The truth is out there: Network executives always need a hit. They'll come right out and say so in a major American newspaper.
"We need some new hits," Fox Networks Group chief Peter Rice told USA Today last year. "Big ones."
Rice must be satisfied. Fox now has the ratings juggernaut and cultural vortex that is Empire. Averaging 13 million viewers per week, this show was the toast of Wednesday nights: unavoidable, well-dressed and tweetable. It even has songs.
But Empire's season finale aired earlier this month. What's next for Fox? The TV business is like the music business: You're only as good as your last jam.
Meanwhile, broadcast television is facing stiff competition from that thing called the Internet. Netflix. Hulu. Amazon. And then there are DVRs. And on-demand viewing. And, in case anyone forgot: Millennials don't watch TV. What's a conglomerate owned by Rupert Murdoch to do?
Enter The X-Files. Again.
"The good news is the world has only gotten that much stranger," Chris Carter, the show's creator, told The Associated Press. How he thinks of the show's long hiatus: a "13-year commercial break."
Carter's right to say his 22-year-old franchise has only been on pause. Back in 1993, television was turned upside-down by the fluke success -- and fast flame-out -- of Twin Peaks, a quirky show that, at least some of the time, was about an FBI agent chasing aliens. (And, not incidentally, also featured David Duchovny as a transgendered G-Man). So Fox, then known for half-hour comedies such as Married ... With Children, took a chance on an hour-long drama about extraterrestrials, government conspiracies -- and two FBI agents who were easy on the eyes and might, just might, get together one day.
The gamble paid off. The X-Files ran for nine seasons. It got Fox its first Emmy nomination. And it put "I Want to Believe" posters on countless dorm room walls.
"The X-Files was not only a seminal show for both the studio and the network, it was a worldwide phenomenon that shaped pop culture -- yet remained a true gem for the legions of fans who embraced it from the beginning," Fox Television Group chairmen Gary Newman and Dana Walden said, as Variety reported. "Few shows on television have drawn such dedicated fans as The X-Files, and we're ecstatic to give them the next thrilling chapter of Mulder and Scully they've been waiting for."
As champagne corks pop among the SETI set, it's easy to forget that there was a time not that long ago that people seemed sick and tired of Mulder and Scully. The X-Files didn't go off the air at the top of its game, but amid declining ratings after Duchovny's departure from the series.
"It was fun for a while, playing along with The X-Files, rooting for this little spook show on the fourth-place Fox network as it wormed its way into the popular consciousness," a New York Times writer said in 2002. "It wasn't until the incomprehensible 1998 feature film The X-Files: Fight the Future, an overgrown sweeps episode, that it became obvious that Mr. Carter was making up the show's 'mythology' (the sadistically convoluted plot line about a secret government war on extraterrestrials) as he went along."
Carter himself -- citing, ahem, the attacks of Sept. 11, which some say were predicted by a spinoff of the show -- tearfully waved goodbye to his creation just a few years before he was saying hello to it again.
"There was lots more we could have done but we ended at the right time," Carter said in 2008 ahead of the premiere of another X-Files film. "Things had changed after 9/11 ... and now the mood is right once more."
And, in 2015, it seems the mood is right once more again. Though X-Files' planned six-episode run will not reinvent Fox to the degree Empire has, the network must be listening to Peter Allen. As the Australian singer put it in 1974: "Don't throw the past away/You might need it some rainy day/Dreams can come true again/When everything old is new again."
Of course, leftovers are nothing new for television. The glow of nostalgia -- and a prepackaged idea already familiar to viewers -- has brought countless shows back from the dead, including but by no means limited to Hawaii Five-O, Star Trek and The Twilight Zone. Even Twin Peaks is slated for a return to Showtime (if it can get into production).
But those behind the X-Files better hope the reboot looks more like Battlestar Galactica -- a stunning re-imagination of a cheesy 1970s show -- than like the new Knight Rider, which flopped in 2008.
The truth will still be out there this time, but no one may care.
Style on 03/31/2015