The X-Files turns 25: The pilot episode still holds up with "seriously funny" Mulder and Scully

Entertainment Weekly

The X-Files made its groundbreaking debut on Fox on Sept. 10, 1993. After 25 years, "time hasn’t dimmed the best thing about The X-Files," says EW's Darren Franich. "It remains very funny, one of the most darkly humorous procedurals in TV history — and you can strike that 'one of' if we’re not counting anything British." In The X-Files pilot, he says, "Mulder and Scully look like they’re having a blast. Drenched in rain, surrounded by empty graves, ranting about aliens summoning comatose man-children into a murder forest, they both start laughing. You have to be some kind of stupid brave to laugh at madness this bleak. Twenty-five years later, TV investigators have trended utterly dour or painfully silly. Mulder and Scully are serious, and funny, and seriously funny. There are jokes about corpses: This was Fox, man, god this was Fox." Franich adds that Gillian Anderson and David Duchovny "are perfect costars from millisecond one. They’re clearly established as opposites, just as clearly established as allies, two totally different smart people who are skeptical in very specific ways. Mulder doesn’t believe anyone because he thinks everyone is lying. Scully is more meticulous: She waits for people to lie before she distrusts them."

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