With the premiere of The X-Files miniseries less than a month away, Fox has released a 22-minute featurette to ignite interest and satiate thirsty fans. The miniseries will be a six-episode event with a two-night opening on Sunday January 24th and Monday the 25th. Remaining episodes will follow on subsequent Mondays.
The Force Awakens has fueled a conversation about how much homage is too much when it comes to re-booting a beloved property, but according to this featurette nobody is concerned about retreading old ground, despite running for nine seasons and two movies. Of course a certain amount of repetition is tolerated in episodic procedural shows and is, in fact, why we love them.
This new series will introduce Joel McHale as a conservative talk-show host/conspiracy theorist who recruits Scully and Mulder for his campaign to expose cover-ups, pulling them back together after several years apart. (Baby William does make it into a subplot.) The two are forced to face the ways time and age have changed them as individuals and as a team.
Creator Chris Carter makes an interesting comment in the video about world conditions since the original series went off the air in 2002, just after 9/11 started to impact the way we viewed our government. “We’re dealing with a world that has changed completely from the time when the series ended in 2002 which was not long after the World Trade Center bombing. The American people had put their faith completely in the government. They didn’t want to know about government conspiracies, they wanted to know that their government was protecting them.” Now, of course, two administrations and countless scandals later, we’re an entire nation of Mulders.
But the new episodes promise to spend just a portion of time on the high-level stuff while incorporating plenty of monster and alien weirdness and action. Annet Mahendru (The Americans) has been cast as a victim who’s faced countless alien abductions and experiments, and the featurette details the work of special effects and makeup (starting at 16:35).
Mitch Pileggi, William B. Davis, and Bruce Harwood will reprise their roles from the original series. Also look for single episode appearances from Aaron Douglas, Lauren Ambrose, and Annabeth Gish. Robbie Amell (cousin of Stephen) will join the series as an agent.