It's Official: The X-Files is Returning to Television

Posted on March 24, 2015

It's official: The X-Files is returning to Fox. Creator Chris Carter will be running the show. David Duchovny will return as FBI Agent Fox Mulder and Gillian Anderson will return as FBI Agent Dana Scully.

The show is being billed as a six-episode event series which will begin shooting this summer. The details of the show, including a premiere date have not been revealed yet. Chris Carter says the scripts haven't been written yet, but he has an idea of how he wants the series to unfold.

The original show premiered in 1993 on Fox and ran for nine seasons. The X-Files racked up 16 Emmys, 5 Golden Globes and SAG Awards for Duchovny and Anderson, as well as awards from the Directors Guild, the Writers Guild and the Television Critics Association. It is quite unusual for a genre show to pick up so many awards.

The show spawned two feature films. The last film, 2008's The X Files: I Want to Believe, did not have the box office punch of the first film but it made $68 million worldwide on a small budget of $30 million. We love anything X-Files, but we're hoping the new series picks up the action quotient that was missing from the last film. Hopefully Fox is giving the show a decent budget.

It's now been more than a decade since the show was on the air. But many of the show's themes are as relevant as ever. The Wikileaks scandal and the Edward Snowden leaks about the NSA's widespread surveillance activities are right in the show's wheelhouse. The overarching mythology of the show revolved around a huge government conspiracy to keep the American people in the dark about a nasty little deal the government made with an alien race to save their own hides. Privacy, surveillance and conspiracy are all still hot topics today.

Chris Carter addressed the challenge in starting up a tv show so many years since it went off the air. He explained, "I think of it as a 13-year commercial break,” said Carter. “The good news is the world has only gotten that much stranger, a perfect time to tell these six stories."

So now that Duchovny and Anderson are locked down, we can't help but speculate about the rest of the cast. We do hope William B. Davis returns as the Cigarette Smoking Man. Right now he's playing the older version of Alex Sadler on Syfy's Continuum, but surely he could find the time to torment Mulder and Scully again.

The other three cast members we hope to see return are Melvin Frohike (Tom Braidwood), John Fitzgerald Byers (Bruce Harwood), and Richard Langly (Dean Haglund), better known as The Lone Gunmen. The Gunmen are brilliant hackers and conspiracy theorists who helped Mulder with his cases. They got their own series which was cancelled after one year, although it was an excellent -- and hilarious -- show. The characters were killed off on an X-Files episode, but in the comics they are still alive after faking their deaths. We want more Lone Gunmen. We can't wait to see what Chris Carter comes up with.