![]() Instead, he and his writers worked things out on the fly – the art of serialised television being to make it look like you had a plan all the time, even though you're were making it up as you went along. While Carter, as creator, oversaw the direction of the series, he had no overall plan for the ongoing plotlines at the beginning. Carter pitched the series to Fox twice before they accepted it, and the network interfered with his vision for the show considerably during early production. Using the FBI allowed a national and sometimes international scope to the series, preventing from the stories stretching credibility too far by having everything occur in one location. The greater inspiration, though, was real life: the political corruption of the Watergate scandal, documented murder cases, and a report that 3.7 million Americans believed they had been abducted by aliens.Īll this came together in The X-Files, based on the premise of a special department of the FBI that investigated unsolved and inexplicable cases. Other series that inspired The X-Filesinclude genre classic The Twilight Zone, and police procedurals including the long-running British series Prime Suspect. It was far from the first series creator Chris Carter cites Kolchak: The Night Stalker, a 1974-5 series that combined crime investigation and the paranormal, as a huge influence. The series was an early example of what I like to call a paraprocedural: a programme which has the setting and structure of a procedural drama, but with paranormal or fantastic elements. ![]() In the early nineties, even that title sequence seemed cool, and not, as it clearly is, hilariously naff. It had everything: aliens, monsters, creepy-as-hell mysteries and quotable taglines. I was ten – just a bit too young to really be watching something like this, but absolutely the right age to want to watch it. By the time it arrived on the BBC, it was already a talking point. The X-Files first aired in September 1993 in the States for the UK, save some limited satellite showings, it was a full year later.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |