The 1990s were supposed to be a decade when Americans could sit back, relax, and enjoy the end of history. With ideological contestation and superpower rivalry now finally over, it was time for some lighthearted diversion. Some of the biggest TV programs of the era, from Friends to Frasier, were basically “shows about nothing,” as Seinfeld, the most popular series of them all, was famously described.

The X-Files, on the other hand, was definitely about something. From start to finish, it had an urgent message to impart, even if the nature of that message became increasingly garbled along the way. The show conjured up a terrifying world of government conspiracies, with a scheme for alien colonization of Earth that involved shadowy cabals of high-ranking bureaucrats and businessmen.

And it was massively popular. By its fifth season, The X-Files was attracting an average of twenty million viewers per episode. Did they all see it as escapist fun, or was there something deeper going on? Nearly thirty years after the show first aired, the paranoiac sensibility of The X-Files certainly appears more representative of mass opinion than the benign vacuity of Friends.