Hacker Cinema
The X-Files
1993 · TV series · 11 seasons
Created by Chris Carter
MysteryScience FictionFantasyCrime
The exploits of FBI Special Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully who investigate X-Files: marginalized, unsolved cases involving paranormal phenomena. Mulder believes in the existence of aliens and the paranormal while Scully, a skeptic, is assigned to make scientific analyses of Mulder's discoveries that debunk Mulder's work and thus return him to mainstream cases.
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281 comments on Hacker News
Absolutely brilliant show. Highly recommend it to anyone. Feels like a hyper condensed version of the X-files but with a decent sense of humour to it as well.
Season two will be out next year and I am curious to see how it goes. Towards the end of season one, the side effects were starting to get interesting, possibilities of it turning dark abound.
I'm just glad that after Joe Bennets previous show Scavengers Reign got axed after one season that we will finally get to see some of his stuff expanded.
Almost every time I see a Canadian character actor I guarantee the film or show was shot there. Shows like X-Files, BSG reboot, The Expanse.. all loaded with Canadian actors
It absolutely is science-fiction.
This recent event is more or less the plot-line to my favourite X-Files episode named Killswitch which was written by William Gibson.[0]
This episode also features one of the coolest intros of any television episode ever[1]
We really are rapidly approaching the cyberpunk dystopia that people like Phillip K. Dick and William Gibson wrote about.
More than ever we need to be consulting the works of fiction writers and philosophers and less engineers and scientists.
We can't be letting the General Rippers and Dr. Strangeloves of the world lead us over the edge. Whether through outright innate maliciousness or wealth induced emotionally stunted solipsism these kinds of people should be no where near the levers of society let alone technology like this.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kill_Switch_(The_X-Files)
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDyr1JMNHVk
The early internet predates imageboards. You found GB/SNES/MD emulators in personal pages. JS was almost not used, active X crap was everywhere. Installing GNU/Linux was really difficult, but you could set it all offline. Getting a multi-CD or DVD release was a bargain instead of downloading everything.
*BSD where for corporations or universities with ISDN/broadband and tons of time to build ports, because OpenBSD CD's were copyrighted. You could get a floppy and netinstall, better if you had a fast connection.
Fora were far more ubiquituous and streaming as they said was so-so. Even 480p was something like "HD" for its day, at least for streamed video for 1024x768 resolutions. The rest was a blocky mess with low bitrate DivX videos. You know what DivX/XVid is right?
The 2000's were more like bridge era as tons of people still pirated tons of good 90's series such as Northern Exposure and The X Files among blockbusters.
Lots of people escaped to the internet to get what they coudln't IRL. Movies, scifi-books, GNU/Linux and indie games, manganimes, a truckload of them.
After that you just got the corporate internet with streaming platforms offering even worse products than the ones we got in the 90's and not to mention the shitty cinema and subpar from the mid 2000's anywhere modulo HL2 and a few exceptions.
You have bug ridden games with DLC's, bot infected propaganda sites like X and walled gardens as Discord and the like.
> Fink typically doesn’t deal with vault toilets in Wyoming’s state and national parks, but he knows what horrors can lurk at their depths. This man was lucky he wasn’t down there deeper or longer, he said.
In terms of fears, I still remember the X-Files episode [0] where the murderous creature hides in the septic system of a toilet...
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Host_(The_X-Files)
I wonder, if the technology will actually get to the point where it can AI/Remix up a bunch of TV shows or movies that are as high quality / nonslop as the original, and if that would satisfy me.
Let's say I'm living in the past and think Star Trek TNG and the X-Files was peak TV. If I could just hit enter and generate an in-all-ways-believably-authentic episode, maybe I just wouldn't watch anything else. Would it matter to my brain that real people didn't make the episode if it was indistinguishable from the real thing?
Broad appeal? You can’t do anything good aiming for broad appeal. People like too different things, they all don’t mash together well. If you add to many tings that appeal to different people you end up with incoherent mess. Instead of appealing to everyone you end up pissing off everyone in many different ways.
Look at the Ring of Power. Did it have broad appeal? Maybe, first 2 episodes brought in 25 million viewers. The whole first season was watched by 150 millions, despite season completion being ~40%. For reference, X-Files pulled in more only in 1 of its 11 seasons with most under 20 mil, and Friends lowered in 20-25 mil with only one season being about 30 mil. So the numbers are impressive but do you know anyone who loves the Rings of Power? Anywhere near to how people love SG-1?
I love the X-files. Season 5 & 6 are the best. Maybe the best episode of all time is Tithonus. Tho many greats. What a fantastic show.
besides already recommended Fringe, Millennium and Halt and catch fire I enjoyed at same time as X Files in 90s also new Outer Limits, opening credits were great and episodes are always thought challenging, I'm just rewatching it and still enjoy it, though technical quality is horrible since I think FHD was never released
but if you wanna straight up X Files just based on 50s check out Project Blue Book, it's like retro X Files, you won't get closer than that to X Files
I was a huge X-Files kid growing up. I was 10 when The X-Files (and Brisco County Jr.) debuted and I watched "Encounters" on FOX in the years before.
Are we talking about the same 90's?
There's no one like you in your area? I hope you like sitting in your house alone. You saw half of a movie late at night? Heard a song in a show? Hold onto it, it might take you a decade to finally track it down (it was Land by Patti Smith.) Have an medical issue that the doctors in your area aren't interested in diagnosing? Good luck, I hope it's not progressive.
You had to fight for access to everything in the 90's. Even if you could track down the thing you want (big IF), actually getting it was SLOW. That book you finally found, it might be 2-3 months away.
Today is the best day in human history to be alive.
We have instant access to everything and yet we choose to waste our time on short-form garbage. We are the people Homer Simpson was designed to mock. Homer and the people of the 90's wasted their time watching whatever trash TV was sloshed into their troughs. We're watching whatever an algorithm is slopped into ours.
You live in a fantastic world with instant access to everything in recorded history and yet you choose to rot in front of YouTube.
Here's the secret. It's not the 90's, the 90's were nothing special. It's the Past World, the one that you can only see when you're looking back at it. The world that we live in today was built in the 90's and the world that we will live in tomorrow is being built today.
The world is and will be what we make of it.
Our current moment will pass. I want to see what we'll achieve in another 100 years and I'm jealous of the babies just getting started now. I hope that something that I make will be seen as a stepping stone towards something better.
If you enjoy The X-Files, you really should check out Millennium, by the same creator (Chris Carter) and broadcast at roughly the same time.
It's very intense, with an Emmy-deserving performance by star Lance Henriksen (whom you may remember from the movie Aliens). It mixes Christian theology and eschatology, mythology, horror, and serial killers, leavened with delightful humour.
The first season is mostly "serial killer of the week", but is important to establish the characters and long-running story arcs.
The second season is a delight, with some of the best writing of any TV show I know, and a lot of complex situations with no easy answers.
The third season changed (and cheapened) everything, and is only worth watching for completists.
I remember watching the weekly x-files episode. My and my colleagues would discuss it the next day at work with great enthusiasm. In those days you had time to absorb tv shows like this, something that doesn't really seem to exist anymore today. The 90s where a great time.
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.
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/
In the pre-internet era, when you heard a fantastic story, you couldn't just google it to see if it was true. People either believed everything they heard, or they took it with a grain of salt. Either way, it was incredibly easy to let your imagination run wild with a crazy idea, even if you firmly believed in science and the burden of proof. That was the one-half the magic of The X-Files.
The other half was that so much of it took place almost entirely in rural or at least tight-knit suburban settings because that's where all the weird stuff happened. You couldn't grow up in the rural US (or probably anywhere) without spending many long summer evenings staring up at the clear starry sky and wondering what was out there, or hearing a sound in the woods that you couldn't readily identify. Pets occasionally disappeared without a trace. Livestock and wild animals behave strangely sometimes for no apparent reason. That guy living on his own a few miles down the road who hurls insults at anyone who walks by.
Weird rural shit still happens of course, but it's shrinking as suburbs continue to grow, and you see less of it on TV and in movies these days.
Yup, X-Files were great and I did experience it. "The Lone Gunmen," was good idea as well but they, i.e. tv gods should have waited five years after the X-Files ended, to allow some time for nostalgia to creep into fandom, to do the show. I remember discussing with someone, who knew a guy who knew a guy, online regarding how their personalities should be crafted for the show. They ended up with, funny. Too, funny was not a good fit for them since they had genius level intellect. This show was one of the few places I saw Linux being mentioned by an ape in the episode where The Lone Gunmen receive a message from an ingenious chimp attempting to escape a government laboratory. The way they were killed off was really crappy. They should bring then back on the new series, perhaps as cloned versions.
Seems like such a shitty thing to victimize the potential victim. But… if you didn’t know that images you took had metadata… maybe you shouldn’t be allowed to use a computer. I mean. I’m going on decades of knowing this. Feel like there is a mid 90s X-Files episode that even like breaks this down. If not NCIS or some shit.
I pretty much declared streaming show bankruptcy after sitting through Severance season 2 last year.
I know a lot of people liked it and maybe I'm just cynical, but to me it seems like every "serious" streaming show eventually falls victim to the "stretch a 2 hour movie's plot across a 12 - 16 hour season" strategy. They know it works because enough people binge watch or feel compelled to finish a series they've started.
At this point, if I'm watching a show then it's something where the episodes are sufficiently satisfying self-contained stories (e.g. something like Star Trek, X-Files, sitcoms). If I want something with a more involved plot, then I'll watch a movie. These formats are better because the limited runtime requires the creators to be intentional about what they dedicate screen time to. Meanwhile in a modern "story-driven" streamslop show it's painfully obvious when they're just padding out the runtime with fluff to make it to 8 episodes.
Of course there are exceptions to this, and there are stories for which a miniseries or a long-form series is the ideal video medium to convey them. But what happens so often is that you get 1-2 seasons of compelling storytelling followed by N more mediocre seasons that keep getting made because enough people keep watching. And the latter are just not worth the time investment.
From my memory from the 90s: Baywatch, X-Files, that speaking car one, Beverly Hills 90210, Ninja Turtles. Some dumb sitcom named Step by Step? edit: oh and ALF
Oh and Married with Children, but it was always very late night and I was not allowed to watch it.
And our teacher always played us ET on VHS. (and that dog playing basketball.)
that's america for me when I was a kid
The late 90s were full of media that questioned reality and authority - like X-Files, The Matrix, Dark City, all sorts of websites about conspiracy theories and UFOs, etc. The zeitgeist was full of speculation about hidden truths. The cultural mood was defiant and sardonic. There was rap, rap-rock, Beavis and Butthead, Fight Club, Office Space... One of the most popular pro wrestlers in the world played a character who beat up his boss and gave him the middle finger. Then after 9/11 it kinda seemed like suddenly the TV shows were all about cops and soldiers. Admittedly, my memories might be somewhat deceiving me. But I do feel that the mood suddenly shifted, much more than the actual damage done to America by the attack should have justified.
I love the case-of-the-week nature of it. Every TV series should work like the X-Files, all be monster-of-the-week while building up the overall macroplot.
I can't remember why I opened a cupboard door, although I recently came across Cerulean blue in an art shop which after much googling got me to the X files episode that I can't have seen since it first aired. memory is indeed weird
Evil got cancelled with a 6 episode finish, which is unheard of when making TV. It wanders around, and has highlights in each season. The x-files got real sloppy near the end too.
Also in the running for great title sequences as well
For X-Files fans who might be unfamiliar with the reboot, the reboot has actually one episode dedicated to this - S11E07 - Rm9sbG93ZXJz, Mulder/Scully don't want to tip the robotic self-service and are punished for it.
Available to watch here: https://www.tvseries.video/series/the-x-files/season-11-episode-7-rm9sbg93zxjz
Going back I dumped all the streaming platforms as most of their new programming was not at all interesting. Turns out I was watching reruns of shows I downloaded years ago that were still sitting on my server. So I made my own cable channel by dumping every downloaded TV show into a single playlist then turn shuffle on. I have a low power PC hooked to my TV running Debian. The power is low enough that I just turn the TV off and leave the PC running.
Since I mostly put the TV on to have background noise this solution works perfectly. It's really nice to turn the TV on and see random x-files, mst3k, max headroom, cowboy bebop, futurama, and so on 24/7. And most of it is in SD or ripped from TV/VHS which doesn't bother me at all, in fact, it adds charm and character via those artifacts of the past.
The main thing I credit EVD with is teaching me disappointment from certain fun tantalizing things not turning out to be true. This prepared me to better cope with the X-Files and Lost TV shows, as well as nuclear fusion research and faster than light space travel :grumpycat:
I seem to remember that it was The X-Files that first pioneered the “every episode is a mini-movie” and it showed in the production at the time compared to other stuff.
Could be mis-remembering though, when I think about early anthologies like Twilight Zone or Freddy’s Nightmares.
I think this is less “Netflix vs old TV” and more episodic vs serialised, and the serialised form definitely isn’t new.
Buffy is a great example: plenty of monster of the week episodes, but also season long arcs and character progression that rewarded continuity. The X-Files deliberately ran two tracks in parallel: standalone cases plus the mythology episodes. Lost was essentially built around long arcs and cliffhangers, it just had to make that work on a weekly broadcast cadence.
What’s changed is the delivery mechanism, not the existence of serialisation. When your audience gets one episode a week, with mid-season breaks, schedule slips, and multi-year gaps between seasons, writers have to fight a constant battle to re-establish context and keep casual viewers from falling off. That’s why even heavily serialised shows from that era often kept an episodic spine. It’s a retention strategy as much as a creative choice.
Streaming and especially season drops flip that constraint. When episodes are on demand and many viewers watch them close together, the time between chapters shrinks from weeks to minutes. That makes it much easier to sustain dense long-form narrative, assume recent recall, and let the story behave more like a novel than a syndicated procedural.
So the pattern isn’t new. On demand distribution just finally makes the serialised approach work as reliably at scale as it always wanted to.
I’ll follow X-Files so M. Whoever came back from a dystopian future to kill his colleague whose work enables that future.
I forgot which episode it is, but it is almost the same idea, and the same school BTW.
Not saying it had anything to do with X-files, but also when you shot something for TV but were not entirely sure if the capture would ever go to the movies, you protected the wide frame.
Also, if you shot a movie but wanted it to look good in TV later, you put the most important action somewhere in a 4:3.
They said Bluray and DVD.
Some of us have quite a few DVD/Blurays that we could rip. A lot of good stuff can be found in bargain bins and closing down sales (I got all the 9 series of the X-files for next to nothing). I am personally not bothering to rip them and download them instead, but I am not paying like 5 times for the same movie/tv series that I have already paid for.
A lot of films have been re-released now like on different media formats, with several different "cuts" which normally have maybe a few extra minutes of dialogue.
To add, when it comes to video games sometimes people go "baww but 24 fps is enough for film". However, pause a film and you'll see a lot of smearing, not unlike cartoon animation frames I suppose, but in a video game every frame is discrete so low framerate becomes visually a lot more apparent.
I think it was The Hobbit that had a 60 fps version, and people just... weren't having it. It's technologically superior I'm sure (as would higher frame rates be), but it just becomes too "real" then. IIRC they also had to really update their make-up game because on higher frame rates and / or resolutions people can see everything.
Mind you, watching older TV shows nowadays is interesting; I think they were able to scan the original film for e.g. the X Files and make a HD or 4K version of it, and unlike back in the day, nowadays you can make out all the fine details of the actor's skin and the like. Part high definition, part watching it on a 4K screen instead of a CRT TV.
Interesting! Makes me think of old 1990s X-Files episodes with chips under a microscope “smaller than we can produce”.
I wonder if the government makes small batches of bespoke chips that are super miniature based on non scalable processes, and how far back in time would they have been able to develop 1nm chips for example?
I assume you mean it's not really worth watching if it's currently on broadcast TV?
Surely there's a huge list of old broadcast TV network shows that are worth watching, and that still suffer from the ad-break problem to various degrees.
Obviously I'm pulling from a wide time-period, and I'll probably get some of these wrong because I'm not in the the US and don't quite grok the network/cable divide, but off the top of my head, I think these are/were all worth watching: Seinfeld, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Freaks and Geeks, Arrested Development, 30 Rock, Community, Schitt's Creek, The Office, The X-Files, various Star Trek series, Cheers
That list could be easily improved on, but I assume it's missing your point anyway if you were only talking about current broadcast network TV (if it exists :) )
This article mentions aliens because this particular signal has been the subject of such speculation for decades, including by real working scientists. Heck an entire episode of the X Files was written around it. To write about the Wow Signal, and not at least acknowledge this cultural history and context, would itself be bad journalism.
Also, extraterrestrial life is not “fairy tales.” Most serious scientists expect that it does exist given what we know about life and cosmos.
Finally, many people have proposed a terrestrial origin for the signal over the years because of its anomalous strength. Some folks found “close accident” more likely than “distant and impossibly strong.”
I feel the same. It's a distinct part of nerd culture.
In the '70s, if you were into computers you were most likely also a fan of Star Trek. I remember an anecdote from the 1990s when an entire dial-up ISP was troubleshooting its modem pools because there were zero people connected and they assumed there was an outage. The outage happened to occur exactly while that week's episode of X-Files was airing in their time zone. Just as the credits rolled, all modems suddenly lit up as people connected to IRC and Usenet to chat about the episode. In ~1994 close to 100% of residential internet users also happened to follow X-Files on linear television. There was essentially a 1:1 overlap between computer nerds and sci-fi nerds.
Today's analog seems to be that almost all nerds love anime and Andy Weir books and some of us feel a bit alienated by that.
You mean 2001 of 1969?
The X-files AI episodes of the '90's are about as close to 1969 as to today.
All anybody could do then was to use their imagination, but is it all that much different today?
They just don't produce very good tv shows anymore. There is nothing to watch.
In the 90s we had Seinfeld, X-Files, King Of Queens, Frasier, Star Trek TNG, Macguyver and so on.
Then onto 1990s movies, which by the time they reached TV syndication were still good! Will I watch Lethal Weapon or Die Hard even though I've seen it before? Heck yes!
> mysterious life form on a docked ship
> black goo
Hey, I've watched this X-Files episode before!
My girlfriend and I have recently been watching all the X-files episodes with glee for the first time. This would be a new twist on Mulder.
Wasnt an early 90s show called "Tropical heat" absurdly popular in the Balkans?
All I remember is that it had a pony-tailed detective called Nick Slaughter, who was solving cases with a red haired woman called Sylvia. The show was very 90s...
How about The X-files? The show was popular everywhere, although it had very un-even writing. Could have a 10/10 episode followed by a 1/10 episode.
It doesn’t mention it in the Wikipedia article but I think the X files episode “The Erlenmeyer Flask” was also partially inspired by and drew some details from this case.
Light hearted? Suitable for small children? Are you kidding me.
I'm in my mid-30's and still remember nightmares those stupid series gave me when I was in kindergarten. It was X-Files-tier scary ("The X Files" being other show aired by polish TV around same time), masquarading behind cute animations. How can anyone in their right mind call the episode where the Moomintroll swaps bodies with Stinky lighthearted and positive? What about the collection of monsters like Groke or Hattifnats? On some occasion I remember my parents would call me to get out from my room to watch the "wieczorynka" and I would pretend I can't hear and come out only as I hear the outro song starting, just to avoid whatever insane plot the Moomins would bring on me that time. I hate Moomins so much and wish could erase it from existence. Calling it "cute and happy" is like saying candybar with razorblade inside is delicious; technically true but not exactly an accurate description.
I don't watch movies or TV shows very much.
For TV shows I keep going back to the same ones I loved, that is the X-Files. And I can't even think of a second one I'd go back to watch...damn there is really no other TV show I'm going to watch, unless you count kids show such as Bluey.
For movies I'm also going back to the ones I loved to watch. I think I did add maybe a few throughout the years, but it's safe to say that most of the movies in my library are older than 10 years old.
The thing about movies and shows is, reality can be weirder and more interesting. Most of the movies and TV shows are pretty naive when they try talking about politics or such.
I made my first couple of websites on GeoCities back in 1997 for my 2 favourite tv shows at the time: Xena and The X-Files. I wish they had been archived somewhere. I remember how watching the visitor counters go up into the tens of thousands for each one of them felt like an enormous accomplishment, like I had peaked in life. Good times.
I have to agree on #7: it's pretty annoying, especially for series where there's both TV shows and movies related to them. For instance, The X-Files: there's 11 seasons of shows, but also 2 movies. A better example is Star Trek, with a bunch of different TV series, plus a bunch of various movies related to the different series.
You can put these into "collections", but it'd be nice if my library could just have a "Star_Trek" directory and then subdirectories with all those things inside, and have it automatically sorted out by JF.
The existence of a fictional movie says nothing about how popular conspiracies are. I have seen a lot of dystopian movies and read such books, including cyberpunk. A Scanner Darkly, The Illuminatus Trilogy, The Matrix, Snow Crash, Dune, eXistenz, just name some random ones. I'll mention four series, too: Twin Peaks, X-Files, Utopia, Nikita. That doesn't make me a conspiracy nut, because I am able to differentiate between fiction and non-fiction.
The trouble from 80's is different. We've shifted power vacuum, but whilst doing so the rich have become very much more rich, and [generally] they don't want to take responsibility; they want raw power. Things like bullshit (lies, conspiracies, manipulation), drama (such as creating friction between poor and middle class), obliteration of facts and science, cryptocurrency to avoid sanctions and law, and criminal behavior (including methods to avoid paying tax) are each tools for achieving more of such power.
UFOs are one of such, too. They're a tool to accelerate the distrust in government. For the acronym UFO itself is broad. A meteorite or Starlink satellite could be mistaken for an alien spaceship. Furthermore, drugs, hallucination, psychosis and the power of suggestion alone are strong tools to feed such fables.
I am well aware fans of conspiracies can very well be fans of X-Files but it is fiction first and foremost, plus don't forget Scully's role and background.
X-files was a documentary
Technology as a narrative element has also evolved.
I distinctly remember watching X-Files in the 90s and thinking this is the first TV show where everyone is assumed to have a cell phone. Moreover, the phone nearly always works! When one of the characters goes wandering into some dark spooky forest in British Columbia, it doesn’t mean they’re going to get their own episode or suffer a mysterious death, they just pop open their phone and call their partner. Suddenly every existing story where phone calls can only be received at fixed locations seems as old as Sherlock Holmes sending a wire by messenger. And nowadays you have to explicitly signal danger by having the character pull out their phone and see NO SIGNAL.
The second season of Severance has a scene where a character leaves his apartment to make a call at a phone booth down the street. In 1980 this would have just signaled that he wanted to make an anonymous call. In 2025 it is alarming. What is this world he’s in where there are still phone booths? Is a shot with the character framed alone, lit by the harsh light of a phone booth at night, a deliberate reference to The Matrix?
What story elements will kids today take for granted? It’s still kind of trendy in stories to show a crowd making videos of something on their phones and causing a ruckus on social media. Maybe ubiquitous video will seem to them like cell phones seemed to us.
Aside from, obviously, David Duchovny, more than a handful of the regular Twin Peaks cast showed up in the X Files. Shapes ft. Michael Horse and Humbug ft. Michael J. Anderson are two particularly great early episodes.
TV was also like this though. It's one of the first things you learn in a 20th century media class. Early TV shows were adapted from radio play scripts, and later written by radio play scriptwriters moving into the new format. That structure and its conventions stayed strongly influential right up until the end of prominent network TV shows.
TV show creators understood and planned for people watching their shows in a variety of environments, with varying degrees and kinds of attention. A lot of what made for example X-files and Sopranos compelling was a willingness to break this convention, so it was still firmly in place by the late 90s.
You could also maybe reasonably claim that all TV shows before those were bad as well. But then you need to view netflix as reverting to the norm rather than being a novel travesty. We are simply exiting a 20 year anomaly where TV was good.
I'm not quite making that argument here though. I think there was good TV before the 90s, so I think this is a constraint on the form that good creators can work through and still make compelling art. Why netflix can't is an interesting question but I think this avenue is a dead end for understanding it.
There was a scene in an X-files episode of a secret meeting in some US city ... under the Skytrain monorail with a train whizzing by.
I liked TV better back when there were a few "main story arc" shows, but the majority were random, unconnected plots. Like the X-files where most of the shows were "monster of the week" but they would occasionally return to some main theme and move it forward. We're re-watching Deep Space 9, and I think that series had the right ratio.
As opposed to something like Game Of Thrones, which was basically a single 70 hour movie split arbitrarily.
"Drive" [1] was a really fun episode of "The X-Files" featuring exploding head(s).
And - interesting anecdote about it:
> The episode was written by Vince Gilligan, directed by Rob Bowman, and featured a guest appearance by Bryan Cranston. Gilligan cast Cranston to play the antagonist because he felt he could successfully humanize the role. Cranston's success in "Drive" later led to his casting as Walter White in Gilligan's AMC series Breaking Bad.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_(The_X-Files)
The Thing and Alien are my two favorite movies. Silence of the Lambs is up there too.
Not movies but I've rewatched X-Files and Twin Peaks repeatedly as well.
Outside of going to the movies, Blockbuster was pretty much my sole source of video.
I had a TV, but no cable and poor reception (I remember watching snowy news broadcasts of the LA riots). I honestly did be not miss it. This was pre-internet, so most of my consumption was through books.
The interesting thing was when BB would get the latest box set of the X-files. Pretty much the closest you could get to binging at the time. 4-5 tapes, 2 episodes per (it was never the entire season). Watch a tape per week. Always excited when the new set arrived.
I don't think JFK's assassination supports this though because that led to President Johnson, the Civil Rights Act, various memorials and some interesting X-Files episodes and not a civil war.
That X-Files episode may have been inspired by "Time Shards" [1] by Gregory Benford, a short story first published in 1979.
TLDR: Too late to be included in the bi-millenium vault, a Smithsonian researcher discovers an audio recording accidentally inscribed on a c. 1280 pot by a pointy tool cutting a decorative spiral. After listening to the banal conversation recorded on the pot, the researcher wonders about the contents of the vault to be opened in a thousand years: “What makes you think we’ve done any better?”
[1] https://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/time-shards/
I don't think this was a real myth. This was an X-Files episode in which a clay pot that has been molded while Jesus was ordering Lazarus to rise from the dead could be used to bring other people back from the dead by playing back the recording. If I'm remembering correctly, even in X-Files this was actually a hoax.
Wade Davis was a speaker at the 2012 American Alpine Club meeting at the Ford Assembly Plant in Richmond, CA. He had a line that stuck with me: death is the price we pay for living. Side note, Davis is mentioned in at least one episode of the X-Files, owing to his work on zombies in Haiti.
These aren't Everest specific recs, but if any of you are looking for mountaineering reading:
_The White Spider_ by Heinrich Harrer
_The Beckoning Silence_ and _Into the Void_ by Joe Simpson
_Eiger Obsession_ by John Harlin. Part of my enjoyment came from my familiarity with the geography of the book.
_Solo Faces_ by James Salter, fiction, loosely based on Gary Hemmings and Royal Robbins.
The movies were much less successful than the TV series. The series was definitely hugely popular in Western Europe at least, I can't speak for the whole continent.
Yep, the PDF/study is US-based (and funded by 21st Century Fox lol) " The sample was demographically representative and weighted to be representative of women in the U.S. population based on age (25 and older), STEM involvement, and viewing of The X-Files" https://web.archive.org/web/20180605152837/https://impact.21cf.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2018/03/ScullyEffectReport_21CF_1-1.pdf
Can it possibly be true that 60+% (she writes "nearly two-thirds") of women in STEM have this character as an influence? I'm only barely aware of this media property and here in Europe I feel our Media is fairly "American" still, does this show have such a global reach? I found, for instance, that the X-Files movie only had 4.2% of its revenue internationally, so I think its not such a popular property outside the US. How would even 10% of chinese female STEM workers hear of this character?
I believe she is citing the PDF she links, where only an archived version is available right now. It seems to be a US-only study, although I don't see any explanation of where participants were from.
>The best X-Files episode
I believe you meant "Folie a Deux"?
The best X-Files episode, "Never Again" from Season 4, is about toxic chemicals in tattoos.
And the classic X-Files episode "Ghost in the Machine" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghost_in_the_Machine_(The_X-Files)
I remember the first couple of websites that I made back in 1997... Both were about The X-Files and Xena: Warrior Princess. Just basic info about the series, character and episode analysis and some screen captures taken with my TV tuner card. I've had an "about me" page in both of them with my contact information. I ended up making some basic websites for some small businesses in my area that wanted an online presence. A part of me wishes I had pursued Web development as a career.
I've just gone from season one to season two in an X-Files rewatch and the sudden appearance of cell phones is shocking.
> Somebody somewhere must have done a PhD thesis on the way that cell phones have changed storytelling in TV and movies. I'd actually kinda like to read that.
Prime example would be the X-Files. IIRC in the first season they had no cell phones yet.
I would add Simon Fraser University in Vancouver BC. Its grey concrete architecture combined with Vancouver's grey skies has appeared in a host of scifi, mostly dystopian stuff such as the Underworld vampire movies. And of course X-files, which was pretty dystopian imho.
https://604now.com/simon-fraser-university-movies-filmed-at-sfu-hollywood/
> Snow Crash is satire of more "serious" cyberpunk
Agree 100%. If anyone has trouble seeing that <i>Snow Crash</i> is satire, I recommend reading <i>Headcrash</i>, by Bruce Bethke, then going back to <i>Snow Crash</i>. If <i>Snow Crash</i> is the original <i>Robocop<i> (a satire that was deadpan enough that many people missed the satire entirely), then <i>Headcrash</i> is Paul Verhoeven's <i>Starship Troopers</i> (completely over-the-top).
> like Gibson.
It's easy to assume Gibson's work is serious, but I think anyone that does is subconsciously glossing over a lot of little details that - in sum - make it pretty clear that Gibson is also a satirist, just extraordinarily deadpan and casual about it.
Almost everyone gets a gritty <i>Blade Runner</i> image in their mind when reading his Sprawl stories, but consider that a key plot element is a space station built by weed-smoking Rastafarians. i.e. they are "so high they're in orbit", and that there are offhand references to an "Aryan reggae band". The military veteran - abandoned by an uncaring government - that happens to be a dolphin.
Then consider that the film and TV projects directly involving Gibson have typically featured plenty of comedic elements, and most have a bright, colourful look. <i>Johnny Mnemonic</i> (the film). The "First Person Shooter" and "Kill Switch" episodes of <i>The X-Files</i>.
This is the episode "ice" from x-files.
This sounds very much like the plot to at least one X-Files episode.
> I'd be very interested in hearing from anyone who experienced that sameness compared to today's more fragmented media on if they think it changed anything from a social point of view. Shared experiences and interests are fertile ground for building relationships and it sounds like everyone generally shared a lot more.
I very much miss the shared social experience. In the 90s, you'd go to school on Monday and run down the latest X-Files episode. VCRs existed, but worst case you watched it later that night. Otherwise you missed out on the discussion.
Then the next week SNL did a parody and everyone got it because everyone saw the thing they were parodying.
Now that happens much less frequently. It still happens sometimes. When Wednesday came out, even people who hadn't seen the show knew what it was about. Same with Squid Games and Stranger Things.
If you want to see some data, check this out:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_watched_television_broadcasts_in_the_United_States#Series_by_year_2
The ratings share is what you want to look at. That roughly represents the percent of all households with TVs who watch a show. Look at the highest rated show for each year and what percent of people watch it.
Back in the day to be the highest rated, you had to be over 60%. Now a top rated non-sports show is maybe 10%.
Interestingly what I see now that I have my own kids is that they don't talk about scripted TV much at all -- they talk about video games and YouTube/tiktok videos that they all seem to have seen. So that seems to be where the social aspect is moving.
Sounds like an X-Files episode.
guess who the early colonizers of these alt platforms are
The early web was mostly nerds, but not just tech nerds. I made my first site in 1997 and I linked to all sorts of things about TV shows, music and games that had been made by fans of things. If someone loved the X-Files and wanted to contribute to a site about it the only option was to get a book about HTML from the library and learn to use FTP. It thrived because it was just a group of people enthusiastic about things. Few people wanted to criticise because the only response you'd get was "well you make a better website then!". And when that happened people did. There were rivalries that worked like a feedback loop to improve things. That's missing today. People just criticise and don't try to do better. I blame the rise of guestbooks.
Agree. Friday night X-Files was is such a great memory. My 90’s-geek-self (and current) especially loved any episode with the Lone Gunmen — such a different era of hacker culture. On the opposite end of the spectrum, while I enjoyed watching SeaQuest (s1 at least) on Sunday nights, I mostly remember the post-episode dread as the weekend was over and it was time to get ready for Monday.
I would think they have been getting royalties on episode reruns, since they were tracked down via a cue sheet, which has their names on it. Cue sheet is used by performing rights organizations to pay out royalties to performers. Given the story of the track's composition ("we need a song, you have four hours") my guess is that these folks have produced a large number of songs over the past 30 years that earn relatively small royalties per track. Add on top of that there are multiple tracks called "X-Files" just in this episode and I'd further guess there are plenty of songs that the musicians are getting paid for that they have forgotten over the years!
This thread inspired me to watch an X-Files episode last night. I had to search for what episode to watch because I remember them getting pretty scary and creepy, which I don't want right now. I found a mild and comical one that was perfect: Jose Chung's "From Outer Space", season 3, ep. 20
It’s quite impressive how good xfiles looks today when you compare it to other shows around the same period.
Space above and beyond in comparison looks pretty terrible from what I have seen. It’s not even wide screen.
I think X files was shot on film perhaps?
I’m not sure if what we have now on say Disney plus for example is a remastered version but certainly it holds up very well.
If you've got an Internet connection, all the X-files episodes are available for download through torrents.
Oh yeah, now that you reminded me, there are a few episodes that has sort of viewer discretion warning at the beginning.
I'll tell $wifie that I'll have to re-watch the whole X-Files this month to figure out which episodes my son should avoid when he is 12 (that is around 9 years from now). This definitely counts as parenting work.
Coincidentally there’s another song in an x-files episode that has been sought out over the years. In that case though, it’s a rendition by the original performers that seems to have never been made public: https://www.reddit.com/r/XFiles/comments/1zthzq/can_we_please_join_forces_to_find_this_song/
Noticed this one a few days ago randomly as it was developing and as an old X-Phile it intrigued a bit ... particularly because it actually was going somewhere very fast after years of people pondering about it. (even had me searching some old usenet archives for clues)
TL;DR:
A song that appeared in a country bar scene in an X-Files episode (the 25th anniversary of the first airing of said episode in 1998!) has been a mystery for years. Allured by its on-topic country lyrics etc, many have wondered for years. After this thread, the music production guy and some others have come out of the woodwork and are working on finding the lost song which was produced/played custom for the show. A cue file has been found and the music guy thinks he might have a cd backup of it somewhere (which requires more help because he doesn't have a cd player to play it apparently!). They are going to work on a public release of the song if it comes together.
I created an online fan forum for The X-Files back in 1993 on the Delphi vax-based network as the web was starting to emerge. I created ASCII art of logos and stuff since it was a text-based menu-driven system. Newscorp bought the company and their marketing managers started asking me to create ASCII art for them. It turned out my fan forum was the biggest on the service with 25,000 members (that was a lot back then.) This got the attention of executives who wanted to use this new digital medium to market their properties not just for FOX Broadcasting but TV Guide, Harper Collins, FOX Film, FX Cable Network, etc. They decided to create a web-based online service to do it and hired me away from my job as a lab researcher working on gene therapy and moved me to Los Angeles to create and run the official X-Files web site. They liked me because I knew the tech and what fans wanted. I basically invented what was then the TV/film marketing web site. All I really did was assess what marketing resources were available and figure out a way to put them online. I was literally the first person to put TV show trailers online Not film trailers, just TV. No one thought anyone cared enough about T shows to download a 1.4MB 320x240 TV spot over 14400bps. Crazy times. I spent $1000 on the video capture card to digitize tv spots on VHS tapes they sent me. This was when the Pentium 90 had just come out. They never followed through creating the web-based online service for Newscorp, but since I had created a web site and online community with millions of users I ended up managing all of the web sites for the television network (and coded most of them) and even worked on sites like FOX Sports when it first came out and became the goto guy on the FOX lot when it came to online content and understanding what the fans wanted out of web sites. I moved on to create and work on ecommerce sites during the dot com boom, later worked on the original Star Wars Battlefront 1 and 2 and created the mod tools (the classic/good ones), worked for Sony Pictures Imageworks Interactive ultimately Sony PlayStation where I managed the production on all of the PS1 Classics available for digital download as well as some less notable stuff. That was my last full time job. Today I can't get a fulltime or even freelance job to save my life, despite nearly three decades of experience managing technology initiatives and software production that generated tens of millions in revenue. Entertainment is a different beast, you age out if you aren't an executive, and other industries don't seem to care about transferrable skills unless you're an individual contributor (programmer).
Yeah there was an X-Files episode where the CIA gathered DNA via polio vaccines.
Which means someone at the CIA said, “Hey that thing that happened in the X-Files, let’s do that but for real!”
Has Toner (or someone with like-minded views) filled in the blanks between "GPT-4" and "Terminator Judgement Day" in a believable way? I've read what Yudkowsky writes but it all sounds so fantastical that it's, at least to me, more like an episode of The Twilight Zone or The X-Files than something resembling reality. Is Toner really in the "nuke the datacenters" camp? If so, was her placement on the board not a mistake from the beginning?
Yeah, I spent years being frightened of stuff like Jurassic Park, Critters, X-Files, and even a MacGyver episode(!) That last one is where MacGyver gets lead poisoning and starts hallucinating; I must've seen that when I was, 4, 5, maybe? I remembered it when I saw it years later at the age of 12 or so (at which point it wasn't scary at all).
But around that age I did see Jurassic Park, and I spent months scared in bed – every time I heard some rumbling noise (usually just a car) I worried it might be some T-Rex or whatnot shrug. X-Files was also all the rage at the time and I always imagined aliens and whatnot peeking through my window.
It all seems profoundly silly even to me who lived through this to the point of mental illness, but kids can be really silly and have a kind of over-active imaginations that can make things scary that you or I have trouble imagining.
And all of that was before the internet. Even back in the 90s some more parental controls wouldn't be a bad idea, tailored to the personality of the child.
I feel like fixating on the device only gets part of the point. I try to remember being a teen, and in spite of not owning a mobile phone until I was 27, and not having a beeper before then, I was still exposed to all of what this article and a lot of the comments are pointing out as harmful things. I saw plenty of porn, gore, witnessed a lot of in-person violence. Looking back, I can see a lot of my friend group had some very inappropriate relationships with predatory adults. We drove while intoxicated, had underage unprotected sex. My sister got pregant as a teenager. Her best friend from high school was murdered by her mom's boyfriend. One of our best family friends who I babysat for was one of the few surviving victims of Richard Ramirez, the nightstalker. My middle school was shot at in three separate drive-bys. It's not like we didn't face danger. By any reasonable measure, at least in the US, the 90s were more dangerous than the world is today. Remember the movie My Girl? That actually happened to me. One of my best friends from when I was a kid, my dad's co-worker's daughter who hung out with us before I could form memories and ended up going to the same middle school as me, died from touching a cat because of allergies when we were 12. Stupid, preventable nonsense.
The problem that kids face today isn't danger. It's scale. Telecommunications has created a world where everyone is hyperconnected 24/7 and it's overwhelming. One issue with phones is the media content. There's too much of it, it never stops, and it creates an environment of constant comparison you can never escape from. Back in the day, getting really into TNG or X-Files was in itself an escape. They only came on once a week. They didn't try to fool you into thinking what was happening was real and your life didn't measure up because you weren't living that. The streaming ecosystem creates an entirely different dynamic where the consumers feel like they aren't living their best lives if they're not also producing their own content because of the illusion that the most popular celebrities are just regular people showing you their regular lives. But even without a phone, it's still there. The streaming services are all reachable from any other computing device or even a television.
Then you get into social networks. People you actually know, but barely. If someone bullies or annoys you, you can never get away. Instead of playing pick up basketball or lifting together with regular friends, you're doomscrolling Instagram watching a bunch of underwear models who can slam dunk thinking that's normal. Maybe you avoid some of that if you can't doomscroll, but if you have friends, they're going to show you the same feed. You can't make them unaware of the environment of FOMO and personal inadequacy this creates.
It's different being exposed to this kind of thing as an adult. Now that I'm spending time on Hacker News, it often makes me feel unaccomplished. There are technical wizards here, people whose books I read when learning the industry, people who retired as multimillionaires before they turned 30. But you know what? I barely knew such people existed when I was a kid. I'm just a normal guy now, but I felt like a god as a kid. I got 2nd in the So Cal regional spelling bee. Won the district-wide art show two years in a row. I lettered in four sports. Won two cross-country state championships, not individual, just team, but still. Perfect SAT score. I was 3rd tallest in my graduating class.
It turns out I was just a somewhat big fish in a nothing pond, but what would it have been like if I'd known that as a kid? If I was aware of how big the world is and how many ridiculous outliers and exceptional people are out there and how far I really was from being great at anything at all, what effect would that have had on my self-esteem and mental health? I can deal with it as an adult. I'm content at this point to live out a mediocre but happy and comfortable life. I don't know that kids can do that. Kids are ambitious. They're self-centered. They naturally form steep and brutal hierarchies.
I'm just not sure that taking away the phone, restricting usage, having GPS and parental controls, actually protects them from any of that.
"Nobody cares" is the important part. The most recent X-Files reboot did an episode on this. The age of conspiracies is over; governments don't have to kill people to protect secrets because they can just dump them in public and nobody has any idea what to believe anymore.
> I still don't understand how Roland Emmerich [...] somehow managed to fail to get people into theater seats for 13th Floor.
There were a lot of "are you living in a simulation?" film and television episodes that came out in 1998-2000. The Matrix was obviously the most successful, but Dark City (over a year earlier) had a similar theme. The X-Files episode "Field Trip" aired a few weeks after eXistenZ was in theatres, but a few weeks before The Thirteenth Floor was released. Etc.
I'm a fan of the genre, and I like all of the examples I've seen from that period (eXistenZ in particular), but I remember feeling at the time like it was just too much similar material in too short a period of time. I doubt Sony could have done anything to significantly change the box office numbers other than releasing it well before The Matrix.
G'day! Logged on '94 or '95 at Edith Cowan University in Perth and was blown away to find an episode guide for a fair chunk of The X-Files Season 2, and we'd only seen the first season! We knew when the "cool" episodes were coming up because we could see William B. Davis (The Cigarette-Smoking Man) in the cast list.
The X-Files is gone, but I'm still here. :-)
The main thing I'm getting out of this conversation is that X-Files had an awful lot of really good writers. Those three episodes you listed had three different writers.
You somehow neglected to mention Home, which had two other writers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_(The_X-Files)
But I think Clyde Bruckman's Final Repose is the greatest of them all.
I remember watching the filming of an episode at the Steveston docks while having dinner at a nearby restaurant.
Can't find the episode name but it was a rainy rainy night (what else). I think the set was the interior of a small fishing boat.
X-Files filming happened all over Vancouver for years. People didn't pay excessive amount of attention to the actors and guest stars when they were at hotels, restaurants etc. Unlike some cities.
You can watch it as two shows (like a lot of shows from the 26 episode season era), one being the story arc episodes and two being the monster-of-the week style episodes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythology_of_The_X-Files
If you look up an X-Files episode guide, you should find something that helps you get through the muck. I found it on red several years ago and I have it on my share drive but it's offline at the moment. It ranked each episode as part of the story arc, generic monster of the week episode (MotW), or "not story arc but particularly good".
I use that to get through five seasons of X-Files and really enjoyed it. I did the same thing with deep space nine.
I'd say X-Files largely survived because of the dynamic of the characters. A lot of the episodes were not very good except for the interplay between the two. But in the absence of good writing you definitely needed Mulder and Scully and the spin-off didn't have them.
We had a viewing party for the premiere. To be honest, we were more looking forward to Bruce Campbell’s “Adventures of Brisco County, Jr”, which premiered just before the “X-Files” (and is now sadly forgotten).
The “X-Files” hooked us right from the start. The only show that even came close to that first episode was “Lost” many years later. Most first season episodes were strong, with some downright classics, and the show was captivating from the beginning. Helps that the two leads were well cast and the writing was way better than the typical genre series.
(Two of the X-Files writers went off to showrun the criminally underrated “Space: Above and Beyond”, too. Without the success of X-Files, we wouldn’t have gotten that.)
YMMV, but I enjoyed the "monster of the week" episodes more - the best were the ones where the show didn't take itself too seriously, and sure enough, three of my favourites are also in the list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcadia_(The_X-Files), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bad_Blood_(The_X-Files) and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clyde_Bruckman%27s_Final_Repose.
Many series were filmed in Canada at the time (still now?), I think it was around Vancouver. Humid forests everwhere... But they are indeed great for X-files.
Anyway, I think the earlier seasons were better in that they were more varied before the show really became all about aliens conspiracies with the odd non-alien episode here and there.
Watching all the "mythology arc" X-Files episodes in a row and skipping all of the "monster of the week" episode makes it look like a modern TV show. Very enjoyable. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mythology_of_The_X-Files
Feels like it was yesterday it came out. It's hard to convey to people who didn't watch it growing up just how special it was.
It landed on TV right as the collective zeitgeist around the governments around the world getting up to shady things ("Echelon's trunk trawler") and the perpetually amusing mythology and conspiracy theories around aliens, ufos, DNA and parascience. Few had BBS/internet/WWW access, so it was much harder to stamp out a lot of the low-level conspiracies that used to float around back then. That helped keep the spirit of X-files alive, somehow. Hm, it's hard to describe.
It's weirdly of its time, and yet it holds up so well -- or at least until it goes off the rails in the later seasons. Still, fantastic cast; great writing, all around; and surprisingly, the special effects and costumes hold up really well, too. The first 4-5 seasons are electrifyingly good because they filmed it in Canada, so it retains this dark, brooding boreal feeling to it.
The amount of gossip around school and between friends whenever a new mythology episode landed was especially fun.
Charnas died recently, I was fairly sad about that. There's also overlap with The Hunger (the novel, not the film which was made from it) in terms of having a separate species. Or Katt Shea's Dance of the Damned.
The X-Files episode "Folie a Deux" featured an insect which "fit in" among humans. You might like that.
When they brought back the X-Files for one season a few years ago they did an episode on this premise: the shadowy conspiracy master actually releases youtube videos describing what he does, on the grounds that nobody knows the difference between truth and untruth anymore, so it only helps him to further muddy the waters.
Neats and scruffies also showed up in The X-Files in their first AI episode.
Looks like something you'd see in an X Files episode.
I personally support a natural origins theory, but I was referring to the disproportionate energy people invest in origins when so many of the same people have dropped mitigations. It's contradictory behavior. Either you believe it's a serious threat and treat it that way, or it's a totally disconnected reality X-files TV show.
If COVID is so unserious that people won't clean the air, wear respirators, test, isolate, or vaccinate, then why should anyone care about origins outside of public health professionals?
I remember that episode of X Files…wait a minute!
I think the same way. The demos from Unreal Engine 5 are incredible. Combine it with LLMs and we really are not too far from being able to as the computer to generate a story and giving it some details, and having it be rendered and look pretty damn lifelike. That 5, maybe 10 years away at most.
I don't think the movie/tv industries will disappear, but they will be lessened when people can generate at least reasonable looking entertainment from home.
I think movies and tv will basically become like books already are. People might have read some best sellers, but there won't really be anything that is super widespread or you can count on most people having seen like Seinfeld or The X-Files.
This kind of gets me, too. I'm seeing a lot of this "skeptics said we couldn't do this, but we did," but really? Predictions seem to have largely been wildly unrealistic. The creator of the first hardware perceptron in the late 1950s predicted it would be sentient with a decade. Clarke and Kubrick thought we'd have computers that resisted being turned off and could autonomously control spacecraft (and that we'd have human missions to Jupiter and a permanent station on the moon) 22 years ago, which we still don't have. Back to the Future II thoguht we'd have antigravity in 2015.
I recently did a full X-Files rewatch and the first episode involving AI comes up in season one, when a computer programmed to handle internal building security and temperature control becomes sentient, decides it doesn't want to be turned off or do what its system administrator tells it to any more, and decides to start killing people in the building, via cleverly calculated means that make the deaths look accidental. Scully, the skeptic in this situation, insists this kind of technology is decades away. Here we are, decades later, and I don't see anything with a capability anywhere close to defying its programming and carrying out murder plots that look like accidents.
It feels like people are being fooled into a single decade's worth of legitimately rapid and unexpected advances in autonomous game play and text generation and now acting like the entire history of computing and AI has been tech consistently exceeding expectations, but that has definitely not been true over any appreciable long term.
The HAARP conspiracy theories are fun and date back to the old days of conspiracy theories when people wore tin foil hats and worried about government mind rays. Not at all based in reality or sensible but at least those conspiracies were harmless and non-political.
Anyway... no there's no evidence. But i do miss these classic conspiracy theories! Anyone remember the X-Files episode featuring HAARP?
I think the writer's point is that Kubrick has been analyzed _to death_ on social media. It's true - there's a huge ecosystem of YouTube explainer videos, listicles, in-depth articles about his shooting style, camera tricks, editing, symbolism in his films, etc. So, I don't think he's actually wrong. In previous decades there was an ecosystem of books and magazines about films (for example I have books on the making of Dune, the making of Blade Runner, the making of Star Trek, books of essays on X-Files, Serenity, and Cinefex magazines that go into amazing detail on how the visual effects for Lord of the Rings were made). But most of this sort of thing seems to have shifted to online.
There was an X-Files episode about this. Most people died quickly if they got infected, but two brothers turned into Chupacabra.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Mundo_Gira
Just don't tip, simple as that, unless you are big supporter of tax evasion, low pensions and unfair salaries.
Btw. I just finished rewatching X-Files and I strongly recommend everyone here (especially to people who like Black Mirror) to watch episode S11E07 from X-Files reboot called Rm9sbG93ZXJz , which is about what happens if you refuse to tip machine/AI.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n2GuGMn7n04
And btw. in China you don't tip and you can even bring your own drinks to restaurant, why not, you are paying for the meal after all.
:D
An episode of X-Files also. But it is mind blowing having the “conversation” with a real chat AI. Malevolent or not.
>I still don’t actually use our DVDs and Blu-rays all that often. But every time I see them lining the shelves, I feel a bit of comfort. Because when I do need them, they’ll be there.
The importance of that type of redundancy depends on the viewing habits of a particular person. In the case of my friend, the "don’t actually use our DVDs all that often" really was "never re-watched the DVDs she owned". She had a DVD collection with all the X-Files seasons, James Bond movies, etc.
But she inadvertently learned her viewing habits when Amazon Prime included video streaming for free. She realized she always preferred watching something new on Amazon rather than play an old X-Files DVD.
But what if Netflix and Amazon Prime Video lets their streaming licenses expire for "X-Files" and it's no longer available? Wouldn't that make the X-Files DVDs a great backup?!? It would, if she actually re-watched the X-Files -- but she never did. Owning DVDs was a waste of money for her particular viewing preferences (new stuff instead of reruns) and she was happy to get rid of the clutter.
> If a show like the X-Files was going to get cancelled on a cliff hanger of the "main story", it didn't really matter because 9 out of 10 episodes didn't involve the main story and therefore wouldn't be retroactively devalued by a cliffhanger cancellation.
This is probably the root of the difference in my take on media - I don't believe it's possible for a later instalment to retroactively devalue previous ones.
e.g. The enjoyment I got from reading Dune wasn't diminished by Sandworms of Dune.
We've cancelled our Netflix, and loading up our Jellyfin server with all those classics (legally... naturally!). And we're in S02E08 of X-Files, because it really was that good. We're also watching Julia Child, and a few other shows.
We were some of the first on Netflix's DVD library, and went to streaming as soon as they offered it. And early on, it was the best of the best. Now, it's throw-away B movie garbage you wouldn't even pay $1.99 in the Walmart's dvd bin, and riddled with shows that were great but naturally cancelled on a cliffhanger. I'm still sour about "Dark Matter". Bought from SyFy to Netflix, and summarily canceled.
I'll just wait until/if the shows are complete. And then I will acquire them. I've been done for a while, after paying waay too much and being jerked around by the media companies. Back to Yo Ho Ho. That means I can afford expensive rum :)
For the most part, network TV used sitcom or "monster of the week" formats in which most episodes stood on their own as self-contained stories, you didn't need context from other episodes to understand the episode you were watching. 90% of the X-Files can be viewed in a randomized order and it makes no difference. This was important on network TV because it was always a crapshoot whether the schedules of fans would line up with the TV schedule so fans missing episodes was the norm.
One advantage of this format is that the importance of a show being ended on a cliff hanger had less relative importance to the rest of the show. If a show like the X-Files was going to get cancelled on a cliff hanger of the "main story", it didn't really matter because 9 out of 10 episodes didn't involve the main story and therefore wouldn't be retroactively devalued by a cliffhanger cancellation.
The 1899 cancellation is when I realized that Netflix has no competent strategy to rolling out shows. It was #1 and #2 on their charts for weeks, only dethroned by Wednesday, yet they cancelled it. I fear that Netflix is eventually going to just make "Fast and the Furious" quality of original content, or they will go with franchises with known names that are licensed. They created the Witcher, are pushing out another season of it (despite the lead leaving, bad reviews and backlash on direction) and have a spin off that is universally panned.
Cinema is suffering from the same thing, which is why superhero films and franchises rule the silver screen. It's not a good direction for the artform or any semblance of quality. So many great franchises were rough (or had poor TV ratings) in their first seasons that are now considered classics. From Seinfeld to Parks and Rec to X-Files to Star Trek TNG, there are countless examples.
I asked it to speculate a finale for the X-Files TV series and it had no problem speculating what would happen if the conspiracy was a human one. If I told it to assume alien invasion was a real threat it refused saying it was unethical to do so.
This is the most salient point. The lost feature of the 90s web is the content, not the GeoCities aesthetic.
Web pages were quirky not because of gifs but because someone lovingly collected a bunch of Dragonball Z images or wrote summaries of X-Files episodes and put those up for others to enjoy. Some people put up recipes or stories or whatever. Most amateur homepages weren't a monetized side hustle, just content about the creators' interests.
Unfortunately today a lot of passion content lives in social media silos. Some still survives on the web, though now on Wikis rather than homepages.
I don't miss the GeoCities aesthetic of the 90s web, I suffered through the design to get to the interesting content. The design wasn't the important part.
This made its way into pop culture via the X-Files, in an episode about A.I.: "Scruffy minds like me like puzzles. We enjoy walking down unpredictable avenues of thought, turning new corners but as a general rule, scruffy minds don't commit murder."
Very much agree. Lately, I’ve been watching The X-Files as back in the nineties, I’d only ever seen the odd episode here and there and never saw them in order. It turns out that many of the monster-of-the-week episodes are quite superfluous and not really worth watching – though you don’t know until after you’ve watched it). Likewise, I’d be reluctant to (re)watch old Star Trek, Stargate or other shows that don’t focus on a well-developed story arc.
Some of my favourite shows of recent years have been stories that get wrapped up in one season: True Detective, The Terror, Shining Girls.
Back when I was messing around with LSTM models I was interested in training classifiers to find parts of the internal state that light up when the model is writing a proper name or something like that.
Nice to see people are doing similar things w/ transformers.
Truth, though, is a bit problematic. The very existence of the word makes it possible for "the truth is out there" to be part of the opening of the TV series the X Files, see Truth Social. I'm sure there is a "truthy" neuron in there somewhere, but one aspect (not the only aspect) of truth is the evaluation of logical formulae (consider the evidence and reasoning process used in court) and when you can do that you run into the problems that Gödel warned you about -- regardless of what kind of technology you used.
Episodic (vs serial) television has its own problems. It can be done well, but the path of least resistance is to make episodes low-stakes, formulaic, and mindless. Law & Order, The X-Files, The Simpsons et al have vague arcs but are approachable by design, which I see as "convenient but less satisfying".
For story arcs, the thrill is an evolving story with a coherent plot. I suppose singular X-Files and Seinfeld episodes could easily fit in with the procedurally generated category. That is very exciting prospect. Seinfeld infinity.
Great x-files episode with said title. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Memento_Mori_(The_X-Files)
William Gibson (whom I adore) wrote two episodes of X-Files. They're among the worst.
For some more horribly bad VR fun, see the X-Files episode "First Person Shooter". Yikes. I'm ashamed of my year 2000 self because I'm sure I thought it was so awesome!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1wXvVW118fo
>but now Amazon isn't hiring
Amazon is not the only company. There are literally millions of companies out there. They can stop being so delicate and suck it up and work somewhere else than FAANG.
>If you bought a house on a single income but suddenly cannot find a new job paying enough to pay your bills
Have you seen the tv show called x-files? Trust No One. Don't make big financial decisions by depending on someone else. Save enough to save yourself from that kind of trouble and find a job. It doesn't need to be Amazon. Suck it up and survive.
I blame people who cry after making $200k+ and not saving. I blame them for making weird financial decisions and thinking their social status depends on their job titles at certain companies. Life is fast and everchanging. You must trust no one and be self sufficient.
And if having no plan wasn't damning enough, the compounding crime was not at least being as good storytellers along the way as X Files.
I couldn't stand all the unbelivable behavior. When you don't know anything about someone yet, then you can be forgiven for falling for deception from them. But once you do catch them doing something inexcusable, why the f have you forgotten all about that an episode or two later? And then act all devastated when the already known bad guy is bad again later... Seemed to be happening in all different directions with all different characters at different times. I never watched more than a handful of episodes before I wrote it off as pointless contrived drama resulting mostly from inexplicable behavior from the victim(s)-of-the-day.
Just to be clear, X Files was never my favorite show, just another show that ended up having no plan, but mostly didn't piss you off for being stupid, so much so that it could get away with being aimless for a long time.
Another way to say it, X Files ended up being pointless, but it didn't feel pointless all along the way. Lost felt pointless immediately and never didn't (for the admittedly short time I gave it).
1992 Basic Instinct https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0103772/
1993 The Fugitive https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106977/
1993 The X-Files https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0106179/
1999 Sopranos (series) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0141842/
2004 Lost (series) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0411008
2004 Desperate Housewives (series) https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0410975/
> I was re-watching the first season of The X-Files and every episode I was trying to pick out where in the Vancouver the scene was shot. I was laughing when I immediately noticed they were in White Rock, BC, which was supposed to be a small town in Connecticut.
In the episode "E.B.E.", Mulder & Scully go to Mattawa, Washington. As someone who grew up near Mattawa, I can assure you it looks nothing at all like British Columbia! Pull up the episode, then check out Google Street View near Mattawa for a good time.
(also, they would never get that close to a Hanford building, there are miles and miles of open sagebrush between the fence and any facilities...)
I notice that as well. Being from Canada originally, I also immediately spot the Canadian accents, even if they are trying to suppress them or do a generic American accent.
I was re-watching the first season of The X-Files and every episode I was trying to pick out where in the Vancouver the scene was shot. I was laughing when I immediately noticed they were in White Rock, BC, which was supposed to be a small town in Connecticut.
All this is more passable to me, though, than the general trend of having characters so well put together in movies. Their hair, makeup and costume is so clearly done by experts, and they are all attractive. I wish characters looked more like regular people in movies and less like models.
Deep Space 9 was also shot on film. The editing, effects, and mastering were completed on video (same for TNG). This is true for nearly every 1-hour US prime-time drama of that era (Buffy, X-Files, etc).
https://www.slashfilm.com/549088/star-trek-voyager-deep-space-nine-blu-ray/
i would argue that in many cases, having multiple directors is actually one of the great benefits of television and even within the constraints of a show, they still have considerable freedom to define the tone. tv is also a great format for relative unknowns to find their voice. steven spielberg was an 'unremarkable' tv director until he worked on Columbo and his episode- The Perfect Murder was a breakthrough that still stands apart to this day. similarly, put together any two episodes of the x files and the range is pretty incredible, Grotesque and Jose Chung's From Outer Space are only a few episodes apart and they might as well be entirely different shows.
Breaking Bad didn't work because the character was different. There was significant push back from AMC about casting Cranston.
Vince Gilligan went to bat for him because he was certain Cranston could carry the dramatic load after working with him on an episode of the X-Files.
Does seeing this headline also trigger memories of that one X-Files episode for anyone else too??
Spoilers: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_Trip_(The_X-Files)
Coincidentally (yeah, that is what They(tm) want you to believe...), that is also the title of a really fun and strange episode of the X-Files. One of my favorites.
Some of you might enjoy the X-Files episode about an HOA with a sinister side.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0751076/
Almost all the shows i watch over and over and again are ones with 7+ seasons,
90's star trek (tng ds9 voy) all 7 seasons, MAS*H 12 seasons, Frasier 11 season, Scrubs 8 season (I skip season 9 and refuse to acknowledge its existance), Red Dwarf 8 season (+ more after the revival decades later), X-Files 11 seasons, How I Met Your Mother 9 seasons, Freinds 10 seasons, Stargate SG1 10 seasons, three seasons is to little to grow a fallowing and not enough for you to rewatch
Yes. Though stepping back a little further, I'd add (with some qualification):
24 (which perhaps opened my eyes to TV overtaking film in new ways) Lost Buffy
And then further still:
The X Files This Life (UK only?)
Much like the parent is the plot of an X-Files episode, this is the plot of Devs. They just kind of handwaved away the resolution issue with some nod to many worlds interpretation. Of course, as they noted in the show, the ability to reconstruct the past this way implies you can also predict the future using the same technique.
There was an X-Files episode where they had Jesus’s voice saying ‘I am the walrus’ frozen in a hardening pottery glaze from the home of Lazarus.
I keep thinking about the old poster in Fox Mulder’s office from the show “The X-Files”, the one that said “I Want To Believe”. I suspect that the reason it featured so prominently in that film set is because showrunner Chris Carter was making a statement about the mentality of conspiracy theorists.
The phrasing of that poster is very specific. These people aren’t objectively and dispassionately weighing the evidence both in favor of and against a certain theory. No, that theory is their pet theory, and whether consciously or subconsciously, their thumb is on the scale in favor of proving it true. The reason being that an implication of most conspiracy theories is that there is a conspiracy of powerful people to keep the truth from being revealed.
I’ve come to believe THAT is the important component of any conspiracy. The specific “truth” which is being hidden, whether it’s aliens or lizard people or pedophiles running a pizza shop, is almost a McGuffin. The reason people believe conspiracy theories, and backwards-rationalize their perceived truthfulness, is that it helps them believe in some all-powerful, malevolent cabal whose agenda includes keeping down the “little guy”. It’s a way for them to justify the failures in their lives without having to take responsibility for those failures. It’s the oldest story in the book.
It doesn’t help that there are real-world examples of conspiracies that have been proven true, but I suspect it wouldn’t be a deal-breaker for these people even if that weren’t the case.
I’m not sure. I also definitely remember everyone thinking that it was very likely the government was spying internally also. The scale was a surprise, but not that spying happened internally. It was quite in the popular culture as well, with shows like X-Files and movies like Hackers and Sneakers and others touching on it.
It was anyway for sure not limited to Art Bell types.
It's amusing that you are using an X-Files episode as if it was factually true.
The barcode register attack was explored in a episode of The X-Files titled Duane Barry (2x05; 14 Oct 1994), when Special Agent Dana Scully scans a chip (that had been found implanted in her neck and subsequently removed) at a grocery store checkout scanner, and iirc all the registers went berserk. So this is definitely a thing.
I miss shows that don't try to have big arc plots and huge setpieces that blow up the per-episode budget; but instead, are okay with being 24-episode seasons of comfy rubber-mask filmed-in-a-forest-in-Vancouver monster-of-the-week schlock. The 90s had so much of this: Stargate, X-Files, Buffy, etc. Why aren't we still making this? Do we just collectively feel like the world has "enough" of it?
Or, to put that another way: I don't need to go anywhere else in the Stargate universe. The place we started in is fine. I just want to watch a cast of hammy actors with excellent chemistry walk through a big puddle into novel science-fantasy situations.
It could be worse: hacked to tell unsighted pedestrians to walk even if there is through traffic. There was an X-Files episode with a guy causing car accidents by messing with traffic lights. However, it was via ESP instead of digital hacking.
Personally I think the use of the word "truth" itself is a bad smell and that goes back to the 1993 "X Files" TV series having the phrase "The truth is out there" appear in in the intro.
Generally having statements that refer to their own veracity is a source of logical problems such as Godel's theorem and these kind of puzzles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Knights_and_Knaves
> Not just calendar entries, but messaging systems
Logged in to my yahoo account that I haven't used in more than 10 years to look at some convos I've had with a good friend. There was nothing there. Yahoo forums are full of people that want to recover messages from their deceased loved ones, and won't be able to.
I find it fascinating that the only traces remaining of our lives will probably be archived on some NSA server somewhere... Flashbacks of that X-Files episode with the underground bunkers full of DNA.
One show: X Files.
1990s Vancouver. Rain. Grey. Science fiction changed from the bright colors of LA (Star Trek) to Vancouver's rain forests (X Files, Stargate, Outer Limits). Why were Star Trek's colors so bright? Desi Loe Studios paid extra for the color film and wanted to use it. X files was on a tight budget and couldn't afford to brighten Vancouver enough to make it look like California. So the backgrounds become dark and grey.
Similar things happened in many film. Alien had budget problems and difficult creature effects. Net result: hide everything in darkness. The color has as much to do with budget as art.
Reminds me of an unusual and short-lived sci-fi series called Space Above and Beyond; it predates the current trend significantly.
“The series featured a very dark and desaturated color grading, apparently inherited from the cinematography of series such as The X-Files and Millennium, co-produced by the same team, but taken to a greater extreme. The strength of desaturation employed in many scenes reaches the level that makes them almost black and white (quantitatively, the saturation in CIE xy color subspace of a typical scene in Space: Above and Beyond is in the range 0.03–0.15, approximately 1/4 of a typical contemporary film or television program).”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space:_Above_and_Beyond
I have always been fascinated by these kinds of things. Cryptozoology, UFOs, Occult...wish I could have the resources to pursuit them scientifically. X-Files is still my top-3 TV show but it's quite a bit cliché after 30 years.
This feels like it might fit a series like The X-Files or The Outer Limits more than a full movie; there isn't much more to it than the twist; aside from that it's a story about some people.
If you don't mind them being shorts, there are some good sci-fi stories on the Dust and Omeleto channels on YouTube. e.g. this "One Minute Time Machine" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vBkBS4O3yvY - has just two people, a bench, and a Time MacGuffin.
Or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KOwKExagzdQ - "The Tunnel Ahead", 15 minute short set in an overpopulated world.
I do feel that many include space because it's fun and can be CGI modelled, or time travel because it makes for a cheap sci-fi plot, and if you rule those out you get things like The OceanMaker ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uWCGK4nneeU ) which I didn't like so much because nothing really happens. Whether there are more concepty ones with more nuanced plot, they probably didn't catch my eye to watch.
There was an x-files episode about how the military had succeeded in making sleepless soldiers, but it was irreversible. The soldiers suffered and longed for death when they came back to the US.
In traditional X-files fashion one of them had gained psychic powers.
It's a good episode.
Augustus Cole from that X-Files episode would like to disagree.
The X-Files did a goodish job alternating between standalone episodes and overarching plot. Roughly 2/3rds of episodes were standalone monster of the week episodes, while every third episode or so was about the conspiracy to help aliens colonize Earth. Also occasionally stuff in the standalone episodes had effects in later episodes (for example Scully's dog is from a person who died in a standalone episode)
Novelizations and (less commonly) comic-adaptations of films filled this role generally, before home video releases were common & affordable. The Star Wars novelization, for example, didn't sell well because it was a great book, but because most kids couldn't re-watch the movie every single day like they could when the VHS releases came out, so they'd instead read a $1.25 mass-market paperback until it fell apart. They were chiefly memory-refreshers for the actual film. There was even a brief span of time in which audio versions (often of the film itself, not necessarily of the novelization, so, not exactly an "audio book") helped filled this role for some films, because audio cassettes & stereos/walkmans were more widely available & affordable than video decks.
Maybe I'm imagining it, but I wanna say there were things like re-cap books for seasons of shows like The X-Files, even, because home-video copies of entire shows were prohibitively expensive for all but the craziest fans. That's also part of what coffee-table type books about shows & movies were for—lore & encyclopedic content mixed with stills and what were effectively plot and episode summaries.
Wow, I was crazily into X-Files back in early 2000s (was in another country so didn't hear about it until then) and watched pretty much every episode many times.
I think Episode 4~6 are the pinnacle of the series, but the rest are not bad. How old is your kid?
Bauer and his team were bigger war criminals than the people they tortured and persecuted.
I was going to say that this was created in the wake of 9/11 and, for the US, it was a sort of catharsis. But the US hasn't existed without an enemy, it appears to proactively create them.
The X-Files is one of the few series I know to directly call that out, because that's been US modus operandi ever since the Brits and the Confederates stopped being an enemy. An entire episode is literally "what do we do? we have no enemies." But of course, the show continues with the invention of a new threat.
Chickity China, the Chinese chicken
You have a drumstick and your brain stops tickin'
Watching X-Files with no lights on
We're dans la maison
I hope the Smoking Man's in this one
Like Harrison Ford, I'm getting frantic
Like Sting, I'm tantric
Like Snickers, guaranteed to satisfy
Like Kurosawa, I make mad films, 'kay, I don't make films
But if I did they'd have a Samurai
Gonna get a set of better clubs
Gonna find the kind with tiny nubs
Just so my irons aren't always flying off the back-swing
Gotta get in tune with Sailor Moon
'Cause that cartoon has got the boom anime babes
That make me think the wrong thing
All of which is to say, without CanCon do we really think this would encapsulate the late 90's experience in Canada?
I don't know why but I have a flashback of the X-Files episode where someone had a salamander arm.. It was something about reversing ageing. :Nostalgia
The web in a nutshell. Your story reminds me of one of the early, lighthearted episodes of the X-Files.
I live in PR for a few years and drove out to see the telescope one day. This was in the days before the Internet, so I didn't know it was only open for visitors on certain days. So, I only got to the front gates. But years later I was watching an X-files episode where they had to go to the telescope. In the episode they were shown driving through a thick jungle over rutted dirt roads. Um... huh, either things had really deteriorated since I had visited or Hollywood takes a lot more artistic license than I would have assumed with something like this.
Now that it is being dismantled, I'm sorry I didn't get to see it that day.
I actually always thought it was abandoned since 1994, based on the first episode of the X-Files https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Little_Green_Men_(The_X-Files)
> Taking this sort of random swipe at at people who experience this is kind of rude.
> Even though it's pretty much confirmed it's not a real audio signal coming from outside of a person's body
Why would you not think you have the well documented medical condition Tinnitus?
"The Hum" is "a real audio signal coming from outside of a person's body", except it's not real. (And the first Google result for "The Hum" is this legend, not the vibrations from the oceans hum)
It was on the X-Files for instance - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_(The_X-Files)
William Shatner's The UnXplained - https://www.history.com/shows/the-unxplained/season-1/episode-4
I have friends who believe in the paranormal. I don't disagree with them, even if it's medical like this. But I also won't agree with them. I'm not sure if that's cowardice.
I’ve seen every episode of Seinfeld, E.R., X-Files, Gilmore Girls, and a couple other shows 10+ times. Just watch ‘em on repeat lol. Ask me anything.
This is why I prefer mini-series to full on series. It's a complete self-contained story.
There weren't that many multi-season shows that I loved and had a decent ending - usually it gets milked to death that main actors quit and then either show cancelled (Castle) or get a new actor and suck (x-files).
Some shows have awful resurrection - 24, I loved the entire thing except for "reboot" and last season.
Some shows have honest writers, BSG reboot was clearly getting too convoluted and had to be ended before it cancelled.
Some shows try to pivot to tumbler fanfics for content - Supernatural. Which was dumb because people were interested in such stories were already watching it.
> If you have a new series, all potential viewers are potential viewers. If you have a season 3, the only potential viewers are season 2 watchers.
That doesn't always top factor. Some shows can generate money outside of screen - merch. That's how supernatural stayed so long.
Am I the only one who misses the 25 episode long seasons for shows like the X-Files? Sure it would have a string of episodes that weren’t great, but it gave more depth to the show than can be achieved with shorter seasons.
I think this depends on the structure of the series.
When all TV was by appointment (no easy way to rewatch), series emphasized self-contained episodes. You could watch half of the episodes of any season of Star Trek or TNG and still enjoy it. Same with other popular shows like Magnum PI, Law and Order, etc. There was some ongoing charater development, but it was pretty slow and minimal.
As rewatching got easier (essentially once market penetration of VCRs got high enough), popular series started introducing more serial story lines. X Files is a great example; it started off with mostly "monster of the week" self-contained stories, and then over time added "lore"--ongoing serial storylines.
On digital platforms, watching and rewatching are basically the same thing, so a series can be 100% serial storyline. Essentially, they are very long movies that are released one chapter at a time.
This has affected movies too. There's no way something like the MCU would have worked as a concept without very easy ways for viewers coming into the middle to go back and watch or re-watch earlier movies.
One of the best strategies ever for me together with Sim City (2000) and Transport Tycoon, was much less of fan of Dune 2 or C&C or Commando, so this was pretty much only strategy with actual fight and not just construction, which could capture my interest supported with popular TV show X-Files at times.
Yes. Arecibo is mentioned in the episode description, and the x-files episode is mention on the Arecibo wiki page.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0751154/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arecibo_Observatory
This X-Files episode (s11e07) from the 2018 reboot season satirized something similar brilliantly:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rm9sbG93ZXJz
I recall an X-Files episode where a woman was affected by the transmission of a ULF or ELF antenna and it was making her crazy. Was a fun episode
Here it is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drive_(The_X-Files)
And written by Vince Gilligan! He also wrote my single favorite X-Files episode "Bad Blood"
Ahh, the episode with Bryan Cranston. I really need to try watching X-Files again.
There have still been recent popular TV series that release weekly, rather than all-at-once binges. Pretty much everything on HBO and FX, for starters. I don't think watching TV on a schedule has passed out of living memory. I personally remember very fondly the collective experience of watching things like The X-Files and Battlestar Galactica at the same moment as the rest of the country.
Most games except adventures and text adventures have a worse script (lit wise) than any average episode of X-Files/The Outer Limits and so on.
Heck, Half Life looks like a -mediocre- episode of The Outer Limits.
Yes, yes it was. For me it was a better successor to X-Files. I even forgive Fringe's last season because, as weak as it was, it had some powerful moments. Tell me you didn't get misty eyed with Broyle's laconic "Dunham!" when they meet again in season 5.
I loved that show.
Thanks. The pattern isn't perfect but the trend is clear. These are Season 1, excluding pilots.
A-Team (1983): 49m
MacGyver (1985, original): 48m
Quantum Leap (1989): 47-48m
X-Files (1993): 43-44m
Monk (2002): 44m
Eureka (2006): 44m
MacGyver (2016, remake): 42-43m
I'm pretty sure Silence of the Lambs influenced the design and casting of the Dana Scully character. In both Silence of the Lambs and the X-Files pilot episode, you have young women with shoulder-length red hair starting their new job at the FBI investigating the death of women, including the examination of corpses (Dana Scully specializes in forensic pathology while the examination of corpses is more incidental to Clarice Starling's work, but is a very memorable scene in the movie.)
> I watched it for three hours and it got to the final scene to reveal whodunnit and the tape ran out.
I ran into one of these on Youtube just a couple of weeks ago. The reaction in the comments was something less than amused.
(Bittersweet memories of taping over some of Mom's seemingly non-important video in order to record...what was it, the first X-files episode? A _Wings_ episode about a favorite jet? Something like that. But man, she was not happy.)
Before Roswell there were a total of 8 films featuring ETs according to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_featuring_extraterrestrials
After Roswell there have been ... well, count them for yourself.
Let's add onto that the numerous TV series from the Star Trek franchise to the X Files, and of course the TV series itself named "Roswell".
I'd argue the decline in observation of orthodox religions is a good barometer for how ready society is to deal with the inevitable truth that the Universe is swarming with life, we just haven't observed it yet.
That's the problem, isn't it? How can we decode a theoretical alien transmission without transposing our own sense of meaning onto it?
It's like the X-Files episodes where they find the aliens are using encodings that were designed in modern history by humans. Binary (as if there is one standard binary), bar codes... These scenes are supposed to be huge revelations, but for any sort of programmer or engineer, they seem silly. Which wouldn't be so if they made a point about how the aliens are intentionally using our encoding systems, but that's not how it's presented.
Not hating on the X-Files though, that show is awesome.
I seem to remember there being an X-Files episode that presented this theory.
We’ve gone back to buying DVDs/Blurays and renting movies. My most recent purchase was all seasons of x-files in a single box for $15. Usually it’s a tad more expensive to pick up an entire season of something though, so there is some front load to pay, but in 10 years not having had 3-5 subscriptions will have saved us money. And we will still have access to our library of things.
That being said, if Disney+ makes it to Denmark, that might actually be the one streaming service we want because of our children.
It probably should be noted that the Danish national public service tv station has streaming apps for all their channels, as well as a Netflix style selection for their own content. So that gives us 6 commercial free BBC quality channels.
There's so many layers to that question. The major influencer though was most likely syndication.
Shows were designed to onboard viewers at any point in the series. This would enable shows to appear in random order across multiple networks and viewers would just accept them as they were.
Shows which juggled long term serial arcs while staying accessible to the random viewer seemed to be viewed retrospectively as the best of that era. Shows like X-Files, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, Babylon 5, etc.
Shows which were purely episodic such as Star Trek: TNG or old Doctor Who don't hold up quite as well. They're still enjoyable episode to episode, but there's something missing that we've become accustomed to in modern television. Perhaps if you feel the rose colored glasses starting to slip into place in the future, you could look back on some of those shows that didn't age as well.
We've thrown out syndication as a concept, so what we're left with is almost lazy writing since they don't have to put a bow on every episode after exactly 46 minutes.
But ultimately I think there are those that feel that the 90's were the pinnacle of Hollywood. I recently read an article claiming '99 to be the best year in cinema. We're just living in a perpetual era of disruption and it's going to take a few more decades until people consistently figure out the new successful formulas that are unbeatable until the technology fundamentally shifts again.
I bought the X-Files mythology collection (main storyline episodes only). The monster of the week episodes are quite average, but if you watch the mythology episodes in order it's a pretty good show IMO, especially if you're into the aliens and government conspiracy theme.
The earliest episodes are hit-and-miss; the writers got it figured out around halfway through the first season, and most of s2-s3 is good.
I think The X-Files also really only worked because of it's context and time in history -- there was a right-wing fringe that was terrifyingly paranoid of a Democrat in office after more than a decade of Reagan & Bush (the first movie aped some of that imagery, in a somewhat tone-deaf manner), and the idea of conspiracy hadn't yet morphed from Soviets and aliens into birthers and truthers.
Season 2 Episode 4 of The X-Files.
Anecdotal evidence. But doing H.264 to HEVC encodes on my GTX 1080 result in significantly smaller files than Blu Ray rips
I purchased the X-Files Blu Ray Box Set. Ripping it all to my hard disk resulted in roughly 1.7 terabytes of footage
Encoding them with a likely higher than needed bitrate to preserve quality shrank them to a much more palatable 237GB (with subtitles) https://i.imgur.com/eJFuxaV.png
Bar removing the film grain (which I prefer, but not everyone does) I think the quality looks absolutely spectacular https://i.imgur.com/xlWJEol.jpg
I wasn't that big into anime but I used to love Evangelion (I still do) after it aired on television here in Australia around 97/98 some of the first web pages I can remember visiting were fan pages for that series. The X Files was other big thing I use to look up online. I was pretty much obsessed with that TV show when I was a kid.
>The ads weren't bad it was banners and it blinks or slide across like marquee html tag.
I can definitely remember ads getting worse and worse. At first they weren't bad but by 1999 or so it was pretty horrendous popup ads were massively prevalent. I can remember needing to run a separate pop up blocker app before browsers started building blockers in.
HTML blink tags were definitely a thing there were some eye bleeding websites using blink.
Trying to use search engines for researching high school projects was a pain you'd need to use 5 or 6 different search engines - Lycos, Infoseek, Metacrawler, Yahoo etc and each search would give you different results you'd be lucky if 30% of results were relevant to your topic. Dial up was so slow as well (at least at my school) it often wasn't worth the time to try using internet for researching assignments. It wasn't until I started university and found out about online journals that it really became a useful research tool.
Plugins used to be a big thing stuff like Real Player, Shockwave, java applets etc I'm pretty sure at some point Flash basically killed all these but for a while it was kind of a wildwest. Video online was almost never worth it. It would take forever to download half the time you wouldn't have the right codec to play it and quality was generally so terrible it was borderline unwatchable - everything looked like one giant pixel.
I can remember being introduced to Slashdot it was the site for a while I was a pretty late comer and it was huge in the late 90's I used to check it multiple times a day.
The real joke of 'seacouver' is the an old adage for filming TV in Canada: Film in Vancouver, but never admit so in the script. If you want to tap the US market (who doesn't?) then the story cannot ever be set outside the US. The few shows that did (The Crow series etc) died quick deaths. X-Men went out on a limb by repeatedly saying Wolverine lived in Canada (Rouge finds him there). That was a risk. Everyone assumed they would have put him in Alaska. X-Files set a short arc on a train heading to Vancouver, but even there the bad guys were Japanese. None of the main story could ever happen in Canada.
Sell also Scrubs, filmed in LA but set in "San Frangeles" although never admitted in the script. They wanted to avoid the LA/SF/NY trend of mentioning place names and expecting the whole world to know what you are talking about. For the longest time I thought scrubs was set in Florida.
You can see it on TV if you are a scifi fan. Look at the x-files, Outer Limits, and early Stargate episodes filmed in 1990s Vancouver. Vancouver's wet climate gave them a very specific tone that became an industry standard. 1990's scifi was generally dark, as opposed to the more colorful productions filmed in California (Trek) or Australia (farscape). But today Vancouver suffers droughts every summer. The Flash is a colourful production. The foggy grey backdrop is now a blue sky. Rainfall numbers might not be very different, but the perpetual cloud that coloured scifi for a generation is gone.
As someone rewatching it now, I'm surprised by how few pure filler episodes there are.
At minimum, every episode at least advances a core character. And usually has one Easter egg related to the overall plot.
As you said, compared to TNG, early DS9, or X-Files, this was groundbreaking stuff on broadcast TV.
> Kind of like reading the paperwork and after-mission reports of SHIELD.
A comparison to SHIELD would be misleading, I think, in that it would suggest an aesthetic/ideology of "heroism" behind the work that's not there. SCP paints a picture of a cynical and dystopian organization, with little concern for loss-of-life of its test subjects.
I would compare SCP more to the Half-Life universe's Black Mesa and Aperture Science research facilities. Or to the Cube movies. Or, I suppose, to The Syndicate from the X-Files (though in that case the comparison would be to the parts of the military doing security and ops under them.)
Also, reminds old x-files episode https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ice_(The_X-Files) Hope mass rage has not started yet in Siberia.
I lived in on-campus student housing that had bathrooms like this (the locks on both sides of both doors version.) My friend was in the bathroom during a commercial break of X-Files and I locked him in there. Ha ha. So he knocked on my neighbour's door and got out that way, but he still needed to get back into my room from the public hallway. I was watching him through the peep hole in my door, and to taunt him I opened the door and quickly closed it again. The two problems with that were that the peep hole made it look like he was further away than he was and the door had a hydraulic arm on it and didn't close as quickly as I expected. Anyway, I put ice on my forehead for the rest of the episode and then went to the hospital for three stitches.
I'd say that the likeliness really depends on whose bathroom it is. ;)
As someone who always wished for more X-Files until season 10 and 11 were released: Be careful what you wish for.
X-files comes to my mind as a great example. The episodic nature is built into the format - a weird thing happens, x-files are called in. Next episode, new mystery.
Its then a coin flip for whether its self contained or has a link to the broader conspiracy arc.
I found that satisying as a kid. I wanted more of the big arc but it almost certainly wouldn't have worked if it was the central theme of every show.
This concept was introduced in an episode of The X-Files.
> There will be a time when modern connected car I own no longer receives software updates while it otherwise would remain a great daily driver. Each passing day it becomes more vulnerable to being hacked to perform variety of things. What is the level of risk that I am willing to accept before having to get rid of the otherwise good car since I no longer feel safe operating it?
I had a laugh last night watching an episode of The X-Files. This is a show that's all about conspiracies and not trusting the government and relying on hackers, yet the show (likely due to a product placement agreement) had Scully conspicuously turning on a car's wifi hotspot and connecting to it. I'd think that the main duo of that show would be tech savvy enough to know that such a thing (since it's connected to microphones, cameras, GPS, and the internet) would be anathema to remaining clandestine.
Also an X-Files episode: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Darkness_Falls_(The_X-Files)
> routinely enters into contracts with foreign companies with the requirement that those companies create Canadian jobs while executing the work under that contract
Sure, for the price of government contract you can always find some things to do for some Canadians (and not that Canadians are bad at doing stuff, so they may be hired anyway, with or without this requirement, but since there is a special requirement, you could always ask for the special price...). Or invent them if needed. The funny thing is that any extra money spent on this requirement is taken from other Canadians...
> In this respect, CanCon isn't philosophically inconsistent with the government's other policies.
Oh, I'm not saying it's inconsistent with other policies. If anything, the tradition of "creating of jobs" (also known under the name of "broken window fallacy") is very popular among politicians of all kinds, and for a clear reason - the benefits of it are concentrated and easy to show, while the costs are distributed and easy to hide.
> Microsoft, Google, Facebook, and Amazon all have Canadian-specific offerings
The question is not whether Canada should allow Microsoft to open its office in Canada, but whether it should force it to do so under the threat of being excluded from the Canadian market and prohibiting Canadians from using Microsoft products. Some people apparently think it'd be a great idea.
> For example, here's a good take on many Canadian actors who were part of X-Files while it filmed in Vancouver
I know a lot of quality Canadian production and actors (see my other comment in this thread about Canadian shows). Which begs the question - apparently Canadians are doing fine even on the market as strong and competitive as US TV/movie scene. Despite the fact that CBC has no way to force any US network to show Canadian content, as far as I know - they willingly do so, and not once but quite frequently. So why there's a need to do the same on Canadian market - what makes one think Canadian companies can withstand competition with Hollywood on Hollywood's own soil, but would inevitably lose in Canada if only CBC didn't take regulatory measures to prevent it?
Every time I read something like this I am reminded of the X-Files episode featuring such an organism and I'm not sure what is imitating what.
I made this same point a while back on HN and the response I received was
>people are half a second between 'that's absurd, they're not doing that,' and 'of course it's always been that way.'
In 1994, X-Files Season 1 Ep. 17 introduced the Lone Gunmen, a group of conspiracy theorists:
>"The characters, who were used to help Mulder appear more credible"
If you watch the episode, one of the main 'batshit insane'conspiracy theories they put forward was that the government is recording everyone's phone calls--then Scully rolls her eyes and Mulder appears skeptical.
You have to admit, it is kind of crazy...
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/E.B.E._(The_X-Files)
That really isn't from The X-Files, it's from a TV series called "Aquarius" (I looked this up because Duchovny's bouffant baffled me!).
Wasn't this actually an X-files episode? I remember a rich techie developing a home AI that Scully and Mulder eventually fooled by stealing a license plate it recognized and putting it on a different car.
I think it's a spoiler-culture, where the movie/show/book isn't even worth reading if there isn't some prospect of a petty thrill or twist.
storytelling isn't something to be taken lightly, it's been ingrained in us since the dawn of language. it can affect entire generations in ways nobody understands and very few care to study. The movie 'babe' created vegetarians, scully from 'x-files' inspired women to study STEM, scotty inspired a generation of engineers.
This is basically every episode of The X-Files.
I even remember watching an interesting X-files episode about this.
I loved Stranger Things, as a die-hard X-Files fan (and similar type shows and movies) it was perfect for me.
And not only that, but also removing their existing collections of videos and replacing it with their "Made by Netflix" shows that mostly amount to shovelware.
I'm about ready to drop them, just like they've dropped MASH, soon to be X-Files, and many many movies.
I do remember watching Twin Peaks, it was certainly odd. Quite a few X-Files episodes had this same oddness as well. I think X-Files also made the whole supernatural thing popular in the 90's and I remember that by the time Buffy came along it was pretty much hyping.
That page ought to have a list of TV series in addition to Mr. Robot: X-Files and more so its spinoff show https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lone_Gunmen
and lack of the rule of Law. and lack of a culture where the rule of law is respected. that's gotta be the difference between the US and Brazil. I hear their version of the FBI is basically terrified to go into favelas. In America, we are all terrified of the FBI and swat teams that very few of us try to pull shit. America has a culture and history of grabbing your briefcase and going to work at your profession. We are brainwashed by Eisenhower era film footage. As well as X-Files that sedates us into thinking--and probably rightfully so--that US intelligence, police, military etc will handle us if we get out of line. Over there it's very quite literally a jungle. There's no where to hide over here.
So I don't disagree with your points. It's just part of a larger picture. My points probably don't even complete that picture.
But for now, for me, it boils down to: inequality + a culture of being civilized.
In season 1 of the X-Files the 'Lone Gunmen,' a group of conspiracy theorists, was added to the show to make Mulder appear more credible and down-to-earth. One of their 'crazy, batshit insane,' conspiracy theories was that the government was recording all of our phone calls.
think of all of the circumstances we've become used to now that were the territory of conspiracy theorists 25 years ago.
I just watched an old X Files episode (season 1) apparently aliens have six base pairs.
Some concrete things that B5 contributed and innovated on (as I understand it, perhaps I'm missing some things):
Extensive use of CGI to drastically reduce set costs. The core of the B5 show takes place on relatively extensive sets that are reused throughout the series, with one-off locations presented with large amounts of composited CG backgrounds. All of the space and planetary footage is rendered, and this choice of setting (simplified lighting and shot composition) played heavily to the favor of the tech at the time--I think most if not all of the work was done on Amigas and Video Toaster.
Heavy interaction with the fanbase using Usenet. I think that B5 was probably one of the first times, if not the first time, that fans got to significantly interact with the folks who were creating a show in a meaningful way. These days, it's pretty obvious and common to have shows use their online presence and discussion panels and whatnot to create organic advertising, but back in the day having JMS show up and answer questions and explain why things happened the way they did was pretty amazing.
Tightly and long-plotted series storyline. Compared with basically any of the Star Treks (and DS9 is quite arguable because reasons), Doctor Who, Buffy, X-Files, or other contemporary shows, B5 Had 5 years of plot to get through and managed to do so. Every episode (barring some crap chunks of season 1) brings in a new plot line, advances an existing plot line, or closes up a plot line. This is a series that really bears watching twice specifically so that you can see how seemingly little things telegraph well in advance important later points. At least through season 4 I never felt that there was an ass-pull or a moment where the narrative didn't know where the hell it was going. I felt like the writer(s) respected me and were going to take their time to weave a good narrative, however long that took.
Genuinely terrible characters and no-win situations. Nowadays it's become somewhat in-vogue to have darker and edgier storylines, but at the time seeing a show willing to do just really evil things (killing children) and having horrible tragedies occur (depicting the permanent loss of at least one alien race that we'd gotten used to seeing around) was rare. Not only was it rare, but it did so in conjunction with a fundamentally optimistic view about people and the future--which is exceptionally rare these days.
Displaying competent and important women and LGBT characters. Delenn is an obvious example for her work with the Minbari and later actions, but Susan Ivanova is probably one of the most capable yet human characters I've seen in television science-fiction. Additionally, the way the show explored her interactions with Talia Winters was basically pushing those themes about as far as you could in television at the time it came out.
Honestly, the only show I'd put in the same ballpark would be the anime epic Legend of Galactic Heroes. I'd strongly suggest, if you enjoy these things, treating yourself to B5 seasons 1-4 and seeing just how well done this material can be even in the absence of large budgets or well-known actors.
There aren't any adversaries trying their best to sneak a different X-Files episode on your recording, so you can reasonably assume that checking the quality of the recording is enough to verify that the show you wanted ended up on the tape.
With security software, the threat model is completely different.
Feynman gave a whole lecture on this subject - the second or third lecture of the Messenger Lectures (much better timepass than night time TV show, second only to the Wizards Lectures and the five three seasons of The X-Files).
It seems that this is an ideal case for the Less Is More principle.
There is an episode of The X-Files where Mulder teleconferences with the lone gunman and they make a whole huge deal about the amazing high-tech capabilities they are using to project their voice/image in to the specially set up conference room.
The way the writers even notice the technology compared to it's transparency/ubiquity today is quaint.
I think my problem with it was how plot-driven the last episode ("Hated in the Nation") was. It ended in a way as if it mattered whether the cops catch the bad guy. I love cop shows, but the procedural bits here took time from all the interesting tech concepts that had been brought up. Another reviewer described it as feeling like an episode of X-Files, which I think is an apt way to describe it: Good, but not the kind of good that Black Mirror is uniquely positioned to deliver.
If you enjoyed Black Mirror you have to watch Utopia by Channel 4 in the UK. It's remarkable. Don't search for a synopsis online. It's a sci-fi conspiracy thriller like none you'll have ever seen before.
This is an imdb review that echoed my sentiments:
"First of, I made an account at IMDb solely so that I could submit this review.
Utopia is exceptional. It is a masterpiece. It gets 10\10 from me.
I won't explain what Utopia is about because I don't want to give any possible hint of what is to come, so I'll describe it by comparing it to other things.
Buy the DVD or download the show and your life will get.... stranger. Its rather unsettling how Utopia gets under your skin.
There are a few television shows that share some similarity to Utopia.
For example, if you enjoyed Fringe, the X-Files, then you'll be quite at home with Utopia's paranoid wanderings.
So then you cross the weirdness of Fringe and the paranoia of the X-Files with the violence of Kill Bill and the action\suspense of the Jason Bourne series.
Now cross that already bizarre hybrid with a series of scientific TED Talks given by Joesph Mengale, yes, the Nazi who chopped countless pairs of twins to pieces for the greater good.
I'm not sure which is more bizarre. That description or that incredibly, it works.
However Utopia is much, much darker than any of those. It is the darkest TV series I have ever seen. It also as others have said, feels very real.
A note of warning. When I said Utopia was dark, I was not joking. If you suffer from excessive anxiety or you're squeamish, then do not watch Utopia. Because this TV show is nothing like you've ever seen before, it will affect you. You will be thinking about the themes in it long after you've watched it.
The violence in Utopia isn't actually that strong at all, most of it occurs off the screen. But the intense atmosphere of paranoia which accompanies it makes it brutally real.
On the other hand since the governments of the world have apparently taken a leaf out of Utopia's manuscript lately with regard to surveillance, Utopia could well seem prophetic in a few years time. This really is a TV series for 21st century of flying killer robots and universal surveillance.
The Sopranos changed the way I thought about television. I thought television was for lightweights until I watched The Sopranos. It was like thinking books were mostly about erotica and then coming across Shakespeare and entering a world full of subtle complexities on a bunch of levels.
Utopia is nothing like The Sopranos. But the way it'll change how you view television is very similar.
Just one last thing. There is an American show called "Person of Interest" or something like that which has similar themes. Watch this instead.
In a word: this is intense. "
It also has one of the strangest soundtracks you'll ever hear. Listen to this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m2f6MfEzhvo
Warning: Do not watch if you are especially prone to paranoia, depression or anxiety.
Going to repeat a lot of what has been said so far:
- Minority Report (The TV show isn't bad either)
- Ex Machina
- District 9
- Elysium
- Oblivion
- Edge of Tomorrow
- Looper
- I am Legend
- Her
- The Martian
- The Matrix (Only 2 & 3 if you're super bored)
- Basically any of the Mad Max series
- Firefly (TV show, movies are OK)
- Dark Matter (TV show)
- Snow Piercer
- American Ultra
- Last Witch Hunter (more fantasy than SciFi)
- Riddick
- Dredd
- X Files (I mean, it's not NOT scifi...)
- Treasure Planet (Yes, the animated one)
- Atlantis: The Lost Empire (Gets a bad rap for being animated, but it has it's own language and everything)
- Serial Lain Experiments (anime)
- Watchmen
- The Dark Knight
- Inception
- The Prestige (technically SciFi)
I can go on for hours
Dangit. I shouldn't have said anything, then. I want my personal AI agent to watch all the movies and television shows I have ever watched, and read all the books I have ever read, and play all the video games I have ever played, so that it can make obscure references that I can understand at the appropriate times.
In this case, it would have to know the various names of sky-blue colors, like "azure", "cerulean", "process cyan", or technical answers like "transparent with Rayleigh scattering" or "hue value between 190 and 200 degrees". Then it would have to cross reference that with things I have already seen or read, and then prioritize several potential responses before finally playing me an audio clip from X-Files 3:17 "Pusher", when the eponymous character is being transported in the back of a cop car.
Implicitly, Netflix is pointing out to the studios that they may be charging more to license their content than what it costs to produce a directly competing property from scratch.
Why, for instance, should I pay as much for a season of X-Files reruns as for the production of an entirely new series of Stranger Things? Why would I pay as much for episodes of The Sopranos, that I have already seen, and have on DVD, instead of another new series of Lillyhammer? I wouldn't, and neither would Netflix. The original content is a reminder to the owners of distribution rights that Netflix is the one who owns the ball, and they're the ones that will be taking it with them if they decide to go home and play alone.
And Netflix originals are getting nominated for Emmy Awards, in competition with AMC and HBO shows. Producing exclusive original content was absolutely the correct play for Netflix at the time they decided to do it, and remains so for the present.
I agree - Netflix is becoming synonymous with binge watching. I've gotten months and months of value out of Netflix with Breaking Bad, Lost, The Office, The X-Files, House, etc... If I had to do the research required to get similar satisfaction out of the same number of hours of movie viewing? Forget it.
I was going to mention this. Is there anything worse than getting in to a show and then comes that shark jumping season? THey are far more obvious with binge watching too.
It seems like in the old days, network series (22-24 shows per season) had a sort of peak around seasons 2-4 where everything was firing on all cylinders, nobody left, the story had enough legs to keep people wanting. If they last much longer they tended to get mediocre. Binge watching has changed it, binge watch X-files, you'll probably have to quit before the end, there is at least a solid weak season (maybe it's 6 or 7) at the time watching week to week it didn't feel that way but day to day it's really obvious.
I don't have the same amount of TV time now, startup, family, etc.. eats a lot but what I like is to find a show that's been on about 3 season, has some popularity and just watch it at my leisure 2 years after everybody else. You can get a good idea if it's worth your time before you spend any on it. (Yes, I know, that makes me old and lame, but it's just TV..)
Yeah I also had the odd acquaintance that did the same, ironically 99.9% of my other friends who claim to be "fans" and that Firefly is the "best thing ever" never bothered.
I don't think most of them even waited for it to come out on DVD but most likely pirated it and maybe bought it once it hit the bargain bin.
Various excuses have been used from "I don't want to see an episode in the theater" to "I don't want to give Fox money" but it doesn't really matter, people didn't came out to see it, and even the DVD sales unlike Firefly were pretty weak.
Anecdotally your friend that went to see it 6 times is also likely the reason why Firefly gets more votes cast on IMDB than The X-Files or Seinfeld.
This was 2003 no TiVo even, and Fox doesn't really do traditional syndication.
Scifi is expensive to make a scifi show has to outperform the competition to survive simply because of production costs.
This is why Shows like Buffy or X-Files worked because they didn't really need anything to set up the world, no need for expensive sets or special effects (buffy had some but you could always just do a filler episode with not much going on to balance the seasonal budget) a high school/small town setting and rural new jersey with a few wind breakers and 2 rental cars isn't going to break anyone's bank.
And also when Fox did try to monetize fans, the fans didn't coughed up the cash, Serenity made 25M at the US box office just to put it into perspective, xXx State of the Union and freaking DOOM made more money than Serenity.
Russians doing a head transplant? Why are they remaking that x-files movie?
I just hope the new and 'improved' X files show, won't try to take this subject as an opportunity to make yet another dubious episode ... Seriously though, could simply be a deformed human hand.
With the new X-Files season, I've had an excuse to watch some over the air TV for the first time in a while. Before and during the most recent episode there was a recurring teaser for the local evening news that went something like "the hidden Dark Nets that cyber criminals are using and why they're so difficult to shut down!"
The accompanying graphics were things like dark hooded figures in silhouette and images of credit cards being scanned on something resembling a flatbed scanner. The whole thing was a real reminded of why I never watch network news unless there's something very local and "breaking" that's going on in my city.
Good lord. I kept waiting for Morlocks to show up and eat some of them. This positively has to be the beginning of an X-Files episode.
Then again, I live in an an industrial park behind the rail yard of a plastic factory so from their perspective, I might be a Morlock...
There isn't enough TV for Netflix because Netflix sells TV to binge watchers who always want the next show.
FX wants to sell high end content at a premium. They don't want so much TV that anyone can find great rerun content on Netflix. FX wants you to watch a new episode of the Americans. They don't want you to binge watch 8 seasons of X-Files.
Netflix actually benefits if content is cheap. FX benefits if content is expensive.
I live in France where I wonder whether there's a law against abusive ad sequences, because they're much less intrusive:
Movies/programs start at 9pm. The ad breaks are at 9.45pm and 10.30pm. It means most movies (1.30) have only 1 ad break, series such as X-Files and 24 hours are displayed with uninterrupted episodes. Football games match this format.
At high school, those who went to Spain or UK discovered the poor state of TV in the rest of the world. We're lucky.
Except for Hoffman’s last proposal, the extensions are cordoned off to the US Government. The sponsors of the standards and their authors make very little effort to provide a use case for normal Internet users.
If this were an X-Files episode, then the group who really runs the world would be forcing the USG to subvert it's own crypto.
Hey cool thanks, that's great! I haven't seen many of those, but I liked Firefly, BSG, GoT, and VM S1-2 (haven't seen S3). I've seen Buffy S1 and the musical episode, I probably should revisit it.
My top recommendations would be Twin Peaks, My So-Called Life, Freaks and Geeks, Sports Night, and Arrested Development. I like a lot of shows that get cancelled "early".
The "myth arc" episodes of the X-Files are worth it, but don't try to sit through all 9 seasons. Recently, Better Call Saul is awesome for the emotional depth and film noir aspects, and the previous Breaking Bad to which it's a prequel is still a masterpiece even though I find the premise implausible. The Walking Dead is seriously addictive too.
> 1. The shift from cheaply produced, low quality content, to higher quality "must see" shows.
I think that the kind of direct analytics that Netflix has is making something obvious to execs that never was before. "must see" is a HIGHLY subjective term and there's a long tail.
In other words if you're just looking at aggregates the really popular, cheap to produce shows are the clear winners. Reality TV.
But if you look at segments or demographics, it might become clear that the Firefly/X files/Dr Who demo demands at least one good nerdy/sci fi show at any given time and lacking that, they will cancel their subscription.
Similarly any other particular demo that you want to look at might demand content that fits thematically lest they too start looking elsewhere to spend their entertainment dollars.
In a weird way it's sort-of gratifying that Netflix is storing so much viewing data because I think it will eventually become clear (if it's not already) that "niche" shows really are mainstream for certain groups of people and absolutely worth making.
There was an X-Files episode with this idea. Something Jesus said ("Talitha cumi") was recorded in a piece of pottery.
What i find quite surprising is that by some magical coincidence just as us puny humans mastered digital photography and managed to miniaturize electro optical sensors to a point where they can be emended into virtually any device and then sent out 100's of millions of people armed with these sophisticated cameras the UFO phenomenon pretty much died out...
For the most part the "latest" UFO shots you can find out there are grainy film cameras shots from the early 90's just about when the X-Files was fresh and cool. As we get closer to the 2000's for some reason all of those photos dry out, i guess ET's are just camera shy.
I suspect this is more a matter of what "sci fi" you like. The 1990s had lots of sci fi TV shows, including, among others:
X-Files
SeaQuest DSV / SeaQuest 2032
More Star Trek than you can shake a stick at (TNG, DS9, and VOY cover the whole decade, with most of it having two at once)
Babylon 5
Sliders
Stargate SG-1
Farscape
I think there's a better case that the 1990s were the high-point of sci fi popularity on TV than a particular drought (though I can see a case that there was something of a drought starting sometime in the mid-1980s through 1993.)
Two views on this issue.
Books, with rare exceptions such as that of K.J. Rowling's and Dan Brown's, are not a global phenomenon, draw less attention, making the crime of piracy less tempting or less lucrative. Books are more elitist and TV series more vulgar. That's also the reason why it's more profitable to harvest clicks on porn or pirated music than on metaphisical poets such as John Donne.
Since there are fewer book pirates it's also easier to track them vs. millions engaged in pirating movies on P2P networks.
My second guess would be that e-books are quite a new phenomenon (in terms of the recent surge in popularity of e-paper readers and tablets) compared with optical drives and tapes that were around for a couple of decades. DRM techniques were much less advanced and so piracy could flourish. The market and the music or film industries were so badly hit that they had to find a different business model to make ends meet.
Kindles and iPads are made with DRM in mind, the techniques are more advanced today, and the publishers have not been threatened by piracy so much as by the shrinking readership. Also scanning entire books could not have been done so massively and easily as copying music or films.
Finally - a word in favour of piracy - I can imagine, although it's just a guess, that it was exactly the piracy that drove evolution and innovation in film and music towards more spectacular entertainment, 3D, iMAX, 4D, live performance, stand-up shows, HD tv screens, VR goggles, 5.1 stereo, group gaming, motion sensors etc. etc., because watching flat, low res. series or films is not considered a proper fun anymore (even The X-files seems boring today, not engaging enough, from a different epoch, like ballet).
I think my favorite part about the Simpsons is how you can date people by which key episodes them remember. For me, it's the X-Files episode, or the Guatemalan Insanity Pepper. But for people a lot younger than me, they remember totally different episodes. I think there's just an age range where the jokes are targeted.
I do think the modern version is just sort of more modern. With so many competing cartoons like Adventure Time, Family Guy, and other (better) ones, the overall humor has just evolved. Simpsons I think has tried to evolve too, but can't evolve enough to really be a solid show because doing so would destroy the fan base it does have.
Perhaps best to think of it as the "Oracle" of television cartoon comedy =)
The problem with that approach is that the MotW episodes include some of the X-Files' very best, and the Mythology became very weak and incoherent in the later seasons. I think you'd at least want to mix in some of the best MotW eps, and probably all the Lone Gunman ones as well.
If you want to do this for the X-Files and follow the story arc while skipping all the 'Monster of the Week' stuff, you can do so with this episode guide:
http://x-files.wikia.com/wiki/Mythology
Don't forget that while users want to watch video entertainment, quite a lot of users have no specific preference as to what they watch. Each consumer has no more than 24 hours in a day to devote their undivided attention to something.
Studios are in a competitive environment. Not only do they have to fight other current studios for monetizable customers, they have to compete with the entire corpus of existing works. Fringe has to compete with X-Files. Law and Order: New Episode has to compete with Law and Order: Rerun.
In order to make money from customers, there must be an intact distribution path between supplier and consumer. In the world of physical goods, you cannot sell a Chinese widget to Joe Merica without a cargo ship, a stacktrain, an intermodal truck, a big-box store, its parking lot, and the roads between it and Joe's house or business. All that has to be paid for. It is completely unreasonable for the overseas manufacturer to expect that he be paid by all those links in the supply chain for the privilege of carrying the goods.
The manufacturer has to pay them a portion of what he earns from Joe on the sale, because without them, he cannot get Joe's money at all. The transport network provides value to the manufacturer because it increases the potential size of his market. Likewise, the manufacturer provides value to the transport network by giving it something to move. Neither one can even try take the whole pie, or it ceases to exist.
The distributor has to pay the supplier. But the supplier also has to pay the distributor.
In the case of broadcast television, the problem of who pays whom is partially resolved by advertising. Advertisers pay the supplier for access to their customers' attention, and the supplier can therefore pay distributors in proportion to the number of customers they can provide.
This is why broadcasters pay so much for licenses. Over-the-air radio broadcasts can bring in a huge number of customers with relatively low infrastructure investment. As long as they are paid by advertisers on a per-viewer basis, there is no reason why they should be getting any additional money from anybody for rebroadcasting rights... except one.
If the rebroadcaster is not providing the same number of consumers for the advertisers as for the entertainment content, the supplier is not getting paid for them. Enter the commercial-skipping DVR. The advertising model breaks down. The advertisers have to assume that every person not watching a show live is skipping their ads, so they only pay for the live audience.
And so castles made of sand fall in the sea eventually.
If any necessary part of the supply chain is not paid for, the money dries up for everyone. And the advertisers are paid with statistics. Aereo probably could have made this go away simply by offering up timestamps and button presses, to identify the number of customers actually watching the ads.
Perhaps citing a television show is not the most credible evidence one can bring to a discussion?
Edit (since I cannot reply directly, apparently): why is it not credible?
Can I start citing the X-Files or Star Trek? How about a broadcast of the Nancy Grace show?
> I can't wait until they start producing TV shows
http://www.theverge.com/2014/2/4/5379520/amazon-studios-the-after-chris-carter-x-files-new-show-pilot
Maybe you can... wait a little longer?
I'm currently binge watching Fringe on Netflix; currently in the final season. So it is still fresh in mind; but I have yet to see all of season 5.
In your article you specifically state, "Torture is used by all parties. Everyone resorts to torture, whether they are the good guys or the bad guys."
You then use X-Files and Fringe as the main points of contrast. This is blatantly wrong. All of the examples you have pointed out above, as well as all of the instances of torture I recall from the show, were from the "bad guys".
I would disagree with this being a form of normalization of torture, but rather a statement against torture. The bad guys use torture because they are bad; ergo this is a quiet form of protest from the shows producers against things going on today; Guantanamo, water boarding, etc...
> "Person of Interest" debuted ahead of common knowledge of the extent of mass surveillance
By the way, I've got to hand it to Person of Interest for creating a show about technology and the singularity that isn't completely ridiculous with its use of computers and jargon. They're also not really pro-surveillance. To quote Finch:
"...the machine is... wonderful and terrible..."
It's also a show where bad guys (the government) are using torture, and it's horrific. On last night's episode they mutilated a main character just to make a point.
In a sense, I think PoI is somehow the spiritual successor of the X Files in a sense that it alternates between "monster of the week" (in this case: criminal of the week) and the big storyline which is about a corrupt and power-hungry government at every level from local city politicians all the way up to vast and limitless government agencies, and about everyone's love-hate-and-exploitation relationship with a superior intelligence (which was the aliens in X-Files).
It's a show that makes some powerful and ballsy statements, while at the same time keeping up the light entertainment of what's ostensibly a vigilante show.
I binge watched Fringe and the X-Files over the holidays. The most stark difference to me was the torture. Fringe in some ways is delightful and gentle. Especially in the portrayal of Walter's mental illness. It's very much like the X-Files in that regards. But even in a show like that they still packed in the torture. What blog post SHOULD I have written? I know Scandal is full of torture. Does our Sci-fi need to be as well? Why is that? What changed since the X-Files were released? That's the point I was trying to make anyway.
I'm the author... I pretty much figured that 24 was generally acknowledged to be torture full. I wrote that piece after spending the holidays binge watching X-Files and Fringe. Such similar subject matter but such hugely different treatments.
The main problem I have with this article is that it doesn't give specific examples of when torture is used, especially by the show's protagonists. I love both Fringe and the X-Files, but I've actually more recently seen the X-Files (I'm on Season 7) so Fringe isn't exactly fresh in my mind.
The main scene I remember where one of the protagonists resorts to torture is in the final season where Peter tortures a captured Observer to figure out how to put together a time portal stabilizer the Observers are using for transport. But if I remember the scene correctly, Peter doesn't even want information - he's just really pissed off at the Observers for killing his daughter. Even though this scene shows one of the protagonists doing something wrong, I question whether it was really trying to get the watcher's approval for the his actions. If anything, it was trying to show disapproval for his actions by depicting him as mentally unstable. I'm not saying that there aren't more scenes where the protagonists resort to torture, just that I can't remember them.
A further question that I have is what exactly torture is in a sci-fi show. There are at least two episodes where the Fringe gang uses a device that reanimates a recently deceased enemy so they can get the necessary information to stop an impending attack. Is a scenario like this torture? And what about when one of the Observers attempts to read Walter's mind causing him a great deal of pain? This seems to be torture, but would the shows viewers think that governments should torture because Fringe depicted a character reading another character's mind?
Finally, Ntrails makes a fantastic point. Typically, torture is not depicted as a critical story piece in Fringe. Torture occasionally makes appearances, but many of the shows fans can't even remember when and how often they were used. What does that say about the "legitimizing" force of depiction of torture in Fringe?
I seem to recall in X-Files people just disappeared. The same occurs in many police dramas and even movies with similar settings.
Whats worse, showing torture or off screen killing people? These are not shows about bunnies and unicorns, they are about dangerous, exaggerated or fictional at best, subjects, and will not necessarily portray characters in the best of light.
Very interesting! I would look at the depiction of torture in Fringe in another light though. X-Files was a cult show that ran on Friday nights (first few seasons) with low expectations. Fringe had high-expectations from the start, had J.J Abrams named attached and (this part is a guess) a more expensive cast. It never did very well in the ratings and was on cancellation watch for most of its existence. It actually did follow the "Monster of the Week" formula more often the first couple of seasons but then started emphasizing the overarching plot more often in the later seasons. The threat of cancellation, I think, explains the use of eye-catching tactics like torture, and how they seemed to retcon the previous season, each season and start an entirely different plot. They never expected to keep going and didn't plan very far in advance.
X-Files had very different constraints which were only relaxed as the years went on and their budget increased. You can actually see the point in season 2 where the show is beginning to become popular enough that they start having better make-up and effects.
Netflix has a pretty good collection of mainstream movies and series. Big plus is that my wife and (young) children can use it, too. I do use newsgroups sometimes to download series (X-Files) or older movies (Bullitt) that I can't find on Netflix, but I'm downloading substantially less than before.
I was thinking the same thing. He has to really have something awful on them - something so bad that they'd eat a ton of crow over it, and possibly lose their jobs over it. But it's still worth keeping under wraps.
The conspiracy theorist in me wishes that the X-files would do a movie on it, as we'd solve JFK and the aliens all in one wrap.
Nowhere Man (TV) was more scary, by far.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0112104/
Sure, X-Files had boogie men, big baddies, conspiracies. In Nowhere Man the evil was ubiquitous, bureaucratic, banal, and terrifying.
I agree. Early on I find it especially ironic when he verbally attacked Carter's X-Files for meaningless mysteries and a lack of satisfying conclusions, when now that pretty much defines JJ Abrams works.
Abrams TV shows are vapid mysteries that have no overriding theme and his movies are are plotless roller coaster rides.
Well, in general Netflix seems interested in providing content that falls into one of two categories. The first is what I think of as "low barrier to entry" tv shows. These are shows that people can turn on while cooking, cleaning, or doing other things around the house to replace pre-programmed tv channels.
"Many of the most-watched series have been off the air for years, like Star Trek and The X-Files." [1]
Personally, I think this kind of content goes a long way to keeping subscribers on Netflix, when they might have otherwise been tempted to turn on a tv channel.
The second kind of content Netflix appears to be interested in is content that pulls in new subscribers, This could be things like movies that were very recently released, or their own original content (mainly to replace the expensive deals to get those new movies).
But the thing about Netflix is that even a new show that might be viewed by other network producers as a flop can end up being a a good call. This is because Netflix isn't constrained by the same limits that cable tv is. The shows Netflix produces don't need to be blockbuster hits, as long as they can help fill the gaps in the "low barrier to entry" tv that keeps subscribers happy over the long run.
A cable channel can only show one thing to all it's viewers at a time, so filling that time slot with something that everyone likes is critical. Netflix can afford a slower burn with content that might not get a million viewers in the first season, but could easily be watched by several million viewers in the next 5 years.
[1] http://finance.yahoo.com/blogs/the-exchange/netflix-dropped-favorite-movie-used-164043268.html
I'm pretty sure I've already seen a few X-Files episodes one could do a word-replace with.
Classic Hollywood movies with English subtitles?)
The first few seasons of The X-Files and Twin Peaks together with Scorsese movies (in which characters talk a lot) were my choices.)
Great work!
It reminds me of an X-files episode where Mulder and Scully find a first century ceramic cup that supposedly contains a "phonograph" recording of Jesus Christ's words during the last supper.
Right, if you mean to watch in one sitting, that wasn't something you could do in the '60s. But it's something that seems like it's been common since the '90s, since the advent of the "DVD Box Set". People would get box sets and watch these long-narrative-arc series in marathon weekends, or socially in parties. There was a period in the 1990s when seemingly everyone I knew was organizing Twin Peaks parties, and it seems like it fits the description of long-running experimental novel. People did that with the X-Files too, though admittedly it was a more coherent experience if you cut the "monster-of-the-week" episodes from the sequence (but hey, leave them in, and make it a gigantic, sprawling novel with disconnected subplots, of the Alexandre Dumas variety). Or Dawson's Creek, for that matter, or Buffy as you mentioned. In my circle of friends it seemed everyone was gorging themselves on Babylon 5, Star Trek, Black Adder, and Monty Python box sets as well; I don't know if I'd describe those as narratively complex, but there are lighter novels, too.
But in any case, I could believe the numbers are different. Perhaps box sets were not as major a part of 1990s/2000s TV-watching as I had thought?
Torrents don't consist 90% of those things either. The largest audio torrent on http://thepiratebay.se/browse/100/0/5 is a sample library for use in creating your own songs. The largest video torrent on http://thepiratebay.se/browse/200/0/5 is a collection of the X-Files TV show; #2 is a collection of 50 classic movies (A Clockwork Orange, American Beauty, Annie Hall, Apocalypse Now, and so on) --- the movie equivalent of Nineteen Eighty-Four. The largest software torrents on http://thepiratebay.se/browse/300/0/5 are chess tablebases --- used for research into the game of chess --- Microsoft Windows 7, and auto repair software called Alldata. The top "other" torrent on http://thepiratebay.se/browse/600/0/5 is a preservation copy of GeoCities, which contained the full weirdness of the late-90s web in miniature, and after a duplicate of the same torrent, #2 is an archive of chemical journals.
I think what you're probably thinking of is not library shelves but library checkouts. And I think that you'll find that library checkouts did consist 90% of trashy paperbacks, the text equivalent of pop movies, back when people got that kind of stuff from libraries instead of online.
I've never seen an ad come up during an X-Files episode, neither on my machine nor on the XBox. (Which is odd, now that I think of it.)
Wouldn't that basically require everyone who pirates to take a questionnaire to truthfully answer?
For the record, I've been watching X-Files on Hulu on my laptop. I've made it through season two, but will probably just download AVI's of the rest of the seasons, because my Wifi barely works in the kitchen, and the video quality goes down.
Am I ethically in the clear if I stream the Hulu episodes on my desktop, while watching pirated AVI's in the kitchen?
My girlfriend and I went AppleTV + Netflix about a year ago, and we haven't missed cable at all (I don't watch sports). The Netflix catalog is sub-optimal and lacking some important content (HBO shows like The Wire, for example) but it's also great if you have certain niche interests and like to watch an entire TV series (Buffy the Vampire Slayer or the X-Files, for example. And now Star Trek!).
We also tend to spend less overall time watching TV. There's something about the ease and pull of flipping cable channels that keeps you watching, whereas with Netflix, you have to actively commit to another episode/movie. That requires a certain cognitive effort and in most cases, we'll find that after one or two 30 minute (well, more like 22 minute) episodes, we're done for the evening.
I was hooked after the first ten minutes of the first episode. Also, best opening credits and theme music probably since the X-Files.
That said, I find the show distasteful at times (the use of 'sexposition'), and sometimes it mishandles morality, making it hard to sympathize with any of the characters if you evaluate their decisions objectively. I suspect that like The Wire (and it's probably in that sort of league) it's weakest point will be unrelenting naturalism - constantly trying to show us how terrible and pointless life is, not offering much to aspire to.
But heck, it's mostly just outrageous fun.
They also used an open graph meta tag, too. So people can easily share the prank on Facebook, presumably. A little ironic.
<meta property="og:description" content="Hulu.com is a video service on the World Wide Web that offers hit TV shows including X-Files and Newsradio. Our extensive library also includes classic TV series and blockbuster movies. Dial up and start watching now. No CD-ROM required." />
Though, of course, Anderson's looks certainly changed over the course of the show's run. By season 5-ish, she was much sexier, and wasn't afraid to use that.
That said, I agree with your general assessment of the gender balance in the X-Files.
Also, I agree with the other comment regarding how good Fisher looks in a few of those photos.
I read an article about the X-Files once where the author talked about how the show flipped the usual formula for television casting on its head. In most television shows, the female lead is hired primarily for her looks while the male lead is supposed to be the one the audience can identify with. In the X-Files, Duchovny was the tall, slim model-ish one while Gillian Anderson was short and basically normal looking. It seems like X-Files fans have a better gender balance than most sci-fi shows. I wonder if having a more normal female lead helped in that regard?
Something similar seems to have happened in Star Wars. It's easy to forget since they've been around for so long, but Harrison Ford and Billy Dee Williams were ridiculously good looking guys. Mark Hamill was a teen idol from his time on shows like Eight is Enough and The Texas Wheelers (I had to look that name up.) By looks alone, Carrie Fisher might be the least likely of the four to get a magazine cover. (Don't tell my twelve-year-old self, though.)
I just finished the 1st episode. Imagine like an indie/pro-am reinvention of The X-Files. A touch of sci-fi. A beautiful smart blonde woman instead of Scully. Nice theme music. Opening voiceover. Not saying it's exactly like that, but stylistically has similarities to it. Anyway, I liked it. Want moar. :)
Love it! Bravo. Can't wait to see the next episode. Fans of The X-Files or SF in general may want to check it out. Has an indie feel to it, but still pretty slick.
I just finished the first episode. It's pretty good. I'm looking forward to seeing where they take it. It feels like an episode of the X-Files for anyone that is curious if it is worth the download.
It makes me laugh, all these movies like Bourne Identity or the James Bond franchise or TV shows like X-files or Spooks where governments and intelligence agencies are made out to be a powerful and capable (if sometimes malevolent) entity. The reality is that any (Western) intelligence agency couldn't spy their way out of a wet paper bag.
And this is hardly the first highly public breach... MI6 staffers are notorious for leaving unencrypted laptops on trains or in taxis. But as an ordinary UK citizen, under the New Liebour government, I'm relieved that they're so completely incompetent.
This is a fine essay on the importance of having a marketable concept.
That said, I'm a bit concerned that he's overgeneralizing from a biased sample set: His major examples (besides his own comic) are TV series. TV series often take time to get started; they always have. To pick some examples close to the geek heart: Star Trek:TNG had a crappy first season. Babylon Five had a very spotty first season.
There's a reason for this: traditionally, the first half-season of the typical TV show was written by a team of more-or-less freelance writers who worked from a "series bible": A big book written by the series creator that describes the characters and the setting and some of the possible plot directions. [1] They might also have had a pilot script, or even an actual pilot, to work from. But these writers would not necessarily have seen the actors performing in their roles. They might not even have known who the actors were. So their scripts would form an odd patchwork that would be stitched together by the producer, the director, and the actors on the fly. By the third season, however, things would have sorted themselves out: The producers would have found a stable of writers they like, the writers would have seen the older episodes and have some idea of how the actors inhabited the characters, there would be a canon to draw upon, and so on.
---
[1] This has changed, of course, particularly for drama series. Heroes was awesome from the first moment; most people agree that it was all downhill from season one. Other shows -- Firefly, the new Doctor Who -- also exhibit the pattern of initial awesomeness. This is arguably because the economics of TV series production has changed a lot: The rise of DVD box sets has changed the target audience and the product life cycle for TV series, and the way shows are pitched, produced, and financed has changed. And it's probably also because writers and producers have learned from the experience of shows like Babylon Five and X-Files and, later, Buffy: Show runners seem to have a greater tendency to be highly capable writers who are given much more control over the early episodes, often to the point where they will write most of those episodes personally.