The Canceled X-Files Crossover That Nearly Ruined Two Shows

By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 35 seconds ago

The X-Files was never really known for its crossovers, although it had a few: “X-Cops” was a collaboration with the popular Cops TV show, and a fun crossover with Millennium helped this canceled show finish out its doomsday plot. Oh, and a memorable appearance by Detective John Munch means that this show technically crossed over with Homicide: Life on the Street. These episodes were generally a success, though the show nearly had an early crossover that would have been a disaster.

Even though The X-Files was a Fox TV show, there was very nearly a crossover with the quirky CBS show Picket Fences. The networks wouldn’t play nice, so this collaboration quietly died, with the X-Files episode “Red Museum” scrubbing all references to the shared storyline. However, the Picket Fences episode “Away in the Manger” secretly kept some of the references in there, and some fans consider these references enough to place these shows in the same universe.

The Meeting Of The Minds

Where the heck did the idea to crossover The X-Files and Picket Fences come from in the first place? As it turns out, from the showrunners! Chris Carter and David E. Kelley worked for two different networks, but they both produced their shows at 20th Century Fox. They ran into each other in the studio parking lot, and soon enough, they began excitedly plotting an ambitious crossover between the two shows. Soon, Carter had written a script, and Kelley liked it enough to agree to a crossover.

How would this have worked, though? It would have started with an X-Files episode where our erstwhile FBI agents are investigating cows in a tiny Wisconsin town who may or may not have been injected with alien DNA. Next, Mulder would have popped up in a Picket Fences episode where similar things were happening in the show’s familiar town of Rome, Wisconsin. 

Why Did The Crossover Fall Apart?

Plans for this crossover died for the exact reason you’d suspect: money. Back in December 1994, an unnamed Fox source told Entertainment Weekly that the Picket Fences network, CBS, was “unwilling to help another show on another network.” The result is that both TV shows shot their intended episodes, but the X-Files episode “Red Museum” removed all references to Picket Fences, including changing the setting of the episode from Rome, Wisconsin, to the nearby town of Delta Glen. Otherwise, the bizarre, cow-injecting plot remained the same.

However, in an interesting bit of quiet rebellion against CBS, David E. Kelley kept several references to the crossover in his Picket Fences episode. The episode “Away In a Manger” refers to the events that happened in Delta Glen, and someone specifically mentions how the drama over there involved cows, alien DNAs, and a man named Dr. Larsen, who died in the X-Files episode “Red Museum.” The same character saying all of this even mentions that the FBI was investigating what happened, though he never mentions Mulder and Scully directly by name.

The Crossover Died (And That’s A Good Thing)

While I love the idea of Kelley giving CBS the middle finger and keeping these references in, I’m personally glad that the official X-Files/Picket Fences crossover was killed. For one thing, “Red Museum” was part of X-Files’ second season, when the show was still trying to discover its true identity. If the producers opened the door to silly crossovers early on, this could arguably have ruined the show because episodes would start focusing more on gimmicky marketing and less on lore and world-building.

Additionally, a crossover with Picket Fences would likely have contributed to continuity problems while making it difficult to stream this story in the future. As of this writing, Picket Fences is unavailable to stream without buying individual episodes. That means that if this crossover went through and you got invested in it as a fan, you would not have an easy way to stream the complete story and would have to resort to individual episode purchases or tracking down physical media (always good to have).

The Crossover Died So Two Shows Could Live

Finally, while Picket Fences was quirky in its own way, it was also a more comedic show, and one that reveled in offering social commentary. Generally, X-Files was more serious, both in terms of its characters and its conspiracy-loving subject matter. Long story short, I can’t help but think a crossover would have been bad for both shows, hurting Chris Carter’s show in its infancy and possibly killing David E. Kelly’s Emmy-winning show that much quicker.

Now, the crossover that could have been is nothing more than a weird bit of trivia. It might have happened and delighted ‘90s audiences back in the day, but on the subject of internetwork collaboration, CBS executives adopted the wisdom of Fox Mulder. Namely, to trust no one!