After years of wondering whether The X-Files would come back in any form – TV, movies, sock puppet show – it looked good for a return to television earlier this year. That has now been confirmed by Fox: the show and its characters will return to investigate more mysteries in a six-episode “event series” much along the lines of 24: Live Another Day.
Despite David Duchovny, Gillian Anderson and creator Chris Carter being spread to the winds on other projects, they’re all coming back for the new miniseries, the details of which are being kept in a locked drawer guarded by a suspicious type endlessly puffing on Morley cigarettes. So we don’t yet know if any of the other characters – Mitch Pileggi’s Walter Skinner, say, – or creative team will be back for duty. Especially since the writers who worked with Carter to create the original series have themselves gone on to chart their own telly and movie courses.
“I think of it as a 13-year commercial break,” Carter says in a statement put out by Fox. “The good news is the world has only gotten that much stranger, a perfect time to tell these six stories.” Production is now scheduled to kick off this summer. If all this excitement has reignited your X-passion, check out our celebration of the show and take a listen to when we had Gillian Anderson in the Empire Podcast booth and peppered her with geeky questions about the series.