5 ms·

The X-Files was the right show at the right time; a "bubble" of the '90s, if you will. The internet and mobile technology was nascent. The world was getting big

• dustfinger 5mo ago
  > Any, and I mean any, attempt to remake this show is doomed to failure I second that. Please, for the love of all good things, do not remake the X-Files, or Firefly.
  • bityard 5mo ago
    Well, I for one would not be disappointed at a sequel or continuation of Firefly, as long as they figure out a way to bring Wash back from the dead and Joss Whedon has absolutely nothing at all to do with it.
    • krapp 5mo ago
      I feel like I'm the only person who didn't really vibe with Firefly. I usually like the "space Western" motif but Firefly was so broad and over the top with it that it just seemed silly to me.
      • ethbr1 5mo ago
        Firefly is "Western" in the same way that 1960s spaghetti westerns (and arguably even John Ford's) were. Which is to say they used a facsimile of a lawless frontier to tell stories about ideologically stark, independent characters. Less cactus, more open carry.
        • bityard 5mo ago
          I'll grant that Firefly's sci-fi western motif was novel, but it could have done fine without it. The show's magic for me was its characters and clever dialogue. It it was funny, and it had heart. There was an enormous amount of satisfying character development for such a short run. The Expanse is fairly good on its own and I did enjoy it but it could have totally filled the void left by Firefly if they would have just had a few comedy writers on the team. Instead, we got a ship full of gloomy self-loathing heroes with poor mental health who were too caught up in second-guessing everything they did to fully appreciate the absurdity of everything happening around them. (I know, I know, the show came from a book series, just humor me...)
          • ethbr1 5mo ago
            Devil's advocate: deft use of zeitgeist-known settings in time-limited media can make for more efficient storytelling. A captain of a ship. An outlaw. In a western-seeming system of planets. If nothing else was said, that already paints a pretty vivid background from the audience's preconceptions. All of that exposition can be skipped. Or at most, quickly nodded to in order to confirm. Sure, a show could rebuild the same thing neater from primitives, but how much show time would that take? Western was "close enough" to the point, so they went with it.
  • crtasm 5mo ago
    The upcoming Firefly series will be animated, seems like the right choice
    • ErroneousBosh 5mo ago
      I hope they pick up on the thing in the last episode of Firefly, where River hears everyone's thoughts except for one person. There was someone else on the ship like River.
      • cindyllm 5mo ago
        [dead]
    • tharkun__ 5mo ago
      If it's anything like the animated Babylon 5, no thanks :( If you love animated stuff I guess it might be fine. Damn, now I want to binge-re-watch Firefly.
  • nradov 5mo ago
    Fringe was kind of a remake of The X-Files. It wasn't an exact copy but clearly derivative. Still a decent show. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1119644/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1119644/
    • ErroneousBosh 5mo ago
      I wouldn't say it was "derivative", although it was clearly made by people who had enjoyed The X-Files, and Twin Peaks. I loved the trick with the colour grading. Won't say more because spoilers, if you know you know.
      • bilegeek 5mo ago
        Fringe definitely handled the continuing storyline much better. The way they blend in, then transition from, the monster-of-the-week format is excellent writing. It did put a deadline on the story, something which the X-Files writers seemed allergic to as the series began aging.
        • ethbr1 5mo ago
          Worth remembering that both the X-Files and Babylon 5 premiered in the same year (1993). TV science fiction was just beginning the transition from "monster of the week" to season+ long pre-written plot arcs. Twin Peaks was only a few years earlier (1990), which pioneered(?) bringing the hitherto only soap opera and family drama continuous storyline to other genres. TNG is indicative of this too, with the adaptation of season-long plotting between 1-2 (little), 3 (some), and 4+ (more). Which is to say when the X-Files premiered, having a series-long plan of any sort was still a novel idea in TV scifi.
  • krapp 5mo ago
    They're going to, because there is no property that will not be milked for nostalgia. Although honestly, it could work if they played into the cynicism and uncertainty of the modern UFO phenomenon. If the "conspiracy" is a hall of mirrors comprised of psyops, lies, grift and folklore and the truth is something very weird exists but the government doesn't know what it is. Establish a "post-truth" narrative where the only thing we know is that everything we thought we knew (Roswell, Area 51, Dulce, Majestic 12) was a lie. Maybe at some point have the in-universe version of Northrop-Grumman (or pick whatever defense contractor you like) actually make a breathrough in reverse engineering alien technology (or say it's China, to play on American xenophobia) and now the enemy isn't some vast government conspiracy but dark capitalism. Have an Elon Musk analogue, AI death cults around weird alien artifacts, SV startup culture, UFO grifters within the government, creeping fascism, all of it. Someone could make an intelligent and interesting show that studies the nature of hyperreality, the evolution of UFO folklore as a mirror of generational fears, and the embrace of metaphysics as a trauma response to the dehumanization of modern technological society. The problem is, that wouldn't be the X-Files. Something closer to Lone Gunmen, maybe, as written by Grant Morrison, without cops being protagonists, but the vibe of the 90's and the Smoking Man and all of that is just too quaint to be plausible nowadays. They'll do it anyway, and they'll do it badly, and they'll probably do it with AI.
    • GoodOldNe 5mo ago
      They're already working on it: https://www.tvline.com/news/the-x-files-reboot-ryan-coogler-new-cast-1234952660/ https://www.tvline.com/news/the-x-files-reboot-ryan-coogler-...
      • ethbr1 5mo ago
        Also Fringe, which captures every plot point parent suggested (salted with a heavy dose of post-9/11).
    • mike_hearn 5mo ago
      That wouldn't work. The X-Files revolves around a government conspiracy because governments are genuinely scary. They have near infinite resources, can break any law they want at will, are frequently motivated by convoluted social engineering schemes, don't investigate themselves (so it requires a plucky outsider hero character) and so on. If you try and make capitalism the enemy you just end up with Erin Brockovich.
• layer8 5mo ago
  It might just be age and experience, but the world felt bigger in the 90s than it does now.
  • dustfinger 5mo ago
    It was happier, with plenty of opportunity for everyone and society felt like it was held up on common ground. It defnately felt bigger, because it was.
  • RajT88 5mo ago
    It felt bigger because of a few things: 1. The world felt farther away. It was much harder to learn current events about far away places, and talk to people there. 2. The number of websites you spend most of your time on has shrunk. Facebook/Insta/TikTok is a lot of people's entire internet diet.
    • InsideOutSanta 5mo ago
      Yeah, the internet felt more like an unexplored place then. Now it feels like a service to access some other services, but back then, it felt like a real world that could contain anything.
  • fidotron 5mo ago
    It totally felt bigger because so many experiences required access to specific physical objects and getting those took forever. 35mm film processing, CDs (tapes even worse), VHS . . . these were all things deemed not exactly ideal at the time.
  • Keyframe 5mo ago
    Not only bigger, but more mysterious at that. Information wasn't instant and wasn't readily available. There were tales, there were rumors, there were news, and you had to rely on those for your own worldview. Anything further you had to make an expedition to your encyclopedia or library or other means to dive deeper into it. If you made an appointment with someone, you had to rely on the fact both sides will be there; No portable means of communication (easily / cheap). Now we have portable comm devices where we even use them between rooms. As sibling comment said, I feel privileged to have experienced that, but especially the whole transition from analogue world into digital and then online. It was quite a ride. Around dotcom boom, the second wave of internet users coming online, internet was relatively widespread,. It was also heterogeneous. Quite amazing actually. Now we're down to few big walled gardens and it's definitely different and, in my opinion, worse.
• keyringlight 5mo ago
  24 is another one that was at the right time, although the big one was not under their control. It started showing 2 months after the 9/11 attacks. More to the general point, it was also at the time that computers and internet usage was fast growing, but gaps in the digital side meant it was still plausible that field agents were important. They also had plot lines such as the bad guys using online video game chat (a smaller but growing thing in the early 2000s) as a hidden communication channel which I believe is pulled from real events.
  • Schmerika 5mo ago
    24 was extreme racist pro-torture fear porn propaganda. So yes - definitely had its finger on the pulse of early 2000s America.
    • xdennis 5mo ago
      I'm at least happy to hear that you think America is better now. Typically agitators say things like America is more racist now than ever (including before Civil Rights).
      • Schmerika 5mo ago
        > I'm at least happy to hear that you think America is better now Pretty certain I said nothing of the sort. Given that both major parties in the US are now fully complicit in arming and enabling live-streamed genocide, there's a pretty strong case to be made that anti Arab and Islamophobic racism is reaching new heights. And while most actual Americans are very much against the arming and enabling of said genocide, that hasn't motivated them to move on from the two party system. There's a widespread notion that "agitating" against two genocidal parties is idealism, or perfectionism. It's really just doing your duty as a person, and the fact that so many Americans don't care/understand that points to... Massive widespread racism, ding ding ding.
  • anthk 5mo ago
    Uh, no. Totally different times. To me the mid to late 90's where almost the same, among 2000 and pre S11 2001, chill, futuristic times, with computers, consoles, comic books, everything, the final death blow to the 80's which began at 1992/1993. Maybe from 2001/2002, but from 2002-2003 the one was grim, dark, pro-torture on series and tons of war propaganda in movies from the US.
• jeffbee 5mo ago
  I wrote an essay for a private journal last year about how the X-Files mainstreamed anti-scientific and anti-government conspiracy thinking and thereby led to the downfall of American democracy in the 21st century. It valorized the fringe, presaged "do your own research" and consistently told us that the skeptic is always wrong, the believer is always vindicated. It wasn't a bubble of the 90's, it was a prescient blueprint for the 2020s.
  • kstrauser 5mo ago
    LOL, we must've been typing in parallel: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47980081 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47980081
  • snowwrestler 5mo ago
    I've heard this idea before but I think it's primarily hindsight. At the time The X Files was on, there were even more popular shows about strong institutions, like Law & Order or The West Wing. So if popular TV was influential, why didn't society evolve toward those portrayals? I think we can look back today and say "that looked like this," but it doesn't mean that caused this. It took something far more powerful than a TV show that was mildly popular for a few years to create what we live today. It took the great flatness of the Internet. As Terry Pratchett predicted to Bill Gates back then.
    • snozolli 5mo ago
      It took the great flatness of the Internet. As Terry Pratchett predicted to Bill Gates back then. Can you say more about this? All I'm finding are articles about PTerry predicting the rise of fake news: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/30/terry-pratchett-predicted-rise-of-fake-news-in-1995-says-biographer https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/may/30/terry-pratchet...
  • quickthrowman 5mo ago
    I think it’s simpler than that, the internet makes it easier for conspiracy people to reinforce each others beliefs in a space where no one is going to challenge their fallacious reasoning.
• jghn 5mo ago
  The one thing about that era that has always seemed unique is that for people who lived it, a few years was a very big deal. Even now that I'm much older, talking to people in my age range it still blows my mind how different people's life experiences were just due to be 2-3 years different in age. Especially for anything tech oriented. Talk to people who were computer science majors in the 90s, you'll find that their curriculum varied wildly depending on exactly what years they were there. a 2-3 year difference could be huge. Same is true for how they experienced the internet, interacted with media, whether or not they were mobile native or landline native, and so much more. Less tech oriented but the 90s had an enormous shift in terms of corporate culture. The people who were a few years older than me reported wearing suits to work. By the time I went off to be a corpo, it was usually casual wear, not even business casual. For the same types of roles & companies! The list is endless.
  • ethbr1 5mo ago
    In retrospect, nobody remembers the exact date of an invention/product. In the moment, there's a sharp "time before it existed" and "time after it existed." I.e. late 2006, there was no mass market iPhone-like device; late 2007, there was
    • Izkata 5mo ago
      There were ones before that, my mom had one. Apple added polish and used a capacitive touchscreen instead of a resistive one, then amped up the hype in their commercials, so everyone forgot these existed.
      • snozolli 5mo ago
        Possibly a Palm Treo, introduced in 2002, or a Windows-based PocketPC, introduced in 2000. I always felt that Apple basically reimplemented PalmOS with the benefit of ~10 years newer technology and a wildly efficient Chinese supply chain. I definitely wouldn't say that these devices were mainstream. They were very much targeted toward business people and hardcore nerds. The iPhone definitely revolutionized the market, with its vastly more desirable aesthetic and approachable interface.
• mancerayder 5mo ago
  People used books a lot more and it was fun to sit on the floor at Barnes and Nobles. I remember planning trips with Lonely Planet books. I just really don't miss the pre-GMaps era. I don't think I'd ever drive now without one a phone.
• siva7 5mo ago
  Any attempts to remake this show including the new X-file seasons were a failure. I believe it was this insane time in history where two young federal agents in the early 90's without smartphones and mobile internet would make this conspiracy stories even more believable. This time felt due to the emerging underground tech scene more mysterious than probably any other span in history. So if someone would want to make a new conspiracy mystery drama it would have to play again in the early 90's.