Rights and Wongs
Part II of "The Carter Conundrum", our continuing look at The X-Files.
      by pisher

[Editor's note: This article is the second in a three-part series, the first of which appeared last issue.]

(We rejoin pisher, Sarah, and Linda in the 11th Hour offices, as the CSM -- California Surfing Man -- monitors their discussion from the rat-infested loft. There has been a long lull in the discussion, due to their taking a break to watch the X-Files seventh season conclusion. That was some time ago, and nobody seems willing -- or able -- to speak. Then Sarah breaks the silence.)

Sarah: Um -- well -- that was -- it was about --

pisher: About an hour, yeah.

Linda: Not much more you can say, really.

Sarah: Not without using stronger language than I normally allow here. pisher -- what happened to Chris Carter? How did he let this happen to The X-Files?

pisher: Ah. The Great Question. Some have been asking it for years, while some have only just begun to ask it. Some are still trying to sidestep it. The simplest answer I can give -- is that he stopped letting The X-Files happen to him. But like all simple answers connected to the X-Files, it requires a long, convoluted explanation. You did say I could make this a three-parter?

Sarah: (bemusedly) Yes, I suppose I did say that.

pisher: Good. This part will be the Divine Comedy. The next will be the Inferno. I've been looking for a subtitle for this part. What do you think of "Profiles in Pillage?"

Linda: Perhaps a tad ponderous?

pisher: "X-pose of an X-poseur?"

Sarah: Slightly X-cessive. Some might take X-ception to it. How about "Great X-pectations"?

pisher: Oh that's a pip! But I think I'll go with--

THE CARTER CONUNDRUM, PART II: Rights and Wongs

So we left Chris Carter in a bit of a pickle last time out. He had a lot going for him. Eight years in the field of TV production had taught him a great deal. But he lacked the kind of background he needed to run a show as ambitious as the one he had created. He was fighting above his weight class, and while you have to admire his chutzpah, chutzpah will only take you so far.

He had an incredible pilot, thanks in no small part to the Fox development people who had helped him rewrite it. He also had the collaborative duo of Daniel Sackheim and Robert Mandel, who helped him make the Pilot and the second episode, "Deep Throat", which set up the narrative of the first season. But all the King's Horses and all the King's Men couldn't have helped him if the pieces hadn't been there to work with -- and Carter had assembled them. From many different sources, not all of them properly acknowledged, but it was his brainchild nonetheless. He was still the star player at this point in the game -- but he desperately needed a backbench.

Thanks to Randy Stone, he had two co-stars with remarkable onscreen chemistry. Vancouver and its environs would provide him with superb cast and crew resources at a bargain rate, and marvelous moody scenery for next to nothing. Now a writing staff had to be assembled -- and some of them had to know more than he did about producing a big multi-camera show or he was in deep doodoo. As he would say later, he "made some great hiring choices."

Actually, they were other people's hiring choices, but he signed off on them with such acuity that it was easy to forget he actually recruited nearly none of the major names we would come to recognize in the coming years. He had garnered quite a few useful friends in the biz, but few if any creative collaborators with talents suited to the show he was working on.

But Peter Roth had his eye on a team of writer/producers. Glen Morgan and James Wong. On 21Jump Street and The Commish, they had established a reputation as guys who could take an existing show idea and bring out its full potential. They were known to love working with wild subject matter -- the wilder the better. And they knew potential when they saw it. In spite of a pre-existing commitment, they grudgingly agreed to view the X-Files pilot, and said to each other -- "Uh-oh -- this is pretty good." They got out of their deal with Columbia. Howard Gordon and Alex Gansa, who had worked on "Beauty and the Beast" together, were also hired. R.W. Goodwin was signed, about two weeks after relocating to the Pacific Northwest with his wife Sheila Larkin -- who would shortly become the mother of a skeptical FBI Agent.

Carter had a staff. For all he had to do with it. A rather eclectic one in terms of experience and interests, but one of the best ever assembled, in this writer's opinion. Carter would later lament his misfortune over not having five or six guys who could write an episode from beginning to end, good soldiers hewing closely to the example set by the show Creator -- Stephen Bochco apparently told him he used to have a staff like that back before everybody with a bit of talent got his or her own development deal, and Carter seemed quite envious. But how many of those guys could write an episode like "Ice" or "Fallen Angel", I wonder? At any rate, the one thing his four best writers had in common was that all of them had more experience producing successful television drama than their boss did. Hey, I bet you've all worked for people who knew less than you. And you found ways to deal with it, right?

It's worth repeating that Carter also knew a good thing when he saw it. He was a masterful network politician, and politics is, above all, the art of the possible. He knew quite well that he needed these people, and the increased depth they would give his original concept. Again and again, for the next two years, he would show a willingness to adapt, change, or simply jettison his own creative choices in favor of theirs. It only enhanced his own reputation to do so. After all, other than Duchovny and Anderson, he was the generally the only one we heard from, right from the beginning, in his first (and remarkably self-assured) press interviews in the summer of 1993. The better his subordinates made his show look, the better he looked. And if any of us bothered to read the credits at the end, we were told who we had to thank for the weirdness that had just concluded. "I made this!" Seemed pretty clear. Carter was Da Man.

But at first, we didn't even know who HE was. Nobody on this show was famous. It started small. "Did you see that thing on Fox last Friday? Man, you should check it out. Serious strangeness. Makes you think. And s(he)'s pretty cute, you know -- do you think they're--" Office chatter, phone conversations, and discussion on that formerly obscure and little understood avenue of human discourse, the internet -- now known as the World Wide Web, and no longer the exclusive domain of technonerds -- all played a part. An audience began to build. Factions began to form. The most pointless argument in the history of humankind would soon commence.

I personally didn't go online until several years later, at which time I was taken aback by the size and diversity of the web subculture The X-Files had spawned -- but I remember, with some retrospective amazement, how I almost imperceptibly found myself becoming addicted to this freaky Friday night drama, which I started watching around halfway through the first season. There were articles, reviews. There was some talk of aliens, monsters, sexual tension between the leads. I didn't see much sign of the latter the first time I tuned in to the end of an episode -- something about a monster at an Arctic base -- but I began to get the feeling I was missing out on something special.

Then I caught this one about a guy who crawled through small spaces -- turned out he had met the Agents before. When I caught a repeat of his first appearance, I realized I found the two lead characters utterly fascinating. This wasn't Moonlighting, not "will they or won't they?" -- it was something different and hard to pin down. A relationship that was compelling, complementary, and largely left open to interpretation, much like the elusive "Truth" that they were looking for each week. I also realized I was developing a slight crush on Scully.

I found myself buying any publication that promised revelations about the show and its characters. I had to start catching up on what was going on here. I waited impatiently for repeats of episodes I had missed. I started noticing the name Chris Carter. Sounded like an interesting guy. I wondered vaguely what he was like. No pictures back then. Anyway, the ratings were low. Seemed a good bet the show wouldn't last.

And like many other people, I sort of enjoyed, but did not become terribly interested in, Brisco County Jr. -- which I did catch the first few episodes of. Don't try to figure us out, TV Network people -- you'll just hurt yourselves. And we feel much the same way about you.

So this was my personal experience -- your memories may vary. By the end of season one, I was thoroughly obsessed. But I still paid little or no attention to that little writing credit that flashes by in the first few minutes of an episode.

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