How TV Shows Like ‘The X-Files’ Trained Us to Be Conspiracy Theorists

“The X-Files,” the alien-invasion conspiracy thriller, had one of TV’s most memorable taglines: “The Truth Is Out There.” It was both a promise and a tease.

Read one way, it’s a slogan of hope: The truth has been hidden from you, but you will find it. Read another way, it’s a taunt: The truth is always out there, a mirage, coming tantalizingly close but then slipping through your fingers, goading you to press further.

This dynamic was, of course, a boon for a TV series that unfolded at length, over hundreds of episodes, movies and revivals. It is also part of the lure of conspiracist thinking in general.

The promise of elusive answers implores you to plunge deeper, deeper, into a thriller of your own, one that you both consume and help construct. It says that the absence of answers is itself a kind of evidence. Proof is proof and so is the lack of proof. All you need to do is follow one more lead, click one more link, chasing your goal like an exotic bird, following its call of truth, truth, truth.

But as stories often do, the television serials that captivated audiences of millions trained us to think a certain way. They taught audiences to invest in baroque mysteries over years. They proved that elaborate, all-explaining, never-quite-solved puzzles are more attractive than mundane answers. They suggested that suspicion is smart and the official story is for suckers. They didn’t create the breakdown of public trust, but they played it all out on TV.

“The X-Files,” like the 1960s cult classic “The Prisoner” and the paranoid movie thrillers of the 1970s, was a product of the 20th century. This was a period of centralization — big government, institutions, media — that consolidated cultural power but bred countercultural suspicion.

Patrick McGoohan, the star and creator of “The Prisoner,” said that his Kafkaesque saga of the internment of a government agent, identified only as “No. 6,” was in part a response to the quashing of individuality by large systems. Chris Carter, the creator of “The X-Files,” cited as inspiration Watergate — which after all involved an actual conspiracy — and the loss of faith in authorities.

“The X-Files” was about a lot of things: aliens and monsters and the tussle between belief and doubt, personified in Special Agents Mulder and Scully. But it was also about a persistent, skeptical theory of power — that laws exist to shield the powerful and not to constrain them. As one character says: “The laws of this country protect them in the name of national security. They know no law.”

The attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, and the subsequent fears over terrorism gave the conspiracy thriller a new twist. In series like “24,” “Sleeper Cell,” “Rubicon” and “Homeland,” the threat might be terrorist moles or sinister forces in the government or a combination of the two. The approach allowed for storytelling that could be both jingoistic and suspicious, and it was an endless source of insane plot twists.

Not only geopolitical and social trends but also the trend toward serialized TV seasons made the conspiracy thriller a more popular and viable genre. In the heyday of broadcast TV, a knotty, shadowy mystery like “Twin Peaks” was a rarity. But cable and later streaming made it more popular to spool out stories from episode to episode, spinning ever more complicated webs.

Now, if you can think of it, there is a conspiracy serial for it. The villains might be politicians (“Zero Day”), cults (“Lost”), scientists (“Orphan Black”), billionaires (“Squid Game”), Big Pharma (“Common Side Effects”), demons (“Evil”), corporations (“Mr. Robot”) — or, as in the first season of “True Detective,” child predators, a category of nemesis that would become politically potent.

Conspiracy stories make the world seem more sinister and opaque but also more sensible. Like religious myths, they offer an explanation for bad things happening. They suggest the existence of a grand plan, even if an evil one. They turn you from a victim of random forces into a rebel against a depraved elite. They suggest that the world’s ills can be sleuthed, gamified and — with enough string and enough bulletin boards — solved.

Around that time, Donald Trump, who has always had an instinct for applying pop culture tropes to politics, made his own crossover from “Apprentice” host to Fox News favorite by adopting the false conspiracy theory that Barack Obama had not been born in the United States. After he became president, he used conspiracy language not simply as an excuse — a stolen election, the machinations of the “deep state” — but as a story to hold and unite an audience.

For a leader, conspiracy theories allow you to hold power yet pose as a challenger to larger powers. For followers, they transform mere political allegiance into participation in a grand story. The QAnon grand mythology — which cast President Trump as a warrior against an elite cabal of pedophiles, and which he amplified — resembled a work of multimedia storytelling, a labyrinth of text drops, video analysis, parsing and close reading.

Now, one of the conspiracist fixations that the president encouraged is blowing back against his own administration. Followers of his own MAGA movement are rebelling over the decision not to release additional files related to the financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

It was — as seen through the narrative held by much of his base for years — as if the serial’s hero had suddenly taken a heel turn. As anyone who has followed a mystery-box TV drama for years knows, the best way to alienate a fan base is to deny it final answers.

The president lashed out in response. He called his upset followers “weaklings.” He cast the investigation as a new counter-conspiracy with him as its victim — the files, in his words, “written” by a consortium of enemies including former President Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. It was as if, on his Truth Social account, he were trying to rewrite the Epstein mythology on the fly, retconning in a new origin story.

But the thing about conspiracy theories is that they absorb their own refutation; telling viewers, “There’s nothing to see here,” only encourages them to break out the magnifying glasses. Mr. Trump is discovering what, as a former TV professional, he should have already known: Once you’re hooked on this kind of thriller, it’s not so easy to just turn it off.