New Millennium movie on the way? Don't believe all you read

19 October 2009

Gerard Wood

For those who can recall how close we came in the late 1990s to television series perfection with Chris Carter's Millennium, recent news of a forthcoming movie based on the series was probably greeted with some excitement.

The source of this snippet of news was an article by Niall Browne on Screen Rant and it quickly went viral. The fact that Browne's article was little more than speculation didn't deter many websites and blogs from posting headlines such as Millennium Returns, With Lance - But Without Chris Carter, reminding us once more (as if we could ever forget) how poor journalistic standards on the web can be.

It's worth emphasising that the author of the source article is not at fault here. Browne stated explicitly that "a film version of Chris Carter's television show Millennium might be on the way". Somehow Browne's "might be" morphed into "is": "Millenium [sic] is getting a movie, and Lance Henriksen will be returning as his character Frank Black." That was io9, an unusual lapse on their part. A number of other sites went on to misquote Browne's article, attributing his words to actor Lance Henriksen. For the record then, Lance Henriksen did not hear "rumblings that Fox are interested in bringing Millennium back to screens - possibly without the involvement of Chris Carter..." Niall Browne did. And while I'm on a roll, it's only speculation that Carter will not be involved.

Apart from sticking the boots in to my fellow hacks, why bother bringing this up at all? Well, it got me thinking again about the possibility of a Millennium movie and it occurred to me that there is a far more pertinent question than "Is a Millennium movie on the way?".

Namely, "Is a Millennium movie even feasible?"

The series ran for a total of 67 episodes across three seasons from 1996 to 1999 and not only gained considerable critical acclaim but was initially very popular, winning the People's Choice Award for Best New Drama in 1997. Exploiting the apocalyptic fear that tends to mark the millennium, the show was far darker, more violent and considerably more horrific than Carter's flag-ship, X-Files, although to my mind Millennium's first two seasons were at least as good as X-Files at its very best. The writing was outstanding and the atmosphere generated was genuinely horrific, recalling more successfully than any other series (or movie for that matter) the chilling horror of The Exorcist.

Lance Henriksen as former FBI Special Agent Frank Black was pivotal to the success of the series. Black is a profiler with an exceptional ability to see through the eyes of serial killers and murderers; this ability is due to more than training, it is a gift and a curse, almost a sixth sense. Any of this sound familiar? In more ways than one, Millennium was the forerunner of almost all the current raft of criminal investigation series filling up prime time television. Literary critic, John Kenneth Muir went so far as to say: "Has there ever been a more influential television program than Chris Carter's brilliant and underrated crime/horror program, Millennium (1996-1999)? I think not, and as evidence I suggest you merely check out the new 2005 Fall TV schedule. Millennium clones dot the schedules of all the major networks, with titles such as Bones, Criminal Minds and Killer Instinct. Don't even get me started on the immensely popular CSI and its various and sundry spin-offs. Millennium focused on forensic pathology, oddball criminals and crafty, perverted serial killers almost a decade ago, and frankly, it did it better than any of these aforementioned shows. Why someone hasn't seriously considered producing a Millennium feature film - or a spin-off/sequel series - is seriously beyond me."

Why indeed?

Frank Black is recruited by a semi-official and fully mysterious organisation called the Millennium Group. Its brief is ostensibly to stop serial killers in their tracks, but as its name suggests it has a wider interest with the approaching millennium and, as we learn, with prophecies of the end of days and with the supernatural. It's here that the feasibility of a Millennium movie becomes a sticky issue. More so than any other series that comes to mind, the very premise of Carter's Millennium is bound up with a specific period in time: quite literally the lead up to the year 2000. Where do you take a series about the millennium and the end of days when Y2K has come and gone and the world as we know it didn't end?

Unfortunately, that is the least of the problems facing a movie adaptation of the series.

For the first two of its three seasons, Millennium was darkly mesmerising but in the final judgement the series came unstuck with the advent of season three. In the history of TV, season three of Millennium stands as an object lesson in how to ruin an otherwise outstanding series. This was achieved through what I think of as the Highlander 2 Effect - in this case, the ill-conceived rewriting of the very premise of a successful series that not only produces something awful in its own right, but has a flow-back effect that infects what came before, sullying its perfection.

Identifying the cause is not difficult. After guiding the series through its first successful season, Chris Carter handed over control to long-time collaborators Glen Morgan and James Wong. They took up the challenge and ran with the series, introducing some changes but basically keeping to the dark spirit of what came before. Despite the critical acclaim, ratings had started to decline in season one, perhaps because it was too dark, and some way through season two Wong and Morgan concluded that the series was unlikely to be renewed. Making the best of a bad lot they resolved to bring some closure to the series and ended the season with an apocalyptic plague that threatened to wipe out the world.

The unexpected renewal of the show saw the return of Chris Carter who was faced by an almost insurmountable problem. To a great extent, the show's effectiveness was the result of the horror and supernatural elements occurring against a backdrop of seeming normality. If Carter were to pick up where Morgan and Wong had left off, the nature of the show would shift from pre to post-apocalypse, moving away from any recognisable reality into realms of pure fantasy.

His solution was simply to ignore the climactic conclusion to season two, almost as if it didn't happen, thereby negating the plot line established over two seasons. And then, to make matters worse, he proceeded to re-cast the Millennium Group in a very sinister light, not so much revealing a previously hidden agenda as completely reinventing the Group and its members as evil. The Millennium Group in season three is fundamentally different from the organisation introduced in the first two seasons, but worse, what we learn of it in season three does not have its roots in season one: there's simply no believable continuity. The only remotely plausible explanation for this was that the Group had been corrupted over time by the very Evil that it set out to thwart, but by the end of season three it appears as if the group was always already evil.

To wrap up then: is a movie based on Millennium feasible or pertinent even though Y2K has come and gone? With enough imagination and ingenuity, good writers might make it so (although the Millennium Group would probably end up looking like one of those cults which emerges a little sheepishly from their bunker the day after the world was supposed to end). But another question remains: on what version of the series would a movie be based? Because in the end there is an unbridgeable chasm between the first two seasons and the third.

Maybe it's best just to leave Millennium alone and to remember it sadly as the series that was almost perfect?

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