Millennium
McConnell, Frank
Frank McConnell A KILLER SERIAL Chris Carter's 'Millennium As I write, we are coming to the end of the 1996-97 TV season in which the most arresting new series was "Millennium," on the Fox...
...But he's also joined a group calling itself Millennium: a group of free-lance in-vestigators, consultants, and, yes, psy-chics dedicated to tracking and stopping serial killers...
...Now that sort of buildup can be, and often is, a recipe for disaster...
...It's like the old Perry Mason se-ries: every episode the same situation, the same courtroom drama, the same break-down-on-the-witness-stand climax: TV as the coma-state of alpha waves...
...What makes "Millennium" different- and vastly better-is its tang of brim-stone...
...Frank Black (Lance Henriksen-remember the good-guy android in the movie Alien...
...And, as if that weren't enough, it became a genuinely good show...
...How many vari-ations can you play on that one-chord theme...
...So who can...
...And watching Frank Black overcome it every Friday night may not be a so-lution, but it is bracing...
...The next year, 1888, remarkably saw the advent of the patron saint of urban dread, Jack the Ripper...
...Millennium," then-at least if you watch it the way I do-isn't finally about serial killers at all...
...Now you understand my skepticism...
...And when I saw it, that first Friday, all atwitter with anticipation, I turned to my wife and said, with all the authority of a media critic, "This won't last a month...
...Occult forces driving us all to chaos...
...Not as rational-who at the tail end of this century could be as rational as Holmes?-and not nearly as assured, he is nevertheless committed to maintaining the solidarity of love against the vile forces who both attack him and whose seduction he feels...
...Think about the fact that most of the best-selling de-tective novels these days are ones about serial slayers...
...Frank McConnell A KILLER SERIAL Chris Carter's 'Millennium As I write, we are coming to the end of the 1996-97 TV season in which the most arresting new series was "Millennium," on the Fox Network...
...The problem is, Frank's not quite right in the head...
...Here's the setup...
...But let me explain how right I was to be wrong...
...Millen-nium," on the other hand, was being celebrated as a major debut before any-one outside the Fox bunker had seen the thing...
...Or is it that Frank somehow shares the seething, maggoty impulses of the men he should track down...
...The Jon Be-net Ramsays of the world are, thank God, few...
...A series where, week after week, a sensi-tive locates a murderer...
...Worry...
...I think it's because the idea of the se-rial killer has something to do with our sense of the astonishing fragility of our carefully constructed "normal" lives...
...In "Millennium" Carter raises the ante: Each episode opens with three phrases: "Wait...
...Millennium" is the creation of pro-ducer Chris Carter, whose "X-Files" has by now become an indelible reference-point of contemporary popcult ("X-Files" calendars, "X-Files" conventions, an "X-Files" movie in the works, and an over-crowded "X-Philes" chat room on the Internet...
...Not that it really will be...
...Mil-lennium" not only survived the Nielsen wars, more remarkably, it survived its own, initial, all-but-guaranteed success...
...is an ex-cop, F.B.I, agent, whatever, living in Seattle- that most squeaky-clean and boring of American cities-in a nice house with his nice wife Catherine, a social work-er, their cloyingly nice young daughter, Jordan, and-natch-their dog...
...It's about-and it's a heartening antidote to-our real fear that present happiness may not last...
...Think about David Fincher's bril-liant, influential film, Seven...
...Forget Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" of 1841...
...Carter's Frank Black is an heir of Doyle's Holmes...
...Every week, then, Frank is summoned by the group to track down another se-rial killer, while also trying, twitchy and all-but-affectless fellow that he is, to maintain something like a normal life with wife, kid, dog...
...of our sense that some-thing has gone terribly wrong and we can't fix it...
...The important thing is our sense that it could...
...When "Millennium" pre-miered, Fox even gave it the traditional "X-Files" time slot-Friday night at 9 P.M...
...It was in 1887, in A Study in Scarlet, that Arthur Conan Doyle invented, at the same time, urban dread in the form of the serial killer and Sherlock Holmes, supreme rationalist, as his inevitable adversary...
...That's the setup...
...Millennium is dedicated to resisting, insofar as it can, the blood-dimmed tide of the end of the age...
...Producer Chris Car-ter is a master connoisseur and purvey-or of digestible paranoia: Each episode of "X-Files" begins with the legend, ei-ther "trust no one," or "the truth is out there...
...Somewhere in heaven, H.P...
...Is it ESP...
...As the New Yorker observed, the "X-Files" began unobtrusively and built a cult following before exploding into the shared mythol-ogy it now, undeniably, is...
...He is a splendid neurotic, splendidly por-trayed by Henriksen...
...Lovecraft is smiling...
...And, before the first episode was shown, it was hyped, on the tube, in the trades, even on the backs of comic books...
...Who Cares...
...He quit his job because he had a breakdown, and his break-down was because he could, somehow, see in his mind's eye the commission of the most awful crimes by serial killers...
...here's the hook...
...They are a mantra of urban dread: of the citizens who watch from their sub-urban houses while a girl is beaten to death in the cul-de-sac, and don't even think to call 911...
...That anxiety may grow as we approach the year 2000, but that anxiety is always there anyhow...
...E.S.T.-bumping its established older sib to Sunday...
...The Millennium group has been formed because, as the world approaches the apocalyptic year 2000, unknowable but undeniable occult forces are urging the human race toward an orgy of self-slaughter...
...This is a great age for serial killers- not in fact, but in fiction...
...Think about Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs...
...So I was wrong: So sue me...
...At any rate, he's moved to Seattle...
...Husband, wife, kid, dog: At any moment, that delicate equation-even in shiny Seattle-can be shattered all too easily...
Vol. 124 • July 1997 • No. 13
