Neo-Cult and the Altered Audience: Reviving Cult TV for the Post-TV Age

Abstract

From The X-Files to Friends, Gilmore Girls to Twin Peaks, revivals of beloved TV series have dominated the airwaves and streaming services over the last decade. The media landscape has changed significantly since these series’ original airings, however, and webisodes, video games, social media hashtags and fan communities exist alongside—and act upon—the “original” text. By focusing on The X-Files and Twin Peaks revivals this chapter theorizes the return of cult television series as neo-cult. I use the concept of the dialogic to argue that if cult is defined dialogically between text, audience, industry, the media and the academy, neo-cult emerges through discourse recalling the series’ earlier iterations as cult being reflected and amplified, thus resulting in the revived text becoming a self-referential cult text or neo-cult.