Conspiracy theory

It may not be Star Wars, but on the small screen, an old science fiction property is proving a major hit.

The impressive reboot of The X-Files has entertainment news outlets like Indiewire asking “Is [show creator] Chris Carter the George Lucas of television?” It’s a fair question given that, including those who watched on DVR, video on demand, Hulu, and other streaming outlets, more than 21 million people checked out the Jan. 24 premiere. It shed some audience with the following two episodes, but that’s almost always the case with a new series, and the numbers are still strong enough to make it the top performer on Monday nights. The X-Files is scoring especially well with younger viewers, meaning there’s a good chance it will find life beyond the planned six-episode “event” run.

Most revivals of beloved shows of yesteryear feel much like they do with movie resurrections—pure money grabs. But given The X-Files’ renowned preoccupation with governmental abuse of power, it may be a series that has found an even riper relevancy than its first outing. Certainly the opening episodes demonstrate that Carter isn’t afraid to adapt the X-Files formula to new and deeper national anxieties.

The strongest evidence for this isn’t Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) or Fox Mulder (David Duchovny), who inhabit roughly the same emotional space they did when we left them 14 years ago. Scully is still a skeptic, though now her skepticism seems to stem as much from an unwillingness to get involved as it does from disbelief. And Fox still has a burning flame within to uncover truth, though he now hides it under a bushel of wounded bitterness. The lure that draws them both back into the hunt, however, is quite a new thing.

Tad O’Malley (Community’s Joel McHale) is a caricature of a conservative cable news show host, clearly fashioned to bring to mind the most zealous tendencies of Glenn Beck and the most obnoxious of Bill O’Reilly (in fact, to make sure we don’t miss the association, Carter writes it into the dialogue). Therefore, initially we think we won’t see anything more compelling than stereotypical villainy out of him. Then we do.

For all his blowhard antics, it turns out Tad is right about a few things. Of course aliens play a role (it wouldn’t be The X-Files without aliens), but more importantly Tad has an inside track to how the government is using aliens to shore up its power against a public too besotted with tabloid celebrities and consumerism to notice. To be fair, despite being billed as right-wing, some of Tad’s rants sound more like Bernie Sanders than Ted Cruz, particularly his frequent invocations of “corporate greed.” But isn’t that where so much anger is stemming from these days? That there’s little perceived difference between Democrat and Republican, that there’s only the elite political class against the rest of us?

Elite is a word Tad uses frequently, and the unease he voices (“Your own government lies as a matter of policy”) cuts across party lines. As Tad rages about how the National Defense Authorization Act abridges the Constitution and how the government plans to seize our arms to prevent revolt, the presumably liberal Mulder finds himself more and more engaged. And so, it seems, do viewers.

At a press event in January, ex-journalist Carter said when he first began contemplating reviving The X-Files, he scoured conspiracy news sites and “really went through and chose the things that have some kernel of truth, or, if not, some element of fear in them for everyone.”

If ratings mean anything, it appears he selected well.