Things I've Noticed: Sometimes watching The X-Files takes some explaining

For the last couple of years my wife and I have been re-watching The X-Files with our youngest daughter, who is working her way through the series for her first time.  The show is both a lot of fun due to the surprise cameos made by all sorts of people before they were famous, and for the storylines themselves.

When watching the series with our teen daughter (born in 1997), we've tried our best to explain to our daughter just how big a show this was in its day.

Today we checked out the season seven episode X-Cops, which crossed over with the hugely popular reality show COPS - which took a little bit of describing as well - following beat cops around through the events of a tour, blurred out bystanders and suspects, and the regular interaction with the cameraman filming.

It's kind of tricky, for an episode which only takes 45 minutes to watch, we end up spending about fifteen giving our daughter backstory and context for what she is seeing.  At the same time, she seems to be tolerating all this, and is probably much more knowledgable about late '90s pop culture than a lot of her high school-aged friends.