In which Piers watches the X-Files

Lileks captures my experience of watching the X-Files mini-reboot:

I've seen one new "X-Files" episode, and it was okay. I heard the third is better, and funnier. But that's not what I want. Anyone hear they were doing more X-Files, and think "hope it's a comedy"? There were comedic moments, but the show relied on dread, paranoia, cold logic vs. incomprehensible events, and of course a baffling, complex, indefensible mythos that brought the whole mess crashing down into cultural irrelevancy. At some point we realized, with a sick and angry feeling, that there was no master plot. They were making it up as they went along, introducing new wrinkles not to reveal the grand plan, but to compensate for their own inability to bring it all together. I can't think of another show I loved so much only to drift away. Oh, the VCR didn't record? Whatever.

Well, the Simpsons.

I tweeted out the other night something about the show being wrong for the times - the idea of an all-powerful super-competent government with plots within plots, capable of devilish secret schemes died somewhere around late 2001, if only because most of us realized it wasn't capable of such things, and the delicious shiver of 90s-era paranoia now seemed like a juvenile indulgence. (The people who believed, who Wanted to Believe in Mulderspeak, doubled down on Trutherism.) Time has left these characters behind, and in the episode I saw they seemed vaguely embarrassed they had to do this. Anderson looked as if she was still doing "The Fall," a show in which she plays a remote and clinical version of Scully without any of the smoldering warmth or softness, and Duchovney just rasped out his lines in rote flat tones as if he'd boned up on the character by watching parody videos. It was a bit disconcerting to see it all so pristine and clear, too - the old shows now look as if they were shot in a smoky room through a lens covered with hair spray, and that look defines not only the show but 90s TV. Looking back at the shows now, I think: those were happier times.

This was all we had to worry about, and it was a fairy tale. We knew it, of course, but once a week, it was fun; we all wanted to believe.

It was a simpler time. We didn’t realize how good we had it.