This October/November, we’re taking a trip back in time to review the eighth season of The X-Files and the first (and only) season of The Lone Gunmen.
The Lone Gunmen seemed destined to be an oddity.
When it arrived in March 2001, it must have felt like a throwback. The production team had consciously modelled the series on the classic episodic spy and adventure shows of the sixties, seventies and eighties. Mission: Impossible and The A-Team served as cultural touchstones, with both The Pilot and Eine Kleine Frohike making visual references to Brian dePalma’s cinematic adaptation of Mission: Impossible while Maximum Byers featured an extended discussion of the pros and cons of Pros and Cons, an early first season episode of The A-Team.
In terms of structure and tone, The Lone Gunmen seemed to hark back to the golden age of two-knuckled action adventure television shows like The Man From U.N.C.L.E. or MacGyver. Threads rarely carried over from episode to episode. Only one actor who didn’t appear in the opening credits would appear in more than a single episode of the show. There was no hint of a “mythology” and no clear structure from week-to-week beyond “the Lone Gunmen get into wacky adventures and hijinks ensue.”
In many ways, The Lone Gunmen was the kind of show that had quietly shuffled off the air in the early nineties. It felt like it belonged to a generation of television predating The X-Files rather than succeeding it. Even the opening credits to the show were much less abstract and much more traditional than those of The X-Files, playing as something of a highlight reel of the early first season. There is something very aggressively old-school about the aesthetic of The Lone Gunmen.
The Lone Gunmen would have seemed somewhat outdated had it aired before Homicide: Life on the Streets during the late nineties; it was doubly out of place in the emerging era of reality television. However, there are elements of The Lone Gunmen that feel like they might have played better had the show arrived a few years later. Byers, Langly and Frohike were too eccentric to anchor an hour-long show on a major network, as Fox had already become. They might have fared better on another network after the cable television explosion.
It is easy enough to imagine The Lone Gunmen as an oddity airing on a smaller cable network like HBO or Showtime or AMC. Indeed, the perfect pitch for The Lone Gunmen would seem to land somewhere between Bored to Death and The X-Files. The audience for The Lone Gunmen might have been small in terms of major television networks, but it was devoted. Smaller providers – even on-line providers like Amazon or Netflix – would love to court that sort of fanbase. Had The Lone Gunmen arrived a few years later, it may have had a chance.
As such, The Lone Gunmen feels like a television show out of time. It is a series that landed at the wrong moment on the wrong channel, and which likely never had a chance. The animators on King of the Hill were incorporating jokes about the inevitable cancellation of The Lone Gunmen before the episode even aired. The viewing figures were far from spectacular, but they were better than the shows that had aired in the same slot in the season prior and the season following. March 2001 was just not the right moment for The Lone Gunmen.
Then again, it feels appropriate that The Lone Gunmen should so perfectly mirror its central character. Heroic, endearing, charming, but also undeniably odd.
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Filed under: The Lone Gunmen | Tagged: Byers, chris carter, Fox, Frohike, Langly, Television, the lone gunmen, the x-files | 3 Comments »
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