Sep-08-1993
The Hollywood Reporter
FBC’s “The X-Files” holds some interest despite its labored premise
Miles Beller

As shepherded to us here, we get FBI agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny), an Oxford-educated psychologist with a glib tongue who tackles those cases the agency hasn’t been able to crack. These unsolved mysteries are known in the trade as X-files. (At show’s start a notice is posted: “The following story is inspired by actual documented accounts.”)

However, Mulder thinks something more than the usual skulduggery is afoot when it comes to these crimes. In fact, as Mulder sees it, these situations are the results of paranormal events, happenstance having to do with otherworldly things and forces. Why, his own kid sister disappeared one night and was never heard from since. Moreover, as Mulder sees it, the government knows about all this crazy stuff but ain’t talkin’.

As a means of keeping tabs on what Mulder is up to, his superiors at the bureau have partnered him with a Doubting Thomas named Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), a young, cool, crisp M.D. with a bias toward the scientific, someone who doesn’t believe that things go bump in the day or night without plausible explanation.

So into this new series Mulder and Scully go, sparking an undercurrent of attraction, at least as scriptors would have it.

It’s a notion that gets a skeptical workout in “X-Files'” premiere, paired to a story line concentrating on the inexplicable deaths of high-schoolers in an Oregon hamlet tied to some odd occurrences that Mulder suspects are alien abductions. When a suspicious fire destroys nearly all the evidence Mulder and Scully have collected, the spooky gets spookier, causing Scully to wonder if maybe Mulder is onto something.

“Twin Peaks” gone ersatz reality-based, “The Twlight Zone” taking it down home, that’s the direction this series goes. And though the show works with a certain unintended camp kick, at the moment “X” doesn’t mark the spot where viewers can find involving drama by way of Stephen King-esque actions.

Sep-05-1993
San Francisco Chronicle
Tracking the Paranormal
John Stanley

Strange lights flashing in the night sky, mysterious, alien-like shapes hulking in an eerie forest, an inexplicable force disrupting mechanical devices, motorists disappearing for a few hours and waking up to find their bodies covered with odd punctures . . .

These recurring themes from reported UFO abduction cases have become the stark, sometimes sinister images for the opening two-hour episode of a new Fox series that dramatizes paranormal phenomena, “The X Files,” premiering Friday at 9 p.m. on Channel 2. If there is any one word that Chris Carter, the show’s producer and creator, wants to emphasize it’s “scary.” However, “I don’t mean scary in the horror-genre sense, but scary in the way that speculation pushes beyond scientific credibility to enter a realm of ‘extreme possibility.’ Films like ‘Coma’ and ‘The Andromeda Strain’ have that quality. It’s the idea that shakes up you and your beliefs, not some hideous Frankenstein monster or a hand clasping the heroine’s shoulder.” Even so, it was the hideous vampire monster in “The Night Stalker,” a highly rated TV-movie of 1973 produced by Dan Curtis, that gave Carter his inspiration to create a show like “The X Files.” “When I saw ‘Stalker,’ with Darren McGavin playing that obsessed newspaperman Carl Kolchak, it really shook me up to think there might be a twilight world of bloodsucking creatures. Of course, that’s the spectrum of the supernatural. Today we’re all more interested in modern phenomena, which has a way of really shaking up that segment of our society that’s come to believe in aliens and UFOs.”

Carter was having dinner one night with a Yale psychology professor and researcher. “When I found out he had been a consultant on Dan Curtis’ ‘Intruders,’ a 1992 drama about UFO abductions, he told me that 3 per cent of the public believed in this syndrome. I was astounded. I realized there was a topicality to this theme of the unknown, and ‘X Files’ grew out of that fascination.”

The series depicts two FBI agents — poles apart in their thinking — on the trail of various unsolved mysteries. In upcoming episodes, says Carter, they will track “biological anomalies, chemical anomalies, twists on genetic engineering and other fanciful spin-offs from modern technological advances.”

Maverick agent Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) is a firm believer in the paranormal, often paranoid in his obsessive search to find the answers to baffling phenomena. His partner Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), with a degree in medicine and a bent for seeking answers through scientific logic, is a total skeptic. Each week they are incompatibly thrown together on a new assignment, unaware that their chiefs are part of a top-secret government project using them to further its own clandestine causes.

In real life, the actors are just the opposite in their attitudes about the paranormal. Duchovny, who portrayed the transvestite detective on ‘Twin Peaks’ and whose ‘Kalifornia’ is now playing in movie theaters, has serious doubts about all those UFO reports. “I accept the possibility of life forms in this vast universe of ours,” he says, “but I don’t understand why, if there are aliens, they don’t land in Manhattan instead of always choosing unpopulated areas where maybe three people see them.”

Duchovny doesn’t believe much in conspiracies, either. “It’s unlikely any high-level conspiracy could last for long. The sheer amounts of people keeping the secret would eventually crack open; somebody’s death-bed confession would expose the whole thing.”

Anderson, an award-winning off Broadway actress whose film/TV career is just starting, admits that “I have this tendency to believe the most outrageous things. After all, this is a large universe we live in, and UFO stories tend to follow a pattern that, in my eyes, gives them validity.”

She finds the role of Scully a challenge to play. “She does everything she can to find a scientific answer to the mysteries, which becomes difficult after a while, because her constant exposure to the weirdest things imaginable eventually have an accumulative effect. Even so, that’s when she turns to her science and physics the most. In a way, she’s shielding herself from the unacceptable.”

Carter, whose screen writing career since 1985 has included several TV movies for Disney, tries to see both sides of each “X Files” enigma. “One half of me wants to have something set before me so I can see it with my own eyes. But another side, and we all have it, wants to take a leap of faith, wants to believe in wild things. I’d like to be driving one night through the desert or a lonely forest and suddenly see something that couldn’t possibly be happening, but is. Then I would know these strange things are going on, and I’d finally be a part of it.”

Aug-18-1993
Chicago Sun-Times
It’s FBI vs. UFOs
Lon Grahnke

X marks the spots where two fictional FBI agents will uncover evidence of extra-terrestrial interlopers and other paranormal phenomena in a Fox drama series, premiering Sept. 10.

“Inspired by actual documented accounts” from various sources, “The X-Files” will offer a tantalizing sitcom alternative from 8 to 9 p.m. Fridays on WFLD-Channel 32. “Television needs a good, scary, weekly show,” said writer-producer Chris Carter, who created “The X-Files” for Fox. “That’s what I want to do. We’re going to be scary and entertaining. “I’m frightened by the unknown. By technology, genetic engineering and their consequences. By things that can take place in the realm of extreme possibility,” said Carter, phoning from his Canadian production office in Vancouver, British Columbia. A former Disney screenwriter, Carter describes himself as a skeptic on the subjects of flying saucers and invaders from Mars.

“The FBI investigators in ‘The X-Files’ are extremely intelligent scientists,” Carter said. “We’re playing it as close to reality as we can. You can find an ‘X-File’ story every day in the newspaper. The agents will reveal hoaxes. They also will encounter things that can’t be explained, where progressive science meets the spirit world.”

David Duchovny from Showtime’s “Red Shoe Diaries” stars as unorthodox agent Fox “Spooky” Mulder, who describes himself as “the FBI’s most unwanted.” An Oxford-educated psychologist known as an expert on serial killers and the occult, Mulder earned a reputation as the best analyst in the bureau’s violent-crimes section – until he started chasing UFOs. “The laws of physics rarely seem to apply” when working on cases from the X-Files, he tells his new partner.

Gillian Anderson as agent Dana Scully is the intellectual equal of Duchovny’s Mulder. A medical doctor with a degree in physics, she was recruited by the FBI to teach at its academy. Now the extremely logical Scully is assigned to work with Mulder and report on his activities. Will she debunk the X-Files project? “We trust you’ll make the proper scientific analysis,” says Scully’s boss, sending her to spy on “Spooky.”

“David and Gillian are very bright,” Carter said. “They truly are the characters. Their relationship is cerebral and subtly sexy. Fox and Dana remind me of John Steed and Emma Peel in ‘The Avengers.’ ”

Although characters are murdered in “The X-Files,” Carter promises to avoid excessive gore. “There is no gunfire in the first six episodes,” he said. “I’m really concerned about violence in our society. There’s too much violence on television. Producers should be responsible, to a point, while telling an exciting story. Like ‘Murder, She Wrote,’ we’ll show the results of violence, not the act.”

Fond memories of ABC’s “The Night Stalker,” a 1974-75 series with Darren McGavin as a reporter tracking vampires and werewolves, gave Carter a “leaping-off point” when he started developing “The X-Files” last year. “That was a good, scary show,” he said. “And it aired on Friday nights, too.”

But “The Night Stalker” vanished after one season. Fox has ordered 13 episodes of “The X-Files.” In its most-unwanted time slot, it could be an ex-series by December.

“I’d rather air right after ‘The Simpsons,’ ” Carter said. “But I know Fox would never put me there.”