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X-Files Is Back … But for How Long?
Will there or won't be there an eighth year of The X-Files? The answer should be simple, but a number of X-feuds look to make the show's seventh season, which kicks off this Sunday, its last.
There's no love lost between series creator Chris Carter and Fox Entertainment President Doug Herzog after Fox pulled Carter's new Harsh Realm show after a measly three episodes. Also feuding, David Duchovny, who's suing Fox for allegedly undercutting his share of the profits in the series. Then there's the well-documented frosty relations between stars Duchovny and Gillian Anderson, and their ad nauseam comments about wanting to end the show now, please. Duchovny's and Carter's contracts end with this season, Anderson's at the end of the perhaps mythical eighth season.
But both the Fox network, which airs the show, and 20th Century Fox, which produces it, would like to squeeze out another season of the cult hit, especially since the new shows in its 1999-2000 season have stumbled badly, including Carter's now-defunct Realm.
"We would love to have the show back," Herzog tells the Los Angeles Times. "There are a couple of hurdles that need to be jumped over. But we are already in discussions with the studio, and when the time is right, we will sit down with Chris. The wheels are in motion."
Carter tells the Los Angeles Times he is "extremely excited," personally and creatively, about the coming season and that he'd love it to continue.
But can he put aside his Harsh feud with Herzog and move on? Carter also spoke with the New York Post, blaming Herzog personally for the cancellation of his virtual reality show. "I don't think that the man who is running the network now got the show or even watched it," he told the Post this week. "Someone over there made the decision to yank it. Herzog was the one that delivered the message so I blame the messenger," he adds.
"The ratings weren't great," Carter admits to the Post. "But Harsh Realm was never considered on any other merit." Fox "decided to put all their eggs into other baskets," says the bitter producer. "The viewer awareness, which had been very high early in the summer, had slipped to a pathetically low number of people just didn't know the show was on. I guess canceling it was a quick way of trying to stop the bleeding of a much larger wound," he laments.
"I have enormous respect for Chris Carter's work, and I regret as much as he does the failure of Harsh Realm,'" Herzog countered. "But I do believe our ongoing discussions with Chris are best conducted in private, not in the press."
As for the inevitable end of the X-Files, Carter doesn't sound like
he's quite come face to face with it yet. Talking to the Times about the
next season, he says, "As always, I want to tell good stories, scare people,
leaven it with some funny episodes, expand and possibly wind down the
X-Files mythology." Part of that winding down is the anticipated kiss
between the show's too elusive leads, a sure sign it's not long for this world.
(See precedents set by Moonlighting, Northern Exposure.
