Six-episode series will begin production in the summer, with David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson back as Mulder and Scully

The X-Files is set to return to television screens for the first time in 13 years, with David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson resuming their roles as Mulder and Scully.

The US broadcaster Fox has confirmed that a six-episode series will begin production in the summer. The broadcast date has yet to be revealed.

The series creator Chris Carter described the show’s absence as “a 13-year commercial break” and added: “The good news is the world has only gotten that much stranger, a perfect time to tell these six stories.”

The six-episode run is shorter than most US TV series, and Fox described the X-Files return as an “event”. Dana Walden and Gary Newman, chair and CEO of Fox Television Group, said: “We had the privilege of working with Chris on all nine seasons of The X-Files – one of the most rewarding creative experiences of our careers – and we couldn’t be more excited to explore that incredible world with him again.

“The X-Files was not only a seminal show for both the studio and the network, it was a worldwide phenomenon that shaped pop culture – yet remained a true gem for the legions of fans who embraced it from the beginning. Few shows on television have drawn such dedicated fans as The X-Files, and we’re ecstatic to give them the next thrilling chapter of Mulder and Scully they’ve been waiting for.”

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The original series was cancelled in 2002, although Duchovny and Anderson returned for a feature film, X-Files: I want to Believe, in 2008. Rumours of the show’s return have swirled around the internet for years, and in 2013 Anderson and Duchovny generated much excitement when they hinted during an online discussion that another X-Files film might be in the works.

Such was the on-screen chemistry between FBI investigators Fox Mulder and Dana Scully in their quest to explain the unexplained that Anderson and Duchovny themselves became a story – according to the press at various times during the height of the show’s popularity, they were having an affair, hated each other or both.

This year Anderson told the Guardian’s Simon Hattenstone: “I mean, yes, there were definitely periods when we hated each other … Hate is too strong a word. We didn’t talk for long periods of time. It was intense, and we were both pains in the arse for the other at various times.”

Since the last X-Files series, Anderson has starred in a string of literary adaptations – as Lady Dedlock in Bleak House, Lily Bart in The House of Mirth, Miss Havisham in the BBC’s Great Expectations, and Mrs Castaway in The Crimson Petal and The White – and more recently she played Supt Stella Gibson in murder drama The Fall, which has been recommissioned for a third series set to air next year.

Anderson also received warm reviews for her performance as Blanche in a feted Young Vic revival of Tennessee Williams’s A Streetcar Named Desire.

Duchovny found further success in the US with Californication, which finished a seven-season run last year. This year he published his debut novel, Holy Cow, in which a cow called Elsie, a pig called Shalom and a turkey called Tom escape a farm in upstate New York in search of a better life.