Directed by Michael Watkins and written by Vince Gilligan, the installment serves as a "Monster-of-the-Week" story—a stand-alone plot unconnected to the overarching mythology of The X-Files.

Originally aired in the United States by the Fox network on February 20, 2000, "X-Cops" received a Nielsen rating of 9.7 and was seen by 16.56 million viewers.

Mulder is a believer in the paranormal; the skeptical Scully was initially assigned to debunk his work, but the two have developed a deep friendship.

The idea was met with a mixed reception, but Gilligan was eventually given the green light to produce the episode because the series was nearing its end with the conclusion of the seventh season.

The episode begins with the Cops theme song before cutting to Keith Wetzel (Judson Mills), a deputy with the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department.

But the police soon realize that Mulder and Scully are FBI agents investigating an alleged werewolf that killed a man during the last full moon.

Though other deputies express skepticism, an officer finds flattened bullets; indicating they physically impacted something, though no trace is found of what they struck.

"X-Cops" was inspired by the Fox television program Cops, which Vince Gilligan (the writer of this episode) describes as a "great slice of Americana.

"[4] Gilligan first pitched the idea during the show's fourth season to the X-Files writing staff and series creator Chris Carter,[5] the latter of whom was concerned that the concept was too "goofy".

[6] Fellow writer and producer Frank Spotnitz concurred, although he was more uncomfortable with Gilligan's idea of using videotape instead of film; the show's production crew liked to use film to create "effective scares",[4] and Spotnitz worried that shooting exclusively on videotape would be too challenging as the series would be unable to cut and edit the final product.

[7] Similarly, Carter felt that the show had nearly run its course,[8] and seeing the potential in Gilligan's idea, he decided to green-light the episode.

Almost three years before, he had developed a script that would have taken the form of an Unsolved Mysteries episode, with unknown actors playing Mulder and Scully and Robert Stack appearing in his role as narrator.

[9] Gilligan reasoned that, because Mulder and Scully would appear on a nationally syndicated television series, the episode's main monster could not be shown, only "hinted at".

[5] Gilligan and the writing staff applied methods previously used in the psychological horror film The Blair Witch Project (1999) to show as little of the monster as possible while still making the episode scary.

Casting director Rick Milikan later explained that the group needed "actors who could pull off the believability in just normal off-the-cuff conversation of cops on the job.

[10] Actor Judson Mills later explained that, because there were few cameramen and owing to the manner in which the episode was filmed, "people just behaved as if we were [real] cops.

He also brought in Bertram van Munster, a cameraman for Cops, to shoot scenes to give the finished product an authentic feel.

During rehearsals, Watkins kept the cameras away from the set, so that when videotaping commenced, the cameramen's unfamiliarity would create the "unscripted" feel of a documentary.

Initially, the actors struggled with the new cinéma vérité style of the episode, and several takes were needed for scenes during the first few days, but these problems receded as taping progressed.

"[5] Anderson called the performance "fun" to shoot, and highlighted "Scully getting pissed off at the camera crew" as her favorite part to play.

For the opening shot, a "surreptitious cut" helped to replace actor Judson Mills with a stunt person when the cop car is overturned by the monster.

[13] According to Jeremy Butler's book Television Style, the episode, along with many other found footage-type movies and shows, helps to suggest that what is being promoted as "live TV", is actually a series of events that have already unfolded in the past.

[15] This sense of realism is further heightened by the near lack of music in the episode; aside from the title theme, Mark Snow's soundtrack is not to be heard.

All of the witnesses to the monster function as unreliable narrators: a Hispanic woman with "a history of medications"; a black, homosexual "Drama Queen"; a prostitute with a drug problem; a "terrified morgue attendant", and Deputy Wetzel.

[21] Rich Rosell from Digitally Obsessed awarded the episode 5 out of 5 stars and wrote that "some might view it as a stunt, but having Mulder and Scully be part of a spot-on Cops!

Watching the agents and police repeatedly run through the darkened streets of Los Angeles after an unseen—and uninteresting—foe evokes merely a sense of futility.

Robert Shearman, in his book Wanting to Believe: A Critical Guide to The X-Files, Millennium & The Lone Gunmen, rated the episode four stars out of five.

[24] Describing the episode as "funny", "clever", and "actually quite frightening", Shearman wrote positively of the faux documentary style, likening it to The Blair Witch Project.