

It was a long moment, but then The X-Files was a long series. Still, The X-Files captures so much of the moment on film. There are any number of television shows that could credibly be said to speak to the nineties as a decade, from Twin Peaks to Friends. The Simpsons is still going, decades after the nineties came to a sudden and traumatic end. was a much larger commercial success while Homicide: Life on the Street has enjoyed a longer-lasting critical reputation. Certainly, it was not the most successful show E.R. It is not the only show that could be said to speak to the nineties as a decade. Other television shows overlap and extend beyond, beautifully summarising a particular moment in the cultural psyche. 24 speaks to the early years of the War on Terror, with its betrayed confusion and brutal paranoia conveying some of the national mood. Miami Vice beautifully evokes the Reagan years, both in its subject matter and in its general tone of pastel disillusionment. Sometimes a television show can perfectly capture the spirit of its era. Photographs become moments captured in ember, preserved for all eternity. Sometimes it is possible to look at a still image and to seem so much more than is captured in the film stock or on the digital memory card. Sometimes a photograph perfectly captures the spirit of the moment, whether something deeply personal buried in a family album or headline picture sitting above the fold on a national newspaper. It is possible to capture a moment – or the spirit of the moment – in a single frame. Either that, or the Fox network has an amazing marketing department.
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Couple that with a cynical, jaded, dispossessed feeling of having been lied to by the government, and you’ve got a pretty powerful combination for a TV show. I think it has to do with religious stirrings-a sort of New Age yearning for an alternate reality and the search for some kind of extrasensory god. … Obviously it’s tapping in to something the nation wants. I think The X-Files is very nineties, because everything is left in doubt.
