Millennium – The Complete First Season
Picture: B-
Sound: B- Extras: B- Episodes: B
Inspired by David Fincher’s Seven (1995), X-Files
creator Chris Carter thought he could take some ideas and concepts into a
direction the film had missed and would not necessarily be possible with
feature films. The result is Millennium,
which despite being on a broadcast network (versus the freer standards provided
by cable/satellite networks) is one of the smartest and darkest shows of the
1990s. Lance Henriksen is outstanding
as Frank Black, a former expert in crime solving whose special psychic-like
abilities jump any case ahead, even cold ones.
After retiring from the FBI in Washington, D.C., he becomes an associate
member of The Millennium Group. On single
ugly case causes him to be an active member for the first time in cases since
retirement.
Shows like Profiler and the many variants of CSI
would take these ideas to more commercial success, but neither could match the
darkness and originality of what Carter and company pulled off here. In the middle of the 1990s, as the Clinton
Years tried to roll forward twelve years of the Reagan/Bush era, the question
the series asked is have we veered towards an unavoidable collision with a dark
future we cannot avoid no matter what we try to do? The dichotomy between Frank’s sunny home life with his beautiful
wife & daughter and the darkness he goes out to stop that he alone can see
better than anyone else suggests one world possibly being eclipsed by the other. Just when it seems to be regular detective
work, elements of the supernatural and overt Satanic evil start to seep in,
making this show more than the police procedural its imitators settled for.
X-Files was a huge commercial success
that allowed carter to do this show and it is a gem and great moment in recent
TV history that he did not squander the opportunity. After nearly twenty years of trying, Carter cracked the dream of
doing a variant of Kolchak: The Night Stalker (1972 – 1975, including
two TV movies prior to the series) that would be a hit. X-Files was the biggest live-action
drama series of the 1990s on broadcast TV and Millennium also has some Kolchak
influence. The series, like the second
telefilm The Night Strangler (1973), takes place in Seattle. Also, the first show was the darkest debut
episode of a series since The Ripper episode of Kolchak, while
Frank Black finds himself in the lone position of being the only one to know
the evil too often and also the only one who might be able to do something
about it. Like Kolchak and unlike
Agents Scully & Mulder, he has no real police powers, making him much more
vulnerable. As a matter of fact, the
first two episodes of Millennium remain some of the most intense
television ever made. They set the show
up well and though the episodes after get slightly lighter, the series still
stays darker than even X-Files, pushing the limits in a way that should
be celebrated.
At the same time, the show was experimental and succeeded
on that level far more often than not, remaining far more distinctive and rich
than the shows that followed in its wake.
The episodes are as follows:
1) Pilot
2) Gehenna
3) Dead
Letters
4) The
Judge
5) 522666
6) Kingdom
Come
7) Blood
Relatives
8) The
Well-Worn Lock
9) Wide
Open
10) The Wild & The Innocent
11) Weeds
12) Loin Like A Hunting Flame
13) Force Majeure
14) The Thin White Line
15) Sacrament
16) Covenant
17) Walkabout
18) Lamentation
19) Powers, Principles, Thrones, & Dominions
20) Broken World
21) Marantha
22) Paper Dove
As well as very well developed individual stories, the
family storyline is well done and well connected. It is also unique to this first season, as things shifted in a
new direction by the next. Even today,
these cases are gruesome and disturbing.
Even after we have passed the year 2000 and that anxiety is gone, the
show then has the challenge of being relevant after the events of September 11th,
2001. Remarkably, that has hardly
caused a dent. If anything, it makes
the show seem more relevant than ever, especially now that people are willing
more than back in 1996 when the show debuted to deal with darker subject matter
again like grown adults usually tend to.
The commercial success of its imitators backs that theory up, all of
which are comparatively safe.
The full frame 1.33 X 1 image is the original aspect ratio
of the show and looks good considering the dark look the show was produced
with. To the shows’ credit, the color
is not so ridiculously desaturated as to look like a bad Music Video, instead
using brown, green and black in a rich, smart way. Also retained is the original surround sound in the Dolby Digital
2.0 Stereo on all the episodes. They
all offer healthy Pro Logic surrounds and remind us how effective these mixes
can be without being 5.1 mixes. The
combination is worthy of the best TV on DVD releases to date, including Fox’s
own colorful Family Guy sets and the many outstanding A&E boxes that
set new standards for how good TV could be presented.
Extras include commentaries on the first two shows, which
is no surprise since they are the strongest the series ever produced. Carter covers the pilot, while director
David Nutter delivers on Gehenna.
We also get over a dozen promos to push the show before its debut,
including one especially intended for theatrical release, then an uncommon
practice, as well as trailers to three other Fox DVD titles in the genre
neighborhood. Finally, there are two
strong featurettes, one about the making of the show called Order In
Chaos, and the other about the real-life Millennium Group called Chasing
The Dragon. It turns out that a
group of very skilled, retired FBI agents formed an investigative body to help
corporations and individuals among others in 1989 and their logo was inspired
by Thomas Harris’ book Red Dragon and the 1986 Michael Mann film Manhunter
(reviewed elsewhere on this site). They
are The Academy Group and their interviews are worthy companions to similar
supplements on the out-of-print Criterion Silence Of The Lambs and some
such materials on the MGM version (reviewed jointly elsewhere on this site).
Despite being eight years old already, I was very amazed
and impressed how well these shows held up on a narrative level. The acting is top notch and it is one of the
last great live action TV series the broadcast networks managed to create before
selling their souls to “reality TV”, yet Millennium is much more like
reality despite being fiction. Unlike X-Files,
Millennium did not go on and on past the time it should have been ended,
no matter what turns it took. Even in
the shadow of Fincher’s Seven, Millennium is a TV classic and
this DVD set will reconfirm that for years to come.
- Nicholas Sheffo
