Women writers are out there, The X-Files discovers

By Erik Adams | August 8, 2017 | 6:45pm

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The next season of Fox’s X-Files continuation won’t arrive until 2018, but the show’s been making headlines in recent months nonetheless. And not just because Mitch Pileggi’s coming back as Walter Skinner: The Washington Post reported in June that Chris Carter had staffed his season-11 writers’ room entirely with men. The news inspired series star Gillian Anderson to check if she had any fucks in her cupboard; when she got there, the cupboard was bare, and so she took to Twitter to point out the lack of behind-the-scenes gender parity across all 207 extant episodes of The X-Files.

That news and that tweet came up this morning during Fox’s executive session at the Television Critics Association press tour, to which Fox chair and CEO Dana Walden let reporters know that two women have been added to the 11th season’s writing staff. There are also two women in the season’s roster of directors, half of which Walden said—in bit of well-meaning exec lingo that never fails to sound the opposite of the way it’s intended—“will be diverse.”