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dustfinger

> 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.

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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/

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.

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.

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.

The upcoming Firefly series will be animated, seems like the right choice

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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...)

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.

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.

They're already working on it:

https://www.tvline.com/news/the-x-files-reboot-ryan-coogler-...

Also Fringe, which captures every plot point parent suggested (salted with a heavy dose of post-9/11).

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.

I don't know. Obviously a certain personality type considers government to be an all-encompassing evil (which is the Cold-War era fear the conspiracy theories of the X-Files drew from) but in the modern day corporations (particularly tech companies) seem to be far more competent and dangerous.

And I think it makes sense that if there were defense contractors and companies secretly reverse engineering alien technology, that capitalism would be their primary motivation. I'm just saying the zeitgeist of conspiracy theory tends to reflect current generational fears and a remake of the X-Files should reflect that.

I think the government conspiracy fear works best for the audience who still has some belief in government. So it is a disturbing moral corruption of something they consider powerful and benign. Lots of people older than myself reported this feeling from the 60s and 70s as things like the Pentagon Papers came to light.

The corporate fear works if you assume either fascism (top-down collusion between the two), government incompetence/irrelevance (so corporate power is unchecked), or widespread government corruption (more bottom-up collusion).

So feelings on these themes may help indicate your worldview or the worldview of the audience and writers in different eras?

Defense contractors only have one customer - the government. They are "capitalism" in the weakest sense of the world. Tech companies aren't scary. Everyone interacts with them, they're run by well known personalities, they're subject to the courts and follow laws etc. The story tension you'd need just isn't there.

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