Visible Fandom: Reading the X-Files through X-Philes

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Early in the spring of 1999, a friend of mine e-mailed me about her increasingly fan-like interest in "Sports Night," ABC's now defunct half-hour comedy/drama created by Aaron Sorkin. Noting her subsequent combing of the web for information on the series, she wrote: "I'm stopping. I'm still going to love the show and I'm going to read anything I see in magazines, etc., but I am not searching the web anymore. It makes me feel like there is actually a relationship between me and the show." Thinking of my own experience with The X-Files, I posed the following question, both as a joke at my expense and a serious response to her brush with media fandom: "Do you mean there 'isn't' a …