Hulu has ordered Ryan Coogler’s “The X-Files” to series. That turns something Chris Carter mentioned on a podcast in 2023 into an actual show. The streamer announced the pickup on Tuesday, October 13th, after ordering a pilot back in February. Danielle Deadwyler and Himesh Patel star in the reimagining as “two highly decorated but vastly different FBI agents who form an unlikely bond when they are assigned to a long-shuttered division devoted to cases involving unexplained phenomena.” That logline is still the only story Hulu has shared. Coogler wrote and directed the pilot and stays on as an executive producer. The day-to-day work belongs to showrunner Jennifer Yale, who has held the job since the pilot order. She co-ran Peacock’s “The Copenhagen Test” and wrote and produced Apple TV’s “See.” Peacock canceled “The Copenhagen Test,” an espionage thriller starring Simu Liu, after a single season in April.
Carter created the original, and he is an executive producer on this one. In that 2023 podcast interview he said Coogler was “going to remount The X Files with a diverse cast,” and added, “He’s got his work cut out for him because we covered so much territory.” Coogler’s Proximity Media partners Zinzi Coogler and Sev Ohanian are executive producers too. Proximity makes the show with Onyx Collective and 20th Television. Deadwyler and Patel are co-executive producers alongside Proximity’s Simone Harris. The leads have a seat at the table. Warning beyond this point there are spoilers for the original “The X-Files” and its 2016 and 2018 revival seasons.
Hulu has ordered Ryan Coogler’s “The X-Files” to series. That turns something Chris Carter mentioned on a podcast in 2023 into an actual show.”
Coogler’s statement leans on the original without promising to copy it. “What Chris Carter created is special, and we wanted to honor everything that made the original series connect with so many people while also finding our own way into that world,” he said. The line worth reading twice is about the leads. “Danielle and Himesh, along with the rest of our cast, have brought such original perspectives and performances to these characters, and watching that come together has been one of the most rewarding parts of the experience.” Those characters are not Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson). A source told Variety that Deadwyler and Patel play new characters rather than new versions of the old pair. The announcement does not name either agent. Carter’s series premiered on Fox in 1993 and ran nine seasons. Two films followed in 1998 and 2008, and Fox revived it in 2016 and 2018.
That makes one phrase in the logline more interesting than the rest of it. A “long-shuttered division” is an odd way to describe the X-Files if this is a clean reboot. In the original canon the unit did not stay closed. The 2016 revival reinstated Mulder and Scully at the FBI and reopened the X-Files. Screen Rant argued the new description “does seemingly point to it being a sequel or continuation of some kind” of Carter’s show. Both readings can hold at once. Two new agents inheriting a unit that went dark after the revival would honor the old show without needing its stars. That is the version that best fits everything announced so far. Anderson has been talking up the new show. Deadline quoted her at Awesome Con in March: “It’s something different. It’s different, and it’s special, so give it a break.”
Patel joined in March, a month after Deadwyler signed on with the pilot order. The two leads already share a credit. Both were in HBO Max’s “Station Eleven,” and Patel earned an Emmy nomination for it. Deadwyler is best known for “Till” and “The Piano Lesson.” Patel is known for “Yesterday” and Christopher Nolan’s “The Odyssey.” In July Patel told the “Happy Sad Confused” podcast that the pilot had been shot, The Playlist reported. “We shot the pilot,” he said. “It was very special. That’s all I’ll say.” He also described a board in the production office. “Ryan had everyone take a Polaroid of themselves, and then there was believer or skeptic on the wall,” he said. Patel filed himself under believer with a caveat. He called himself “a believer maybe like one time out of 10.” That is about the right ratio for anyone working a case file. He came to the franchise late, too. On the same podcast he said he was about three years old when the original started, so he grew up on his mother’s secondhand stories about it rather than the episodes themselves.
The pilot’s guest list is stacked for a show with no premiere date. Oscar winner Amy Madigan of “Weapons” joined in May. So did Steve Buscemi, Ben Foster, Devery Jacobs, Tantoo Cardinal, Lochlyn Munro and Sofia Grace Clifton, among others. Their roles are still under wraps. Deadline reported that the pilot was cast by Francine Maisler, the casting director behind “Sinners.” That is a lot of familiar faces for a single episode. The music has a Proximity pedigree too. In a joint statement the Proximity founders said it was “incredibly special to have our fellow Proximity co-founder Ludwig Göransson contribute the score for the pilot,” calling it “a true collaboration across the Proximity family.” Coogler arrives fresh off “Sinners,” which set an Oscar record with 16 nominations and won him the award for original screenplay.
The business side makes this more than a routine pickup. “The X-Files” came out of Coogler’s five-year exclusive television deal with Disney, which owns Hulu, 20th Television and Onyx. In June, Proximity signed a TV overall deal with Netflix to develop series for the streamer, a multi-year exclusive pact according to Variety. Deadline reported at the time that Coogler was leaving two projects behind at Disney, this reboot and “Southern Bastards.” The Netflix deal does not take him off this one, either, since Deadline also reported that he will keep working on the series. So Hulu just ordered a full season from a filmmaker whose TV company now develops series for a rival. That is a real vote of confidence in one pilot episode.
The odds were never guaranteed. Deadline noted in February that Hulu has moved to a largely pilot-first model. That same month its “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” reboot was making a pilot with Chloé Zhao directing. According to The A.V. Club, Hulu passed on that one a few months ago. “The X-Files” made it through the same gate. There is still no premiere date and no episode count. The rest of the season still has to be shot. The case is open, but the calendar is still blank.
What Do You Think? Does “long-shuttered division” read like a continuation of Carter’s canon to you, or just a tidy way to restart the clock? With Coogler’s TV company now based at Netflix, how much of this season do you expect him to shape beyond the pilot? And should Mulder and Scully stay out of it entirely, or is one Gillian Anderson cameo worth the risk of making the new agents look like substitutes?
Catch up properly: every X-Files episode, movie and revival season in chronological order on our Timeline Hub’s X-Files timeline.
See you on the next binge!
