By Chris Snellgrove
| Published
It’s an open secret that most TV show reboots are pretty awful…Charmed, Frasier, Night Court, and That ‘70s Show are just a few examples of classic TV series that were brought back as seriously subpar revivals. That’s a big part of why we’re dreading the Buffy the Vampire Slayer reboot: unless its quality is insanely high, all it can do is disappoint fans of the iconic original. But we can’t help but look forward to Sinners director Ryan Coogler’s upcoming X-Files reboot for the simple reason that this mixed bag of a franchise has been needing a new direction since the ‘90s.
Originally, The X-Files was a breath of fresh air, thanks largely to its combination of spooky storytelling and steamy sexual chemistry. Eventually, though, it went off the rails, ending with a season in which Mulder was conspicuously absent before getting a revival that managed to piss off the franchise’s few remaining fans. It was genuinely tough watching such a great show tumble so far from its previous heights, and we can only hope that Coogler’s X-Files reboot breathes some much-needed fresh air into the world’s stalest genre franchise.
At this juncture, it’s difficult to tell whether Coogler wants to give The X-Files a complete reboot or a revival in the vein of Star Trek: Picard. In a recent appearance on the Last Podcast on the Left, the Black Panther director confirmed that he had been in talks with Gillian Anderson, one of the original show’s two leads. She might very well reprise her role as Scully in a revival, mentoring a new duo of truth seekers; if this is a revival, though, we’d love to see her play a new character who functions more like Walter Skinner did in the earlier series.
However Coogler approaches this X-Files reboot, he has his work cut out for him because, let’s be honest: the franchise has had nowhere to go but up for decades. It arguably reached its creative heights at the end of Season 5, delivering a show-stopping finale that led directly to the crowd-pleasing film X-Files: Fight the Future. The next few seasons went off the rails, killing and reviving Mulder while making its tangled web of conspiracy storytelling completely incomprehensible, a problem only magnified by the show’s awful revival.
With a true X-Files reboot, though, Ryan Coogler has the opportunity to combine the best parts of the original with the potent world of postmodern conspiracy theories. As any old-school paranoid will tell you, the world of conspiracy has changed dramatically since the original show came out, and some of the theories that would have seemed unthinkable back in the day seem all too plausible in an age of AI and deepfakes. With any luck, an X-Files reboot will make the most of all this ripe storytelling potential and anchor its wild tales with the kind of killer chemistry that made the original show so popular.
We wouldn’t have much faith in this reboot if not for the involvement of Ryan Coogler…in addition to delivering the spooky goods (seriously, go see Sinners, it’s great!), his Creed film proved the director has a major talent for reviving IPs that seemed dead in the water. We’re not sure which of today’s young actors would make the best Mulder and Scully, but we’re confident that Coogler will find them. The new show might disappoint or even fizzle out entirely, but like Agent Mulder, we “want to believe” that a reboot will bring one of the best ‘90s shows back in all of the sleek and sexy style it deserves.
Source: Variety
