It's October 27, 1996.
Your neighborhood's Halloween decorations are up, yellow leaves carpet the ground, only a few still on their branches. You just got home with your family from a trip to Sears, where you picked out your Darth Vader costume. Star Wars Shadows of the Empire was huge for kids your age -- a Nintendo 64 game, a book, and non-stop commercials hyping up the rerelease of A New Hope. Halloween is on Thursday this week, but right now, all you're thinking about is turning on the TV. America's Funniest Home Videos, back-to-back Treehouse of Horror episodes, and then The X-Files.
30 years ago today, The X-Files moved from Friday nights to Sunday. Friday was tough for primetime, with families going out to dinner, movies, high school football games. It was called the Friday night death slot, its shows destined for cancellation. Still, The X-Files had persevered, growing from 10 to 19 million viewers through three seasons.
The season three finale, Talitha Cumi, was seen by nearly 18 million people, ending with a great cliffhanger. The next episode, Herrenvolk broke the show's previous record, hitting 21 million viewers. Episode 2, Home, got it's first of only two broadcasts, still known as a shocking episode today.
This was all leading to a seismic shift in The X-Files' popularity. The fourth episode of the season was moved to Sunday night.
I love the episode, Unruhe, even if it breaks the mold a bit. While it does keep a creepy supernatural element with the psychic photography, to me it feels more akin to the psychological horror of the time: the disturbed serial lobotomist, and the thrilling climax, both remind me of Clarice's encounters with Buffalo Bill.
This was also one of Vince Gilligan's early episodes. His previous episode, Pusher, had one of the most emotionally intense scenes in the series, and Unruhe continued this trajectory. This was where Gilligan started writing regularly for the series. It was both a massive addition to the talented pool of writers, and a landmark moment for Gilligan's career that in no small way lead to the eventual creation of Breaking Bad. (Aside: Bryan Cranston, Aaron Paul, Dean Norris, and Raymond Cruz were all in both shows.)
The Sunday time slot took the show to new heights in popular culture. There were far bigger shows -- ER and Seinfeld were juggernauts, like 30m people watching -- but they were for normies. Little else in mainstream popular culture of 1996 was so edgy: on TV, it was sitcoms and (largely) milquetoast family dramas; The Macarena spent over a year in the Billboard Top 100. (This isn't to say that 1996 didn't have other successful, edgy productions: 12 Monkeys, Marilyn Manson, Duke Nukem, heroine...)
Anyways, that shift to Sunday might be why we have a subreddit for The X-Files today. Even though it had weathered three seasons in the Friday night death slot, it's hard to say how much longer it could have lasted, and it almost certainly wouldn't have broken into the mainstream. It's a testament to the show's genius: great writing, novel episodes, a perfect balance of edge and heart, all made it one of the few shows ever to reach escape velocity and moved out of Friday nights.
