Rewatching the X-Files

I’ve started rewatching the X-Files on NetFlix. From the beginning.

It takes a certain amount of mental jiu-jitsu, from the vantage point of 2016, to understand how truly innovative and influential this show was. The tropes pretty much invented by Chris Carter and company back in 1993 have become so pervasive, so taken for granted in our current entertainment landscape, that you have to think a bit to realize that they were something completely new.

That heady and headlong mix of horror, romance, sci-fi, police procedural and winking parody was truly unlike anything that had ever appeared on the small screen. If this once avant guarde TV show now seems so familiar in form, it’s precisely because of its influence on everything that came after.

I need to go through the same mental process every time I see Citizen Kane. When it came out it broke a lot of rules, and invented some very good new ones. Which of course were then imitated endlessly by lesser films.

It might be fun to compile a list of works that were truly radical in their time, yet were then so widely copied and imitated that you need to think a bit to realize just how innovative they were.