While Hulu is soon set to reboot The X-Files, another unrelated upcoming show with a similar premise is also coming for the crown of the ’90s hit. Although the classic ABC murder mystery Twin Peaks gets a lot of credit for inspiring small-town mystery shows that run the tonal gamut from Desperate Housewives to Gravity Falls, David Lynch and Mark Frost’s seminal series doesn’t always get credited with another major innovation.
Nowadays, everything from True Detective to DC’s Lanterns has made the idea of a cop show with supernatural plot elements feel quotidian. However, before Grimm, Lucifer, The Outsider, Evil, Supernatural, and even Buffy the Vampire Slayer all borrowed elements of traditional police procedurals and mixed them with horror tropes, the ’90s hit The X-Files pioneered this twist on the detective drama. This Fox series was heavily influenced by Twin Peaks.
The biggest innovation of The X-Files was the decision to drop the season-long serialized storytelling of Twin Peaks in favor of the Fox show’s iconic monster-of-the-week approach. Gillian Anderson’s skeptical Agent Scully and David Duchovny’s earnest, paranoid Agent Mulder investigated new paranormal phenomena every week, meaning viewers had to continually check in to see the show’s latest inventive villain. While Hulu’s upcoming The X-Files reboot will bring back this storytelling style, the rival podcast adaptation The Black Tapes will go head-to-head with the series.
The Black Tapes Is Going Head-To-Head With Hulu’s X-Files Reboot
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Based on the popular horror podcast of the same name from 2015, The Black Tapes will be an eight-episode production from MGM+. The show is set to star Game of Thrones‘s Nikolaj Coster-Waldau as Dr. Richard Strand, a psychiatrist who works alongside the obsessive researcher Alex Regan to debunk the paranormal phenomena supposedly documented by the titular tapes. Of course, this being a horror story, not all the contents of the Black Tapes are so easily debunked.
With more than 60 million downloads since its launch according to Deadline, The Black Tapes is an ideal candidate for an adaptation. While many shows from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and beyond have tried to replicate the appeal of The X-Files since the show’s original nine-season run ended in 2002, The Black Tapes has a unique advantage in this regard.
The Black Tapes is based on a far less famous, and far less contentious, intellectual property than Hulu’s reboot of The X-Files, which arrives burdened with the weight of over three decades of audience expectations on its shoulders. Not only was The X-Files a massive hit throughout its original run, but the show also spawned the 2008 spinoff movie The X-Files: I Want to Believe and 2016’s two-season revival, which brought back Duchovny and Anderson.
The Black Tapes Has A Major Advantage Over The X-Files
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Although The X-Files: I Want to Believe was well-liked by fans and earned solid reviews, the 2016 revival of The X-Files was a profound letdown for fans of the original series. Critics dubbed the comeback a major disappointment and there was widespread relief online when Hulu’s new version of The X-Files was revealed to be a wholesale reboot that would star franchise newcomers Himesh Patel and Danielle Deadwyler instead of the original show’s actors.
However, even though Hulu’s reboot is making a fresh break and has the talents of Sinners director Ryan Coogler on its side, The X-Files still has an uphill battle to fight in terms of living up to the original show. In contrast, The Black Tapes is the first screen adaptation of the famous podcast, so the show isn’t as heavily hyped.
The Black Tapes may well fail to outdo The X-Files when the reboot arrives, especially when the pilot of Hulu’s reboot alone has already announced a string of notable guest stars including Steve Buscemi and Amy Madigan. However, there is also a chance that The Black Tapes will benefit from avoiding the historical comparisons that already plague Hulu’s take on The X-Files.
The X-Files
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