PASADENA, Calif. -- There's a darkness spreading across the land of popular culture, and it is coming to a television set near you.
If you are one of the millions of fans of Fox Television's "The X-Files," you have already encountered this sensibility, with its weird camera angles, long shadows, and scenes set in deep forests, basements and underground garages. It's a universe of conspiracies, whispers, tape recordings and a government that lies to its own employees and "terminates" those citizens who discover its dirty secrets.
Come next month, with the arrival of the new fall season, that tone and worldview will be on display across the prime-time television landscape.
It will be most apparent in such shows as NBC's "Dark Skies," a Saturday-night drama that re-imagines post-World War II American history as the result of a clandestine war between alien invaders and a secret government agency, and "Millennium," another Fox show from the creator of "The X-Files." "Millennium" is about a former FBI agent who joins forces with a secret law-enforcement group "fighting against the growing forces of darkness as the millennium approaches," to quote Fox Entertainment president John Matoian.
Much has been written in recent months about science-fiction, alien invaders, American enemies, heroes and popular culture. With the enormous success of the feature film "Independence Day," it is not surprising that initial attempts to account for the new television shows have simply tried to plug them into the "Independence Day" discourse. That is, by writing about them as part of a trend in sci-fi/fantasy or as indications of how our ideas about alien invaders have changed since the Cold War.
Some of that discussion is useful, but most of it misses the larger cultural questions that beg to be asked about "The X-Files" and its imitators. What matters are not so much the specifics of genre, but rather the dark sensibility and worldview that these television shows share.
"Sometimes what I do and what people think it is that I do are different," says Chris Carter, the creator of "The X-Files" and "Millennium." "People think it is science fiction. I always tried to think of 'The X-Files' as other than science fiction.
"Personally, I think the world is a very scary place. I think it is becoming more and more frightening. I think that in most neighborhoods you can't go out for a walk alone -- certainly, a woman can't walk alone at night. So, for me, the darkness in the shows is a response to the world I live in -- it's a response to the times and that is what's important."
