Talk:The X-Files

"the reawakening of interest in conspiracy theories"
Sorry to nitpick🇱🇮 but perhaps "reawakening" here could be replaced with "explosion?" If I recall rightly there was little interest before, and certainly nothing on such a level - with the possible exception of JFK stuff. Bicycle wheel  21:15, 17 March 2015 (UTC)

Other stuff

 * "As the poster on the wall of his office puts it, he wants to believe." - It'd be fun to mention that said poster is illustrated with a photo by the well-known fraud Billy Meier.
 * "the reaction to 9/11" this whole paragraph is good. It also reminds me of the hand in hand growth of ufology/monster films and the cold war in the 1950s - the films were trumped in the end by the real-life fears of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
 * "it can be argued that it helped contribute to a cultural atmosphere where such topics were the subject of mainstream discussion" - in my opinion it definitely did. In 1990, a few thousand people had heard of, say, Area 51. Ten years later, millions did. Although, that said, there had been some pre-TXF growth of conspiracy theories, with Whitley Streiber's book gaining more attention than his horror novels.
 * Spinoffs section - careful, your fandom is showing! I'm not sure if these two series, being comparative flops, need more than a sentence. Bicycle  wheel silverbrain.png 21:32, 17 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Thanks! I threw in the Billy Meier connection. By "reawakening of interest", I meant how, back in the '70s, there were any number of schlock documentaries and TV programs purporting to "expose" something or other. As for the Spinoffs section, I could probably trim the bit on Millennium, though I feel the Lone Gunmen stuff is worth keeping, if only for the 9/11 Truther connection. KevinR1990 (talk) 00:44, 18 March 2015 (UTC)
 * Ah, here on Damp Island we didn't have schlock TV until the 90s. Bicycle  wheel silverbrain.png 18:51, 18 March 2015 (UTC)

How far to silver?
Textually tall, appears well sourced, has external links and other sections filled out... What I can see from a three-second glance is that it appears to miss images. What else needs to be added, folks? Reverend Black Percy (talk) 03:07, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

Lone Gunmen
I'm not a good enough technical writer to make this change myself confidently, but there's an inaccuracy in the Lone Gunmen section. While it was not cancelled because "they got too close to the truth" or anything absurd like that, the 9/11 connection did, in fact, lead to The Lone Gunmen getting cancelled, just more indirectly than you'd figure: the show was conceived in a pre-9/11 world and Fox got immediate, serious cold feet about anything X-Files related when 9/11 happened and people suddenly really, really wanted to trust the US government again in its aftermath. 9/11 actually fucked over a lot of TV shows in one way or another. 2601:2C3:8980:87C0:1C52:D39F:6048:7485 (talk) 13:51, 9 December 2020 (UTC)
 * Nah, it's just the marketability of the franchise. X-Files had peaked in 1996 with Season 4, with ratings regularly in the 20-29 million range and while the movie was being released. They came up with two spin-off ideas (Millennium from 96-99 and Lone Gunmen 01-02), but their ratings were based on their association with X-Files, which was falling in ratings. Good example is Millennium which was canned in '99 when multiple episodes were being seen by <5 million people (the Season 7 episode where the Millennium cast appears was seen by 15 million in comparison). By the time The Lone Gunmen came out, X-Files Season 9 had a viewership of 7-9 million - nine LG episodes were seen by fewer than that (several of which were seen by less than <5 million people). TL;DR: Lone Gunmen was cancelled entirely because it was only watched by X-Files fans, and even they weren't all that interested.-- Forerunner (talk) 14:24, 9 December 2020 (UTC)