Millennium: Season One
Spoiler alert! The world didn’t end at midnight on January 1st, 2000. Sorry.
Nine years later and I'm still waiting.
I spent most of December 31st, 1999 sitting in my room listening to Quartet for the End of Time with the lights turned off, pondering exactly how all existence would cease at the stroke of twelve. Around ten o’clock my friends convinced me to go out to some New Year’s party, arguing that the apocalypse would be better experienced communally. We were all gonna die together anyway, so why not hear each others’ screams as the heavens split in twain?
Then the ball dropped. Dick Clark’s face was not melted off by a hydrogen bomb. I was fucking pissed.
A little over three years earlier, FOX premiered a greatly hyped, highly anticipated show called Millennium. It featured much of the same creative team as The X-Files (most notably executive producer Chris Carter), but promised to be a darker, grittier show. (Its tagline was “his curse is your salvation.” Way cooler than “the truth is out there,” right?) Millennium almost was the crazy, terrifying super X-Files it aspired to be, but (just like the real millennium) it came up short in the end.
The show followed retired FBI profiler Frank Black (Lance Henriksen, not the dude from the Pixies) as he hunted down serial killers, cultists and terrorists whose crimes seemed to portend a coming millennial apocalypse. Millennium aired during the notoriously difficult Friday night spot and suffered on the ratings front from early on. The show’s creative team tried damn near everything to get people to watch (often with disastrous results), but I think most of the series’ ills can simply be traced to how the show began. Observe this real, unaltered frame from the title sequence:
Like, WTF? It’s Friday night. You have the option of sitting at home alone to watch a serial killer show or going to your local roller rink for some make-out action. I’m no TV genius, but putting the words “who cares” in there was probably not the best idea. However, if somehow you resisted the urge to lace up your skates, you would often be treated to a pretty rad show.
The show's filled with shit like this.
The pilot episode, about a prophecy-obsessed killer who passes judgment on prostitutes, strippers and other sinners, remains one of the scariest, coolest things ever shown on TV. The grimy shots of a seedy, decaying city framed by perpetually rainy exteriors was television for kids raised on Doom, Se7en and Nine Inch Nails. In it, Frank combines a preternatural profiling ability (he can “see what the killer sees,” though he asserts that he’s not psychic) with old fashioned detective work and a deep knowledge of prophetic hokum to find the killer. There’s a surprising amount of action and a healthy serving of blood and gore. It rocks. But with a tighter budget and faster shooting schedule the series had difficulty sustaining what the pilot had established. Many episodes struggle to find their voice.
Some of Millennium‘s problems come from the ways it tried to set itself apart from The X-Files. For one thing, there were no funny episodes (in the first season at least), but more dangerously, they gave the main character a life.
Oh wait, that's Roy Scheider.
While all we know about Agent Mulder revolves around porno, Frank Black is a family man with a wife and child. He even has real, non-phone-sex-related friends. Friend and family time in Millennium is usually a drag though, and Frank’s conversations with his amazingly supportive wife seem like bland filler compared to Mulder and Scully’s semi-flirty argue-fests. Frank’s wife was even given her own episode, an emo mope-athon about child molestation that’s easily the worst thing in the first season.
There are still plenty of episodes that managed to translate The X-Files’ monster-of-the-week formula into a non-supernatural killer-of-the-week show. My favorite is “Broken World,” where Frank teams up with a plucky female veterinarian (who just happens to be a redhead…) to stop a slaughterhouse worker who’s switched from killing horses to people. Unfortunately, instead of cranking out more episodes like this one, by season’s end the show switched to supernatural storylines and heavy handed, make-it-up-as-you-go-along mythologies. Millennium was doomed to the same fate as X-Files.
That's him, right? Okay good.
More and more supernatural eschatological bullshit crept into Millennium until the show was unceremoniously dumped at the end of its third season. The ersatz series finale can be found jammed into a boring, late season X-Files about New Year’s Eve, 1999 where Mulder tracks down Frank for some reason or another. Whatever.
What makes the apocalypse mythology episodes of Millennium so frustrating (aside from being generally crappy) is that, you know, the apocalypse didn’t happen. It was all bullshit. When the Millennium Group (the nerdy Phoenix Foundation sans duct tape to which Frank belongs) talks about fighting the “rising violence in society,” I can’t help but laugh. Remember World War II? On average, fewer and fewer people have died per year since that shit ended. Gah, whatever. This was still a cool show. Maybe I’m just still bitter about that New Year’s party.
Before I go, I want to clear up something I may have implied in a previous post. I love Lance Henriksen. I love that he stars in a billion damn movies a year. He was the sole redeeming factor of Alien vs. Predator, and I hope that if they ever make a movie out of Aliens vs. Predator vs. Terminator they find a way to cram him in it. I don’t care if he comes back as Bishop, Weyland or Detective Hal Vukovich. Put him in the damn thing and it will be awesome.
Tags: 90s, chris carter, lance henriksen, the apocalypse, x-files
April 15th, 2009 at 7:35 am
Yeah, I thought this show was great for the first five or six episodes. After that, not so much. At least it introduced me to Lance Henriksen and his general badassery.
April 17th, 2009 at 7:49 am
You know, I never, ever saw this (because we didn’t have cable, and thus no FOX). But I can tell you that I spend NYE 1999 all freaked out because my female friends in high school were all born again Christians who very seriously said goodbye to me the day before.
April 17th, 2009 at 8:52 am
Yeah, I was only born once (har har), so my apocalyptic hopes rested less in the Parousia and more in a Skynet-esque Y2K nuke malfunction. If you’ve never seen this show, I can’t say I recommend renting the whole thing. But since you seem to be something of a Chris Carter completist, you might want to check out discs one and three.