New X-Files Will Mix Mythology And Standalone Episodes

During their executive session with the Television Critics Association, Fox showed a clip from The X-Files new event series and talked about how the film will mix mythology and standalone episodes.

The scene screened at TCA featured Scully frantically arriving at Mulder's farmhouse because he'd hung up on her earlier. He's talking X-Files again and she's worried for his sanity. She tells him he wants to believe so badly, and he says that the truth is out there, while discussing the leads a new character named Tad O'Malley has given him. There's also a young woman staying in Mulder's house, but it's purely related to research.

They managed to say "X-Files" a lot in the clip, as if ensuring that this new series was in fact about the X-Files, not a standalone like the second film I Want to Believe. Dana Walden, Chairman and CEO of Fox Television Group, said the limited series will feature the same balance of episode types as the original run of the show.

"You're seeing a scene from our first episode back," Walden told me. "As you may recall, the mix of episodes we did was mythology episodes, episodes that dug deeper into the conspiracy of the X-Files, and then there were great spooky standalone episodes. That's still the mix we'll be exploring in this run.

Chris Carter returns for the new X-Files series. Like Paul Scheuring returning for Prison Break, Walden feels these TV revivals allow the creators to explore their creations with new energy and perspective, after having a break from the grind of running a weekly series.

"They feel ripe for reinvention and a great opportunity to reunite meaningful characters who people were attached to, tell fresh stories about them," Walden said. "They've taken a significant hiatus and they're event miniseries. We're not suggesting that we're rebooting The X-Files longterm. It felt like there was a great opportunity to bring back two characters who have enormous chemistry together and tell some new stories now that we have new fans and people that remember it from the original run."

The X-Files returns this winter on Fox.