The X-Files (1993)

California native Chris Carter, who had previously met with limited success writing for television, was given the opportunity to produce new shows for the struggling FOX network in the early 1990s. Tired of the comedies he had been working on, inspired by a report that 3.7 million Americans may have been abducted by aliens, and recalling memories of Watergate and 1970s horror show Kolchak: The Night Stalker, Carter came up with the idea for The X-Files and wrote the pilot episode himself in 1992. He initially struggled over the untested concept—executives wanted a love interest for Scully—and casting. The network wanted either a more established or a "taller, leggier, blonder and breastier" actress for Scully than the 24-year-old Gillian Anderson, a theater veteran with minor film experience, who Carter felt was the only choice after auditions. Nevertheless, the pilot with both Anderson and David Duchovny was successfully shot in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada in early 1993, and the show was picked up for the Friday night 9:00PM slot on the American fall TV schedule. Carter started a new company called Ten Thirteen Productions, named after his October 13th birthday, to oversee The X-Files.

Carter's idea was to present FBI agents investigating extraterrestrials and paranormal events, but Carter also wanted to deal directly with the characters' beliefs. Carter said, "I think of myself as a non-religious person looking for religious experience, so I think that's what the characters are sort of doing too." Dana Scully, in addition to being the scientific "skeptic" and a trained medical doctor, was open to the Catholic faith in which she was raised; while Fox Mulder, in addition to being an Oxford-educated psychologist and renowned criminal profiler, was the "believer" in space aliens, derisively nicknamed "Spooky Mulder" by his colleagues. Carter said, "Scully's point of view is the point of view of the show. And so the show has to be built on a solid foundation of science, in order to have Mulder take a flight from it... If the science is really good, Scully's got a valid point of view... And Mulder has to then convince her that she's got to throw her arguments out, she's got to accept the unacceptable. And there is the conflict." Carter also felt Scully's role as the more rational partner and Mulder's reliance on guesses and intuition subverted the gender roles usually seen on television.

In the pilot episode, Scully is assigned to the X-Files as Mulder's partner, in order to serve as a scientific check on Mulder's belief in the paranormal. In later episodes, it becomes apparent that she was actually set up in that role so that the government conspirators could contain the implications of Mulder's work, which they viewed as a danger to their devious plans. Notably, the powerful shadow government official known only as the Cigarette Smoking Man, or "Cancer Man", appears without any spoken lines in the first and last scenes of the pilot episode—although at that point his ongoing importance to the series had not yet been established. The "unresolved sexual tension" between Mulder and Scully was also a central underlying theme from the beginning, although they were each given other brief romantic interests in future episodes. Carter thought the show should be "plot-driven", and was quoted as saying, "I didn't want the relationship to come before the cases." For example, throughout the series, Mulder and Scully, with rare exception, refer to each other in a professional manner by using each others' last names, rather than calling each other by their first names, which might seem more personal.