing about the 77% plunge in viewers, as well as joining the Twitter chorus mocking the season-finale twist, where does this leave The X-Files? How did we get from the hysteria of 2016's 'event series' to this? We chose to remind ourselves of Eugene Tooms, Deep Throat and Clyde Bruckman, Jose Chung and Duane Barry… We chose to look back to a time when we believed – oh, the naivety – that Chris Carter had a coherent plan for those mythology episodes.

We decided instead to remember those ratings-conquering early years, when The X-Files had, it seemed, hit the world's cultural G-spot.

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