Last season my two favorite shows were The X-Files and Homicide: Life on the Street–safe favorites, I thought, because nobody else ever watched them. I could go on and on about how great they were without anybody snickering at me. But now I feel betrayed: neither show was canceled. They’ve both somehow managed to claw their way onto the fall schedule, and both look the same as they did last year–same casts, same plots, same styles–but to me, they’ve been taken over by the pod people. The nuances have vanished, and I can’t pretend I don’t see the difference.
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So even though I didn’t get The X-Files, out of some mistaken, retrograde commitment to plausibility, I worked out a rationale on my own. It held up pretty well–until this season, anyway. What I thought was happening was this: in a neglected room in the bowels of FBI headquarters, the bureaucracy dumped all the fringe cases they couldn’t be bothered to investigate–cases involving the occult, or flying saucers, or the weird and inexplicable in general. Two agents, one a believer and one a skeptic, were stuck with the job of closing the files. So they ran around the country investigating UFO sightings, and murder cases that looked like the work of werewolves, and rumors of mutant killer fish in sewer systems. Sometimes they found rational explanations, sometimes they weren’t sure; but even when they unearthed what looked like unequivocal proof of the existence of the supernatural, their superiors stepped in, thanked them for their good work, and buried the evidence again, this time permanently.
I still think this is a great idea for a show. It has some of the same junky poetry as the ending of Raiders of the Lost Ark–where the mystical ark of the covenant, after all those ridiculous adventures, ends up in a dusty box in some warehouse, uncatalogued and forgotten. I can easily imagine that happening. Anything at all might end up lost in the government’s files–the exact location of the Holy Grail, a message from another planet–not through conspiracy, but through sheer bureaucratic inertia. People quit, their superiors are skeptical or oblivious, nobody ever follows up, and the great secrets of the world go permanently undisclosed: The X-Files was the most realistic show about government I’ve ever seen.
The whole key to a successful show is this: how seriously are we supposed to take the premise? There’s a strange balancing act a show has to perform, between the languid contempt for plausibility in the average prime-time show, and the fervent overcommitment in a would-be cult show like The X-Files. Too little seriousness, and you have a turkey like SeaQuest DSV, where all the expensive sets and effects turn out to be in aid of dumb little allegories that would have been considered lame on the original Star Trek. Too much, and you have The X-Files–or, to take another show that I almost recommended to people last year, Babylon 5: a low-budget knockoff of Deep Space Nine that’s turned out to have a more complicated back story than The Lord of the Rings. Individual episodes are incomprehensible, because the writers are setting up a master plot that won’t be revealed for another five or ten years. Evidently they’re going to blow up the universe–but the show is so cheaply done, if they ever get to that episode, I’m betting it consists of actors staring earnestly offscreen and describing the shots the effects crew failed to deliver.
The jokes could not have been more unfortunate, though, given what has followed these last few weeks. Homicide’s producers, it turned out, had cut a deal to get their show back on the schedule: one of those old-time deals with the devil–air time in exchange for their integrity–that I didn’t think people bothered to make any longer. The market researchers and the focus groups have been consulted; new producers and cast members have been brought in; and–well, you can imagine the result. A blandly ridiculous new show about a feisty female lieutenant in charge of a rowdy homicide squad (hoked up out of Prime Suspect) has been ineptly grafted onto the feeble, twitching remnants of the old show.
