Chris Carter

Chris Carter (born October 13, 1956, Bellflower, California, U.S.) is an American writer and producer who was best known for the television series The X-Files (1993–2002, 2016, and 2018) and its related films.

Carter graduated from California State University at Long Beach in 1979 with a degree in journalism and took a job as associate editor for Surfing magazine. During his five years there, Carter tried his hand at screenwriting. A script about three young men going off to Vietnam never made it to the big screen, but it encouraged him to write a second script—this time a comedy. Although that too was a failure, it brought him to the attention of Jeffrey Katzenberg, who was then chairman of Walt Disney Studios. Katzenberg hired him as a writer for The Disney Sunday Movie, and Carter’s interests switched from movies to television.

Carter wrote for several television shows before creating The X-Files science-fiction series, which debuted in 1993 on Fox and soon become an international sensation with a cultlike following. An enigmatic mantra—“The truth is out there”—appeared in the opening credits and was silently implied throughout each episode. The story line followed two FBI agents who investigated paranormal activity and other bizarre phenomena. Fox Mulder (played by David Duchovny) was the believer, haunted by childhood memories of his sister’s abduction by aliens and driven to find what he believed to be the truth. His partner, Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), was a doctor and pathologist whose practical, scientific approach usually led her to play the devil’s advocate and keep Mulder terrestrially grounded. In 1998 a popular film adaptation of the show was released, and a short-lived spin-off series, The Lone Gunmen, aired in 2001. The X-Files ended in 2002, but a second film, The X-Files: I Want to Believe, appeared in 2008. In 2016 Fox aired a six-episode X-Files miniseries, which was considered season 10, and two years later an additional season, featuring 10 episodes, was released.

Carter created several other series, including Millennium (1996–99), in which a member of the mysterious Millennium Group investigated more earthly, yet still frightening, crimes and other weird phenomena supposedly arising as the world approached the new millennium.