Meet the Substi-Stars

By James Poniewozik Sunday, Oct. 29, 2000
    • As FBI agent John Doggett on the X-Files, Robert Patrick has to hunt alien shape shifters who steal people's faces. On some level, he probably knows how they feel. No sooner did series creator Chris Carter announce Patrick as the new lead, after star David Duchovny scaled back his role, than some outraged fans tagged Patrick as a usurping alien himself. The steely-eyed character actor (Terminator 2) knows he lucked out in getting the role, but he has a healthy respect for the X populi. "They're great, enthusiastic fans," he says diplomatically. "I'd like to tell them that this is a great character."

    This you're-not-my-real-dad reaction isn't surprising among contentious sci-fi fans (ask Patrick Stewart and Kate Mulgrew). But The X-Files isn't the only series of a certain age adding a prominent new face and taking a prominent risk. After losing nice guy Michael J. Fox, who's fighting Parkinson's disease, ABC's city-hall sitcom Spin City added bad boy Charlie Sheen. On NBC's Law & Order, Dianne Wiest takes over from Steven Hill, who was the show's savvy, world-weary district attorney for 10 years. Law & Order, driven more by taut crime tales than characters, has gradually jettisoned its original cast and flourished ("This sounds arrogant," says executive producer Arthur Penn, "but we don't worry about it"). And series like NYPD Blue have thrived with past additions. But for every Bobby Simone, there's a cousin Oliver (The Brady Bunch)--a symbol of a show's inhumanely prolonged life.

    On The X-Files, now in its eighth season, the drift had arguably already set in. It was among the most relevant dramas of the 1990s, a sleek buddy-cop variation whose conspiracy motif captured a mood of civic mistrust that ranged from Perotistas to militias. But last year the investigation by Duchovny's Fox Mulder and his partner Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) into a government-and-alien cabal went from teasingly ambiguous to meandering, and the stars seemed restless. "I was done. I wanted to move on," says Anderson, who says this season's changes have energized her. "Everybody was in a rut. How many more f______ [Mulder and Scully] episodes can you write?"

    Carter took the change as an opportunity to shake up the show a bit. After Mulder was abducted by aliens at the end of last season, he decided to write not a pseudo Mulder but a skeptical foil for Scully. And when the hard-boiled Doggett joins the search for Mulder in the premiere (Fox, Nov. 5, 9 p.m. E.T.), Scully receives him as harshly as many X-philes have. "We let the returning characters speak to our own discomfort with the idea of a new guy," says executive producer Frank Spotnitz.

    Patrick, Carter maintains, is not a "replacement" for Duchovny, who will be in 11 of 20 episodes this season--though nobody knows whether the star will re-sign next year. The producer says Doggett will darken the tone of the show, which often played to Duchovny's wry side. "It takes us back to our roots, telling good, scary stories," he says.

    Gary David Goldberg, the creator of Spin City (Wednesdays, 9:30 p.m. E.T.), lived his own scary story with Fox's loss. To replace Fox, he needed a big-enough star to "legitimately stand on his own" without imitating his well-liked predecessor. He picked a departure, all right--Sheen, lately out of rehab and one of Hollywood madam Heidi Fleiss's most infamous customers. "I saw it as an opportunity to get back into the fold," says Sheen. It took eight script drafts to introduce deputy mayor Charlie Crawford, a party boy we first see waking up in bed with a flight attendant, late for a press conference. (In an early scenario, there was a blackout, and when the lights came back on, Sheen was in Fox's place.) The result is a one-joke character, and a predictable one at that. (How predictable? The flight attendant is Swedish.)

    Patrick's debut is stronger--he's a commanding figure, and the premiere gets back to the meat of the show's mythology--but the real test will come when Doggett and Scully work side by side. Of course, neither man can be expected to outdo his precursor, but we're not expecting Olivier. We'll settle for no more Olivers.