Television is incestuous. Every prestige drama is a sitcom’s bastard child, every reality show has a soap opera godparent, and sometimes a cartoon rabbit is secretly raising your favourite feminist antihero. TV doesn’t evolve in straight lines — it cannibalises itself, mutates, and dresses the same archetypes in new costumes. That’s where Unhinged TV Family Trees comes in.

Everyone remembers Mulder and Scully as TV’s ultimate “will they/won’t they.” But the blueprint came years earlier, when Bruce Willis and Cybill Shepherd turned bickering into foreplay on Moonlighting. Mulder and Scully just swapped the neon for trench coats.

Moonlighting walked so The X-Files could brood.

Moonlighting thrived on banter: rapid-fire dialogue, sexual tension as punchline, romance disguised as resentment. It was screwball comedy with a private investigator license, the kind of show that ran on energy rather than logic.

Every argument was a love confession in denial. Every eye roll was foreplay. Maddie and David were two people who hated that they couldn’t stop orbiting each other, the gravitational pull of shared irritation.

The X-Files slowed it down but kept the charge. Mulder and Scully didn’t spar; they simmered. The cadence shifted from manic to meditative, pauses replacing punchlines, glances doing the work of dialogue.

Every Mulder and Scully exchange is a remix of David and Maddie’s repartee, just with more autopsy reports. Where Moonlighting winked, The X-Files stared, same electricity, different voltage.

Both shows are case-of-the-week. Moonlighting: quirky mysteries, small-time scams, the occasional meta episode that broke the fourth wall. The X-Files: alien abductions, cryptids, small-town horror with government overtones.

On paper, they’re worlds apart. In practice, they use the exact same scaffolding: plot as pretext. The formula was never the point; the chemistry was. The case just gave them a reason to be in the same room.

Week after week, audiences tuned in not for the mystery, but for the ritual: two partners thrown into chaos, solving crimes while making longing look like procedure.

Both shows knew that sexual tension was the most reliable kind of serialization.

For queer audiences, the allure wasn’t just the romance; it was the performance of intimacy through banter. The attraction wasn’t physical, it was textual.

We learned that desire could be intellectual, verbal, and unspoken. You could want someone through language alone. You could fall in love with the rhythm of conversation.

Moonlighting smuggled that queerness into comedy, verbal fencing as affection. The X-Files translated it into sci-fi, where repressed connection could live inside metaphors about trust, faith, and the unknown.

The more Mulder and Scully talked around their feelings, the more it felt like something forbidden. The same was true of David and Maddie; they weaponised avoidance. They were two halves of the same archetype, lovers who can’t confess because the story depends on repression.

Which, to be honest, is as queer as television gets.

So yes, Moonlighting gave us smirks and slapstick, The X-Files gave us monsters and conspiracies. But both shows are built on the same thing: banter as foreplay, partnership as performance.

David and Maddie fought over private eyes and office politics; Mulder and Scully fought over alien life and government lies. But in both, the tension was existential, not will they kiss, but can two people understand each other in a world that keeps pulling them apart?

It’s the same dynamic, repackaged for different decades: the impossible relationship built on shared obsession. One handled it with champagne and pratfalls, the other with flashlights and trauma.

Without Moonlighting, we don’t get The X-Files. Without The X-Files, we don’t get Bones, Castle, or any of the procedurals where “professional tension” doubles as courtship. Every new duo dynamic owes a debt to David and Maddie; they wrote the emotional blueprint for solving crimes instead of feelings.

The DNA is still alive in television today: the fast-talking skeptic, the emotionally guarded believer, the unspoken promise that they could be together if only the plot would let them.

Same spark, new monsters. Different network, same ache.