Thirteen years after the original series’ run, the next mind-bending chapter of The X-Files is a six-episode event series helmed by creator/executive producer Chris Carter, with stars David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson re-inhabiting their roles as iconic FBI Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully as they investigate unexplained cases for which the only answers involve paranormal phenomena. Over the course of its nine-season run, the influential series went from breakout sci-fi favorite to massive global hit, a cultural phenomenon that became one of network television’s longest-running sci-fi series, earning 16 Emmy® Awards, five Golden Globes® and a Peabody Award. In 1996, in Courmayeur, Chris Carter received the Raymond Chandler Award, Italy’s highest honor for lifetime achievement normally bestowed on authors of literary, ‘noir’ thrillers; ’96 marked the second time the award encroached on the audiovisual sphere (the first time was in 1992, when it went to Quentin Tarantino).
"Every day I look at the newspaper and I see a possible X-Files episode, so this is obviously something I’ve done for a long time, and you never quite lose the eye for what would be good X-Files storytelling. It’s a perfect time to come back with the X-Files, considering global politics. It’s about my faith as well. My faith in science. Believe it or not, I’m a skeptic. I’ve never been visited by aliens, believe it nor not. It’s a story about the modern pursuit of science by scientists. If it weren’t for the science, this would be just another show about the paranormal. I think the reason the show has been successful these many years is really David and Gillian and the characters of Mulder and Scully. The actors were very happy to come back. But the exciting thing for me was beyond David and Gillian, who wanted to do it, but the original writers of the show coming back. The writers probably did the same thing that I did: pick up the paper every day and see that there were stories to tell. And two fantastic actors to tell these stories with." [Chris Carter]