The new X-Files will premiere in January and other news from Fox's 2016 television slate

Fox Television has picked up shows based on Minority Report and The Sandman, as well as horror/comedy series Scream Queens, and announced that The X-Files will return on Sunday, Jan. 24, 2016.

The revival of the seminal science fiction procedural will have a regular time slot of 8 p.m. on Monday night, but will debut at 10 p.m. after the NFC Championship Game. The second of the six episodes will follow the next day at 8 p.m. Fox TV CEO Dana Walden explained the premiere timing:

"We've got a lot going on in midseason on our schedule and it felt like the best way to capitalize on all of the opportunities was to give The X-Files, something that's so highly anticipated, that fans have been literally clamoring for for a decade, giving it the best, maximum expose in that post-NFC game time period and then starting the next day with the first of the next five episodes. So it'll air Sunday night and then Monday night and then for the next five weeks, which will give us a great opportunity to platform our new show Lucifer on Monday night."

Lucifer, starring Merlin's Tom Ellis, is based on characters from Neil Gaiman's The Sandman, and you can probably guess which one. One of subplots of Gaiman's 1989 Vertigo Comics series involved Lucifer abandoning his rule of Hell, having gotten fed up with playing into god's ineffable plan for millennia by punishing sinners. In comics, Old Scratch moved to Los Angeles and opened a piano bar, in television, according to Fox's press release, he "takes refuge in Los Angeles, where he uses his gift of persuasion to punish bad guys. But the longer he's away from the underworld, the greater the threat that the worst of humanity could escape."

But The X-Files and Sandman aren't the only blasts from the past showing up on Fox. The network picked up a cop show based on Steven Spielberg's Minority Report, starring Stark Sands and Meagan Good. Also on the docket: Scream Queens, from the creators of Glee, a series playing fast and free with all the tropes of Final Girl horror flicks. With a cast that includes horror veterans Jamie Lee Curtis and Emma Roberts, a sorority house races to figure out who is responsible for the rash of murders on their campus.