‘The X-Files’ Season 11 Fills Its Writers’ Room With All-Male Staff
“The X-Files” was always a show where the quality depended largely on the writing, so paying attention to who would sign up for the upcoming Season 11 has been a high priority for fans.
And now we know: TV Line is reporting that creator Chris Carter has re-enlisted writers Darin Morgan, Glen Morgan, and James Wong (who all worked on Season 10) for the new season, which is shooting this summer for a early 2018 release.
READ MORE: ‘The X-Files’ Deal Finally Done; Revival Set to Return For Second 10-Episode Season
In addition, three new writers have been selected to help complete the 10 episodes ordered by Fox earlier this year. And the new kids in town are Gabe Rotter, Benjamin Van Allen, and Brad Follmer — the first two were writers’ assistants on Seasons 9 and 10, while Follmer was Carter’s personal assistant during the show’s original run.
That’s right: In the year 2017, a major broadcast drama is going with an all-male writers’ room. It speaks to the power Carter has at Fox — Rotter, Van Allen and Follmer have a total of one previous writing credit amongst the three of them, but they clearly forged a connection with their former boss.
Oh, and one other thing: With seven writers set to write 10 episodes, that means we could see Carter write up to three episodes on his own.
In the lead-up to Season 10, Carter told IndieWire that the reason he stuck with writers he’d worked with during the original series for the revival was the short timeframe and his concern that new writers wouldn’t be able to match the original style of the series.
‘I think it would have been a mistake, because you want to make good on a promise,” he said then. “You don’t want to take a chance. If it didn’t work you’d be sunk because there is no way to recover if someone wrote a script and it didn’t work. The clock is ticking. The clock is always ticking in series television. You don’t have a chance to make a mistake. You have to put it on the page first and you can’t fix it in post, no matter how much you rely on your post-production process. If it’s not there to begin with, it’s very hard to manufacture quality.”
When pushed to name other writers he’d love to see write an episode, his picks were Charlie Kaufman and Aaron Sorkin. Looks like they — or any other woman writer working in Hollywood today — weren’t available.
David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson will star in Season 11 of “The X-Files,” premiering early 2018.
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