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

I had no idea who had written, directed, or produced the episodes. I certainly did not know what a "Showrunner" was. Do any of you happen to know what a Showrunner is? No, it's not the funny looking bird the coyote keeps trying to catch. Here's a quote from a recent book, The Showrunners, by David Wild:

The X-Files Roadrunner -- err, showrunner.

"Showrunners are the equivalent of head coaches. They are generally writer/producers -- though some do not write -- who are perceived by network or production studios as being capable of steering a weekly sitcom or drama. They are charged with supervising the writers' room and dealing with the sometimes irrational demands of their casts, as well as those of the networks, the production studios, the agents, and ultimately a fickle and unpredictable viewing public. They come as close to auteurs as one can in television. The buck stops with them, at least until the buck stops completely."

It's a big job, and as Wild points out, it's a job that is sometimes performed by more than one person. For all intents and purposes, Carter shared it with Morgan and Wong, whom Peter Roth had brought into the mix to back up his promising but raw young protege. Not that you would have guessed this from most of the articles published at the time.

From L.A., where he spent the greater portion of his time, Carter would handle the studio, run interference with the nervous nellies at Broadcast S&P, and fight for his show's right to be different. He would also lay down a seemingly unending barrage of media interviews, tantalizing onlookers with his enigmatic quips and quotes, acting like he knew all the answers to questions he had scarcely asked. Above all, he presented bored entertainment journalists with an intriguing paradox -- a buff, suntanned California surfer who had created a dark rainy Canadian show about aliens and monsters. He was great copy. And he was always available to the mainstream press. Actually, in the early stages, he did quite a few interviews for sci fi fanzines like Starlog and Cinefantastique. The X-Files owed much of its early support to such publications, which helped sustain its cult during the lean early times. But as the mainstream began to catch on, these publications would increasingly find themselves out of the loop, forced to make do with interviewing Carter's lieutenants. As he so frequently pointed out, he never liked sci fi very much. He charged heavily for sci fi convention appearances, then started showing up late, and eventually stopped coming at all. He had outgrown the genre bush leagues -- he was going to The Show.

As mentioned in the last installment, Carter's media profile is astonishingly high for a producer. Producers are usually behind the scenes guys. How often do you hear from Joss Whedon or David Kelley? They're too busy writing to do a lot of interviews. You sure as hell don't see them lying naked in bed with their co-stars in the pages of Rolling Stone. Mind you, in most cases that's a very good thing. Carter broke the mold in this respect -- he loved to talk about what he did, though you might eventually notice that the more he talked, the less he actually said. Given the general state of entertainment journalism in this country, this did not weigh heavily against him. Substance is so overrated.

We may assume that all this PR work, potentially useful though it was, was also extremely time-consuming. David Chase has remarked that since The Sopranos became the pay-TV equivalent of a smash hit, the increasing demand to speak to the press has "completely changed the shape of the day." He seems to find it a bit of a bother. It was presumably the same for Carter in the first two seasons, as The X-Files got more and more buzz in the media. But for Carter, it was never a bother. After eight years of professional invisibility, people were finally listening to him, calling him, begging him for quotes (and eventually photo-ops). Rarely did he turn them down. He would even go speak to a convention of scientific skeptics in New York State, to explain to them that he couldn't make Scully right half of the time, the way he had originally promised. The reason being that stories where there was a rational explanation were "really boring." And the weird thing was that they stood up and applauded him anyway.

Gratuitous Duchovny picturage.

He was just in a groove, PR-wise. Nobody could touch him. He was the Golden Boy of New Age Paranoia, the Surfer of the Urban Legend Zeitgeist, the King of Conspiracy, the Prince of the Paranormal -- you get the idea. A bonafide TV auteur -- a "Media Seer" as one writer put it. He had an "instinctive sense of what makes people afraid." Never mind that Carter didn't actually believe in any of that paranormal stuff. Never mind that he freely admitted in one interview that he hadn't done that all that much research when the show first started. He did mention that two of his staffers brought a truckload of research materials with them when they showed up.

Now I think I know which two writers he was referring to. But it's hard to be sure. Carter rarely mentioned the other writers by name in his interviews. Cinematographers, SFX guys, no problem -- any great general needs loyal foot soldiers. But he was most reluctant to share credit for the overarching vision and strategy that lay behind his suddenly red-hot media property.

You may recall my mentioning that Carter's name will yield over 700 hits on a Lexis-Nexis newspaper search. Do a Lexis-Nexis search combining Carter's name with "Morgan, Wong" and you will get about half a dozen hits. All but one dealing with Millennium. And you will search in vain for an instance where he spends more than a sentence or two on them. He often refers to their scripts with admiration, I hasten to add -- he just tends to forget to mention who wrote them. Which may be why Ken Tucker, doing an early review for Entertainment Weekly, said that most of the early scripts were written by Carter, a not uncommon assumption by many journalists. In point of fact, Carter was the sole author of only six of the twenty-three first season episodes -- not counting the pilot, which was written much earlier, with a great deal of assistance. Morgan and Wong wrote just as much as he did that season, and likewise shouldered massive production workloads. And while Carter did a lot of tweaking on the other writers' scripts, he never touched a word of theirs. He knew better.

He was still the Showrunner. Every script went through him, and the final word was always his. But for all his incessant rewriting of most X-Files scripts, you have to look at the confusion of plot elements and characters introduced in the first season and ask -- who's in charge here? The answer, of course, is that Carter was. The buck stopped with him. But like some callow young prince prematurely elevated to the monarchy, he left a lot to his advisors, particularly Morgan and Wong. Their authority on the show was not simply due to their position (which was clearly subordinate to Carter's) but rather to the fact that Carter desperately needed men of their capabilities if he wanted to hang on to his loose-fitting crown. As he grew more comfortable on the throne, this would begin to change.

One fact is agreed upon -- Carter never provided a "show bible" to establish plot and character continuity -- which is standard operating procedure in series TV -- and so it was up to him to tell the other writers what was or was not in sync with his overarching vision of the show. So why did we get a bunch of apparently different and unrelated alien races, with no later attempt to fit them into what would (much later) be known as the "Mythology"? Remember, Carter is overseeing most of these scripts. Why are Morgan and Wong's episodes the only ones that seem to have any kind of internal logic to them?

James Wong (left) and Glen Morgan on the set of Final Destination in 1999.

However confusing this approach was for the viewer over the long run, it seems to have worked rather well for Carter. Everybody had to come to him for the answers. Which he rationed out very stingily. Because he didn't have any yet? Or because the ones he had weren't really his to begin with, and he didn't want to tip his hand too soon? We asked questions like these back then, and we're still asking. But somehow, all we ever seem to get is more questions.

Of course, if you paid close attention, you would see that the episodes that drew the most attention -- and the most critical plaudits -- were the ones written by Morgan and Wong. "Squeeze." "Ice." "Beyond the Sea." "EBE." "Tooms." There is not one favorable review of The X-Files in the first season that doesn't focus heavily on one or more of these episodes. But nearly all of them fail to mention who wrote them (honorable mention goes to a 1994 Newsweek article, the writers of which happened to quote the estimable Paula J. Vitaris -- I would guess she helped clue them in regarding these mysterious Wong persons.)

And rarely did the press mention that Morgan and Wong also created nearly all the supporting characters that we came to love. The Lone Gunmen. Assistant Director Walter F. Skinner. Captain and Mrs. Scully, and their psychic daughter Melissa. The grave and angry "Mr. X" (originally Carter wanted Mulder's new informant to be a woman, but the Wongs sought and won the right to cast their old pal Steven Williams, and built the character around his intense acting style). The Cigarette Smoking Man was just a guy who puffed away in the background and disposed of paranormal evidence, until Morgan and Wong gave him a persona. Dana Scully was little more than a tagalong, a witness, Dr. Watson with breasts, until they gave her a purpose of her own -- the purpose Carter had originally intended, but was apparently unwilling or unable to fully implement. She was Mulder's conscience, the one who shored up his spooky instincts with research and a hunger for solid evidence.

In the X-Files universe of the "Wongs", skepticism had an honorable place in the scheme of things. In their episodes, the partners were exactly that. Sometimes Carter seemed to emulate them, particularly in "Fire", where Scully actually solves the mystery of Cecil L'Ively's identity. One of my favorite scenes, actually. But scientific skepticism is so much harder to write than impassioned belief. Intuitive guessing is easier to write than careful scientific deduction. Sorry, Scully.

I think Carter understood all of this better than I ever will. I think he genuinely loved and appreciated the transformative work Morgan and Wong did on his show -- but understandably, he still thought of it as his show. In the early days, he showed his appreciation in very concrete and useful ways. In several instances, most notably in the case of "Beyond the Sea", he intervened forcibly on his collaborators' behalf with the bluenoses at Standards & Practices. He had a remarkable talent for getting what he wanted from the network higher-ups, and an unmatched capability to stare them down -- or fake them out. He was no outsider in that world, however much he played the maverick surfer -- he entered the world of screenwriting as a salaried studio employee, and he came to understand these people better than some of them understood themselves. I'm in deep guessing mode here, but I would go so far as to say that in each network bureaucrat Carter found a small piece of himself -- and they in turn found part of themselves -- their secret aspirations and dreams of auteurial power and might -- in Chris Carter.

(And major bonus points to anybody who can tell me which famous dead author I plagiarized that last sentence from, and what historical personage he was writing about. A much worse person than Chris Carter, to be sure.)

Morgan and Wong were better liked and trusted by the more knowledgeable Fox executives -- but Carter was the one who knew how to push their buttons. An incredibly useful talent in his field, and one whose strategic value should never be underestimated. A huge part of putting a show on the air is getting a show on the air. And then keeping it on. Credit where credit is due. In this area, Carter's Kung Fu was the best.

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