You ever seen a UFO in these parts?
You ever experienced a period of missing time?
You ever have the suspicion that you've been abducted by aliens?
To say Fox Mulder is one of the more recognizable characters
modern television has produced would
be a bit of an understatement.
Audiences around the globe quickly
became obsessed with this true believer's dogged quest
to reunite with his long-missing alien abductee sister.
And don't even get me started on how ridiculous
that logline sounds.
And yet, at the height of that show's popularity,
he was nowhere to be found.
Which begs the question, why did Fox Mulder
disappear from The X-Files?
It's no secret that The X-Files was a popular television show.
It currently sits right behind The Twilight Zone and Doctor
Who in the rankings of longest-running science fiction
shows ever produced.
By seasons four and five, The X-Files
was reaching an average of almost 20 million viewers
per episode.
Fox originally believed this to be a high risk proposition,
but it ended up generating maybe more reward on the back end
than any show Fox had in their catalog at that time.
X-Files creator Chris Carter quickly
became one of television's first celebrity writers.
He was basically the Vince Gilligan of the early '90s.
More importantly, audiences noticed an almost
immediate on-screen chemistry between David Duchovny
and Gillian Anderson.
You think it's remotely plausible that someone
might think you're hot?
According to Anderson, that chemistry
was something that existed before the show even
began filming.
And I don't want to get into how to create on-screen chemistry,
because sometimes that's just really not how it works.
No amount of rehearsals or work can create something that's
sometimes just not there.
In the case of Anderson and Duchovny,
that connection was almost instantaneous,
which is, oh, something that's valuable to a production.
Recognizing this, the show really dove deep
into a will they, won't they between the two characters.
And the rapidly growing fan base began to split into two camps.
And this is where things get a little weird for The X-Files
and really, TV in general.
Fans of the show that wanted the show
to be about solving supernatural mysteries
exclusively dubbed themselves NoRomos.
Essentially, meaning people that wanted no romance in the show.
The other camp of people dubbed themselves Shippers.
These were the die-hard fans who wanted Mulder and Scully to end
up in a relationship together.
And this in some ways became the heart of the conversation
surrounding this show, which needless to say,
is a little extraordinary.
In the latter of these two ideologies,
the Shippers, I guess, was actually something
that Chris Carter wanted to avoid entirely.
He wasn't all that interested in the romantic element of what
he was placing onto screens.
But when you have two leads that are playing characters that
work this intimately with one another,
well, people are going to come up
with some interpretations of how they
think the show should continue to write that relationship.
And this wasn't the current modern age of message boards
and comment sections.
So when fans took to the internet,
effectively setting the stage for how we discuss shows
to this very day, that passion surprised a lot
of people working on X-Files.
There are plenty of moment to moment breakdowns online
you can find of every time Mulder and Scully made
direct eye contact.
And series watch lists are still available for fans
who just want to follow the unspoken romance.
These were people who weren't just watching
a television show.
They were so emotionally invested
that impacting its realities became well, kind of possible.
So the original plan for The X-Files
was to have the series run for five seasons
and then wrap up the story with a feature length film.
The unprecedented success of the show
led to studios and production teams
doing what they typically do, which
is adding at least two more seasons.
While Duchovny signed on to star in the extended run
of the show, he apparently never really wanted to.
He stated in an interview that he always
thought five years was enough, and that seven years
was definitely enough.
The actor wanted to branch into other projects
and move to LA after having lived in Vancouver
for more than a decade.
And there was contempt growing for the show,
and also contempt growing towards his co-star.
At least, that's what's been reported.
In this case, it seemed like he was just counting down
the minutes until this contract was up so
he could pursue other projects.
On top of this workplace frustration,
his relationship with Anderson seemed
to be strained to say the least.
In a 2008 interview with Metro UK,
he would state, familiarity breeds contempt.
And that by the time the eighth season came around,
he and Anderson couldn't stand the sight of each other.
That precious chemistry that was so vital to the show's success
was obviously fractured.
Duchovny was also in the middle of a falling
out with both the show's creator, Chris Carter,
and also the entirety of the Fox network
over a lawsuit filed by Duchovny against Fox
for essentially self-dealing the show's distribution rights
and cutting him out of profits.
So he was only contractually obligated to appear
in five seasons of The X-Files.
After the show's fifth season, he extended his contract
in exchange for profit sharing that
would be commensurate with what Chris Carter was
being paid at the time.
Duchovny's lawsuit states that Chris Carter conspired
with Fox Studios to sell the show to Fox's subsidiaries
at a reduced rate for syndication,
all in an effort to reduce the amount of money Duchovny
would ultimately be paid.
The lawsuit stated that the series would eventually net Fox
anywhere between $1.4 to $1.5 billion
and that Duchovny was entitled to his fair share.
The lawsuit was settled out of court, as these things often
are, and Duchovny was reportedly awarded $20 million.
Now, settlements happen all the time for a variety of reasons.
It simply means that at some point,
both parties decided it was easier
to settle instead of going to court.
While any connections that would be
made between this lawsuit and his departure from The X-Files
would be, well, speculative at best,
it isn't too far-fetched to imagine
that a very public lawsuit with a serious allegation
against a person's character could
put a strain on any personal relationships
behind the scenes.
At the end of the show's seventh season,
Fox Mulder gets abducted by aliens
and carted off into the great beyond inside a flying saucer.
Season Eight paired Dana Scully up
with the head of the FBI task force as her new partner,
and moved on.
That passionate fan base was, well,
displeased to say the least.
Apparently, nobody was interested in shipping
these two characters at all.
And the ratings quickly began to reflect their frustrations.
Now, this isn't all to say that the ratings of The X-Files
were driven by people shipping characters together,
as it's now colloquial to call it.
And it certainly doesn't mean that this relationship
was the only thing driving the quality of this show.
It's simply to say that one of its most
talked about and paid attention to elements no longer existed,
and when that happens, there is going
to be an impact on your audience and your ratings.
Whether it was the most important element
is not the point.
If it's an element at all that affects viewership,
well, it's an element that has affected viewership.
Now, Fox Mulder eventually came back, but was written down
to a tertiary character.
He didn't even want to return to Vancouver to shoot any scenes,
and shot his torture scenes in LA.
The fact that Fox Mulder's exit itself
didn't particularly resonate with fans of the show--
they essentially started using his character as a carrot
to dangle in front of the audience every now
and then to keep people interested in a show that
was no longer about that character, long enough
at least for them to try to push new storylines
and introduce new characters, to in some ways
manipulate the audience into continuing to care,
even if they weren't being given what they actually want.
And fans of the show, well, they responded.
And average viewership of The X-Files dropped by about 35%
almost immediately.
This was essentially the death knell for The X-Files
and the show wrapped up its primary storyline
after its ninth season, which yep,
saw Mulder return for the final episode.
It seems after the dust settled that Duchovny
was able to reconcile his differences with his co-star
and producer.
They all got back together for the 2008 film X-Files:
I Want To Believe, which was directed
by Chris Carter, who co-wrote the script with Frank Spotnitz.
There was also a two season revival
of the show, which began in 2016,
and while this definitely left fans with more questions
than it answered, the struggles surrounding the original series
did seem to be a thing of the past.
But a theory after all this time still
prevailed, that The X-Files' success was
contingent on the irreplaceable chemistry between Fox
Mulder and Dana Scully.
This has been made very clear in the wake of Chris Carter's
repeated attempts to generate bootleg Mulder and Scully
combinations in the more recent entries into the series,
like the potential spinoff with Lauren Ambrose
and Robbie Amell as Agents Miller and Einstein.
Apparently, Fox thought that the thing that
made Mulder and Scully so great was just
pairing up a really handsome guy with an attractive woman
and giving them aliens to hunt.
Sadly, this turned out not to be the case.
And I can leave you here with the typical platitudes
about how difficult it is to work in this industry,
and how sometimes, on-set frustrations can disrupt
a television show's production.
But you know those things.
You know that there can be tensions in any workplace.
You know that sometimes people don't like their jobs.
None of that really matters here.
And frankly, none of this is really
a lesson imbued with any of those realities.
What this is though, is an interesting example
of what it means to be unable to let go of your art
when it may be finished.
The X-Files probably should have been five seasons.
Maybe Stranger Things should have
been that single first season.
There's a list of properties that ended and they kept going.
Oftentimes, as artists, you place a completion date,
or a set of parameters for completion on your art.
Maybe your script is done after the 10th draft,
because you've no longer found any of the structural issues
you were trying to iron out.
Or maybe you're done with a painting when
you can no longer look at it anymore and say,
I want to continue to work on this.
Sometimes there are literal checklists,
and other times they're just a mental reality of feeling out
when your work is done.
But all too often, when money gets
involved in art what we see is work
that's never done until the money dries up,
which means that the creativity, the soul of that work,
has to inevitably dry up with it.
And that's a shame, because it usually
means that good art turns into something much more
sour and decomposed before it's done than it probably was ever
intended to.
So the lesson here is know when you've told a story.
Know when you finished your piece,
know when your art is done, because the last thing you want
is everybody else realizing it before you do.
Well, guys, that's it for today's episode of Nerdstalgic.
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