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(thunder rumbling) (eerie music)
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- That was Chris trying to come with
the darkest scariest thing that he's really afraid of
in real life
And I think we all are.
- I just like the mythology around it.
I like the idea of a communal feeling of end times,
like, let's examine that.
What is that?
What is the human race at the end of its time?
Who are we?
- I think Chris has the ability like Rod Serling
to tap into these deep questions that we all have
like, why am I here, what's out there?
- It's not just some sci-fI fantasy,
I'm not saying that there's anything wrong
with sci-fI fantasy, but there's a lot of truth
and a lot of fascination with what the show represented
and the metaphors in the battles between Good versus Evil
within ourselves and the world.
- It was dark.
Talk about a dark show
And I couldn't believe that
that show would make it on the television.
- A mini serie on television getting darker was,
I think it kinda started with Seinfeld,
where Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld said
no hugs, no lessons.
And then after that, The Sopranos.
What is it, the fourth episode,
he strangles a guy with his bare hands
on a college trip with his daughter.
- You took an oath and you broke it.
- Then we get Dexter. (saw whirring)
And Walter White. (Krazy-8 gagging)
- Millennium was kind of way before all of them.
- If something is driven by character,
if you're interested in those people,
the rest of it becomes a sort of context.
- Frank is a real hero and he's trying to protect all of us
from the darkness that he sees inside of himself.
- You know, I say about The X-Files,
the reason for the success of the show
is ultimately Mulder and Scully, it's that relationship.
And I believe that Millennium is the same way.
I believe it's the power of Frank Black
as played by Lance Henriksen.
- Chris once said something to me,
and he said that I had to really dig deep
to do that character, and he's right.
He was right, he saw it.
- Bizarre that it didn't get to the actual millennium,
but we felt we had to deliver some kind of order,
at least avoiding breakdown and chaos.
- I wanna see Frank in our political landscape now.
He would be dealing with all the crazy right now.
- Yeah.
- I think it's crazier now than it was.
- Oh, it's totally crazier now.
- [Anonymous] We are Anonymous.
- They're bringing drugs.
(guns popping)
- There is no evidence any classified information
ended up in the wrong hands.
- There was an integrity in Millennium.
Now 20 years later,
we're seeing all the more reason to have integrity.
(dramatic music)
(eerie music)
- 20th Century Fox, that would be Peter Roth, came to me,
this is during the I think third season of The X-Files,
and asked if I would do another TV show.
I had this character in mind.
Frank Black had sort of come to me
as a result of an X-Files episode that I had done
called Irresistible.
We really dealt with a human monster in Irresistible
and dovetailed with my interest
in the behavioral profiling work that the FBI was doing.
I just thought it would be interesting to do
a tortured FBI agent who saw evil.
- What do you see?
- I see what the killers see.
- He actually began to see beyond reality
into the minds of killers.
- And I think the best episodes of The X-Files
that they're about something.
There's a reason we've chosen to tell the story,
whether we know it consciously or not,
we're trying to ask an interesting question
by creating a monster.
And I thought Millennium
really had something powerful to say
about the world we live in.
- I was doing films, and my agent called me and said,
"I have this script, you've got to read it."
And I said, what is it?
And he says, "I don't wanna tell you.
"I just want you to read it."
But anyway, he sent the script, and it was very dark,
that was the pilot, very, very dark.
I said, if it was a movie, it would be a great movie,
I mean, you wouldn't have to worry about the darkness,
people can take that, you know, for a period of time
and then they move on.
But as a series,
I didn't know how anybody was gonna hang in with it.
I met Chris Carter and the director at a restaurant.
I said, I got one question for you, man.
Where is the light in this?
Where is the light?
I don't know how this is gonna work as a series.
And all Chris said to me was, "The yellow house."
It sort of struck a nerve with me.
I meant, what did you mean by that?
He said, "The core of the story
"is the family in the yellow house,
"and that's what makes it all survivable."
And then I finally went, all right.
I didn't realize what a commitment all right would be.
You know what I'm saying?
You just let it out, you go, okay.
- [Chris] I developed Millennium with Lance mind,
that he wanted to do it was, you know,
kind of a dream come true, obviously.
- As I started reading the pilot and getting really,
investing in it, I suddenly realized,
wow this is a really educated character.
So one of the biggest challenges was
to overcome my own judgment of myself about it,
and just try to get on the journey ride
on this guy's intelligence.
It's not mine, it's written.
- And I remember the one thing that I told Lance.
I said, I don't want you to use your hands.
I just want to use your voice and your face.
I felt that the use of his hands
was a kind of salesmanship in a crutch,
and that if he was a man
who dealt with you squarely and forthrightly,
that he wouldn't need to sell his opinions,
his beliefs, and his convictions.
I do see him as kind of an idealized hero.
He was a moral man, a family man.
His control of his anger and his rage and his outrage
is what made him exceptional.
It's that paradox and that dichotomy
that I think makes the character interesting,
that he can put it away.
That's the reason he does it is for them, really.
And that he paints his house,
he paints away the darkness by painting his house yellow,
or in this case, buying a yellow house is, I think,
indicative of a man who is very aware
of the forces of darkness and light.
- I could just see the possibilities,
I mean, Chris talked to me about Catherine
and what she was meant to be
and how she was meant to function in terms of the story.
I thought it was pretty clear
that she was sort of hearth and home,
and a little bit of his conscience and, you know,
that their Connection in the story would be very important.
They had this little girl.
Little did I know it would be this adorable Brittany,
but she was such a cutie, oh, my god.
- So I don't remember the first audition,
but I remember the call back
because there was a puppy in the room,
and I love dogs, then and now.
And so, I was obsessed with this dog,
and they really wanted to see my natural reaction
to the puppy coming out of the cage
'cause there was a puppy in the pilot.
And then I remember them basically telling me in the room
that I had the gig.
And I didn't know that meant
because there was a puppy in the room and I was five.
- Had done, like, nothing before.
I think she'd done a commercial or something like that
before starting Millennium, and Chris wanted that,
he wanted somebody who is really fresh.
She didn't know what the word cut meant,
and then she learned that print was, you know,
that meant that was a good one,
and then we could go on to other things.
So she was absolutely delightful.
Really, really cute and funny,
and always had a great questions for me,
and we just had a good time together.
I just really liked hanging out with her, she was great.
- I do remember shooting the pilot
and spending that time with them, especially with Lance.
- I have two daughters.
And I've been through those years with my daughters.
It's the most beautiful time in the world.
Brittany was just an incredible kid.
I don't know what words her and her family used
about Frank Black, but I know she trusted me.
And I know we had an affection going
that was very, very right and simple and pure.
It had a pureness to it.
- There's some really candid moments in the pilot episode
that were not written and that just happened
because I was little,
and this is my first real time on set tonight.
I think there's the scene where I lick his nose in the car,
and that was not scripted.
I just did that, I don't know why. (laughing)
And I remember hearing the whole set
start bursting into laughter, and I looked around,
did I do something wrong?
And my mom, I remember looking at her,
her being like, oh, what did you do?
- She licked my face.
Most innocent gesture in the world, and I went, (chuckling)
I knew we were gonna be fine, all of us.
(eerie music)
- We did the little piece in the pilot
where they go and they find the body down by the river
at night, with lips all sewn together, and I thought,
man, there's no way they're gonna let that show on TV.
It's absolutely not going to happen.
- Well, I saw the pilot at a screening at the DGA,
and I brought a bunch of friends, and it was terrifying.
I mean, I will always remember the image of the guy
with sewn shut mouth, oh, my god, I mean.
- It was so dark.
I mean, compared to, you know, anything else
that was out in the world and on television at the time,
it was very, very dark.
It was kinda mind-blowing.
How are they gonna get that on television?
That's gonna be a series?
Whoa, what's gonna happen every week?
- It was obviously kinda sexy and kinda violent
and kind of cool.
But it was also intense in a way
that I came to kind of understand only after I worked on it.
- The pilot, we shot for a month,
and I remember being in the last scenes of the pilot
knowing that this was the last scene of the pilot,
and then we were gonna have a break.
And I said to Chris,
Chris, are we gonna have a month for each show?
I mean, he said, "No, every eight days."
And I went, what?
What did you say?
I was, like, stunned.
Yeah, it was an exciting time, but it was also overwhelming.
It was like surfing on a giant wave.
And you have to have skill, but you also have faith.
Terry O'Quinn is this wonderful kind of actor that,
he was so supportive to me.
There would be times where I'd get a script,
I'd be memorizing that one, the second script would come in
before I'd finished memorizing that one,
and then I got all the way to the end of the first one,
the second one would come in.
By the time I was finished halfway with that one,
another one would come in.
So was an awesome amount of learning they had to do.
And I remember Terry saying to me,
"Lance, don't panic over this stuff.
"Here's the thing to do, let's just read it, accept it,
"and it will come to you right in the middle,
"it will come to you, don't worry about it."
He was right, it did. (eerie music)
- When I got the call to do Millennium, I'd just finished
or was still on a series called Strange Luck,
which was an interesting show
because partway through they lost there lead writer
and it kind of lost its way a bit,
and we had to dictate from long distance through a producer
to just keep doing whatever it is you're doing.
We were being extremely creative with the camera.
We were just trying all kinds of kooky stuff
to get people from A to B and to tell the story and stuff.
I think Chris really just wanted to make sure
that I sort of, I kind of got the aesthetic,
which was really sort of enhanced,
what I now call enhanced naturalism.
- I think the show gets into your fear.
It gets into the place where you're scared and alone,
and you're in the dark, and you don't know what's happening.
And it does it not directly,
it does it kind of atmospherically.
And through the photography, through the staging,
not really so much the events,
through the events that you don't know are going to happen,
that you're unsure about.
- It was hyperreality.
- Hi, there, how are you?
(dramatic music)
Hi, there, how are you?
- Hi, there, how are you?
- Hi.
- And I think that's what made it scary for me,
is that I always said that I'm struck
by the sort of everyday evil,
and the fact that you can be in line at the supermarket
and be next to a serial killer and not realize it
that what evil looks in the minds of men
is what we were after.
- Because it was reality-based, we didn't have the license,
I didn't think, creatively,
to do the kind of writing you can do
with something that's more in the science fiction world
of The X-Files.
So, all our writing sources were sort of reality-based
and motivated, and that sort of drove it.
And Mark Freeborn was the production designer
on almost all the episodes.
He was brilliant.
So that was great for Lance, I think,
because he got to come in,
and you could literally smell the locations you were in
sometimes, I mean, they were so real, they were so well done
even if it was set on a stage or something,
it really took you into it the space.
- To go up to Vancouver and meet the incredible craftsmen
and craftswomen who made that show,
every single department was at the top of their game.
They put a enormous love into the thing.
And so, your prop person would go,
"Okay, these are the different severed heads,
"we can have one of them in a plastic bag, if you prefer.
"This is that would look like.
"And here's the other severed head,
"and my brother works in the emergency room,
"so I know how to do bruising and amputations really well."
And you're like, wow, I love you.
Right when you think it can't get any better,
you get amazing crew, amazing cast,
amazing production team, amazing editors.
Then you go to Mark Snow's garage in Santa Monica
and he plays the music cues for you.
- Mark was almost like the soul, in a way, of Frank Black.
And I told him when I saw him not long ago,
where I said, you were like a core element in that show.
- And I think now we're so used to beautiful television
and cinematic television, it's easy to forget
that that was really unusual, you know,
at the time the Millennium pilot was made.
And I do think, you know, Chris should get credit
for having that ambition for television
and really understanding television can be this.
I think it's important to remember sort of
the landscape of television in the 1990s,
which was cop shows, doctor shows, lawyer shows.
That was pretty much it, and David E. Kelley, right?
And when you're doing a show like The X-Files or Millennium,
you are such an oddball.
And it was really hard to find writers
because all the scripts we'd get
were for procedurals and stuff, and that's like,
well, that's not what we're doing.
- It was all sort of TBD.
Chris did not lay out some idea for the season even,
as I recall, but.
And I think that was intentional.
He wanted to open up the unconscious of the writers
and see what it would produce.
- My recollection is that
you were kind of hung out to dry a little.
It was like sink or swim.
Are you gonna get this or not?
And there wasn't a writers' room.
At least on Millennium, the way, there is now
because every episode was standalone really.
I mean, I know there was this mythology thing,
but really standalone episodes.
And so, as a writer, you came up with an idea
that got approved by Chris, as I remember,
but he might guide it a little bit,
but then it was like you were really supposed to come back
with a finished story. (eerie music)
- [Lance] I remember speaking to the people in Virginia,
The Academy Group.
And they said two things to me about it, they said,
I wish I could solve everything by nine o'clock, you know.
And I know they were digging at me with it.
And the other one they said,
if I had been able to grab a doorknob
and see who touched it before me, that would be great.
- Frank Black would have his visions, you know,
he'd be at a crime scene,
and you'd have all these flash frames.
And it was shot on film, and on film,
when you shut off the camera,
it slowly slows down and you get what they call rollout,
which is like multiple images,
and just weird like three and four and 10 frames
of garbage under most circumstances, and we'd use that
to intercut with the images that he was seeing,
which were usually shot on 16-millimeter
to give them a more grainy look as opposed to the 35.
- In the beginning, I think those visions were meant to be
intuitions or his tapping into the collective unconscious
or it was just, because on a deep level
that Frank Black himself didn't understand,
he had insight into the evil that these people were doing,
he can make sense of it.
It was a darkness in his own heart
that connected to the darkness that other people were doing.
So it was like a deep intuition or insight that he had
into these murderers and their crimes.
- I have intuition as a person.
We all do, you do, we all do.
And sometimes, if you really are able
to listen to your own intuition, it's not a magic trick.
It's an accumulation of elements that you noticed
that become intuition and has a message.
- Chris didn't think that it was a supernatural gift.
I think that when the show went more to a paranormal thing,
you wanted to believe that he had some kind of gift
that he could put himself in the mind of a murderer.
- It's the psychological equivalent
of Arthur Clarke's observation
that any sufficiently advanced technology
is indistinguishable from magic.
And any sufficiently developed intuition
like Frank's has seems supernatural,
maybe even to the person who has it.
So it's either a highly developed gift
or it crosses over into the supernatural.
And we wanted to, I think once you say it's supernatural,
it takes the steam out.
You go, absolutely, it's supernatural.
Then you go, it's a different show.
But if you say this guy is extraordinary
and it may be supernatural,
then all the rules of real world trouble come into play.
- I was brought in to do episode number two of season one,
Dead Letters.
Chris basically gave me the show to produce and said,
"Tom, you're Mr. Millennium, so, any problems,
"just give me a call."
- As far as Tom was concerned,
I mean, one of the things was,
he was a fixture almost from the get go.
He directed almost every other episode.
And he's just so good and so buttoned-down and so prepared,
it made all the rest of our lives that much easier.
He and I had a sure hand, he could say, you know,
if you had a script ahead of time, you'd say,
you know, I think in terms of such a movie
that's the feeling that we want here and, of course,
we're all familiar with the same references and stuff,
so it was easy to, creatively, to drive the ship
and lead the whole crew where they needed to go.
- From Ten Thirteen and from Millennium,
what was our obsession that we talked about,
I mean, we talked about this point of view,
so the whole visual style was set up to support that,
was that sort of Dario Argento horror vocabulary
but with the very tight sight lines.
- When I read the script, I would always see it,
I thought or I tried to see it through Frank's vision.
Was more or less what his vision was
from the case he was on.
What he was seeing it, how he saw it.
And I would get as close to that as I could.
I thought it was the best way to approach it
because it was all his world.
And Rob and I would get into these conversations
about the look of the show, how dark we can make it,
and, you know, people fighting us on all that,
and, you know, it was always something.
But we would push it everyday all as far as we could.
I remember on Dead Letters, the first when I did,
man, they came on strong about what the visuals and things.
So one scene, the only way I could get it across was
to take the photographs and I put 'em,
exhibit 'em up on the wall,
and then I put the lead actor or guest actor
in front of the the wall to play the scene.
That's the only way I could really show those
because they weren't gonna let us show 'em at all.
- Well, initially, they were super excited about the show.
I mean, the pilot episode, they loved, they flipped for it.
They recognized it was a work of art.
I mean, I use that word advisedly, but it really was,
and they saw the integrity of it,
and they went to a lot of trouble to promote the show.
But I remember after four or five episodes,
they called us in for a meeting
'cause they just thought the show
was unremittingly bleak and dark and depressing, and like,
Jesus, guys, can't you get some humor into this thing?
Something, you know, 'cause they thought it was too much.
And we heard that argument,
we were kinda sympathetic to what they were saying,
but we also struggled
because there's something you want to say with the show
and we didn't wanna compromise it for commercial reasons.
If you're gonna deal with dark stuff like this,
you must horrify people.
You can't sanitize it and soften it.
I actually think it's kind of dangerous to do that.
It makes it entertaining and safe,
and it should be disturbing,
you know, it should trouble you,
otherwise it becomes kind of obscene in a way.
It's inviting you to enjoy suffering
and perversity and cruelty.
- I did a new play by Lee Blessing at La Jolla Playhouse
in which I played a serial killer,
a composite of all these different serial killers
from the '70s and '80s.
So I read everything I get my hands on.
In fact, I read too much.
You can do too much, especially with that dark stuff.
- Well, I think Dead Letters is one of most important
early episodes of Millennium
because it juxtaposes Jim Horn with Frank Black.
Both of these investigators are candidates
to enter the Millennium Group, but they're very different,
and the important thing about the episode is
their differences illuminate the character of Frank.
- The stuff that I went through, my character went through
was a way for him to sort of look into the future and see
what happens to these guys.
When I look at the victims, when look at their faces,
all I can see--
- [Boy] Daddy, Daddy.
- Now, when Frank works his cases,
he gets into the mind of the killer.
He sees what the killer sees, and implicit in that
is the idea that he takes himself out of that.
Jim Horn is exactly the opposite.
He can't separate himself like Frank does
from what he's seeing or what he thinks the killer is doing.
- If you make every one of these personal, you'll go insane.
And that's from having been there, James.
It was really important to me
to have Frank Black be a non-judgemental person.
You knew that people had to be taken off the street
that were causing mayhem and great pain to other people,
but it wasn't about judging anybody
because you're not gonna get any information
once you made that decision.
Somebody has to stay sane in that situation,
and I thought Frank Black was that way.
- I don't think the show was meant to be
sort of a procedural drama like so many procedural dramas,
because they really do just become about
there's a bad guy out there
and what clues are we gonna find.
He was going to get the bad guy.
So you needed other pathways,
other things, other relationships.
- I could see the child in everyone.
When you see anybody, any person, stranger or not,
wherever you are, if you look in a very relaxed way,
you can see the child in them.
And I'd rather engage somebody
in having that piece of knowledge.
Because there's a lot of forgiveness,
and a child struggling to find an answer,
and a lot of people, in life,
they're struggling for an answer,
and some are successful and some are not.
(eerie music)
Originally, they were gonna call Millennium 2000,
and they changed it to Millennium.
And I thought, what a great idea,
because 2000 is just as cold as ice.
Millennium makes you think, it implies a lot.
- That flaw that got put into the system
in terms of two digits for a date instead of four
has become, over the last 25 years, absolutely pervasive.
- People don't remember that at that time, '97, '98, '99,
this millennial thing was real
And there was a sense of anticipation,
a sense almost of foreboding.
- [Newscaster] 70% of Americans buying emergency supplies
to welcome the new year.
- Y2K, you know, there was gonna be this Y2K thing.
Everybody was a little bit on pins and needles
about the millennium,
and this show is the only show in popular culture
that I know of that really tapped into that
in a very real way.
- People were not so much afraid of the millennium bug
as they were afraid that there would be some sort of
soul-wrenching worldwide change.
And I never believed that the Y2K bug was gonna be anything.
But Millennium, which started a lot earlier than that,
started in '96, was about the fear that there would be
some kind of worldwide change.
- If you look back on the show now,
I think it was actually more on target than we realized
at the time.
I think looking back on the show now,
I think something did end as it turned out it ended
September 11th, 2001 not December 31st, 1999
but pretty close to the turn of the millennium.
(somber music)
- [Newscaster] We see the lights shining from the spot
where the Twin Towers once stood, a symbol of what was lost.
- And I think it was a sense of dread
that something was coming to an end
and we didn't know what it was.
My memory was, very clearly,
there was nothing supernatural about the show
in the beginning.
And that, really, Chris wanted that to be a way
to differentiate Millennium from The X-Files.
And Chris, in my recollection anyway,
was not somebody who believed in the supernatural.
So we thought this was being truer
and it was gonna be more terrifying than The X-Files
because it didn't give you the out of well, it's monster,
well, that's an alien.
It's like, no, this is real, this is the real evil
that's out there in the world that you're afraid to look at.
So it would be even harder for you to go to sleep at night
after watching Millennium.
But I think what he became aware of
and he ultimately embraced with the Lucy Butler character
was that it was hard to make a show of ideas
and not start to embrace the supernatural on some level.
- So Lucy Butler was kind of the devil personified,
and while I, you know, as I stated that, you know,
I don't think that the devil himself,
the guy with the pitchfork is running amongst us,
I believe there are people who do personify evil.
I've met these people, I've look them in the eye.
I've experienced that kind of perfect self-interest
that evil is, and the lack of compassion and empathy.
- I had an audition for Millennium, and I went home,
and a couple of days later,
the casting director called me at home,
which is pretty unusual, and she said,
"Well, I have good news and bad news.
"And the bad news is that the part got cut.
"And the good news is
"Chris Carter has written a recurring role for you
"on Millennium to play the devil.
"Would you like to take it?"
- I have worked with Sarah-Jane a number of times since then
because of meeting her on Millennium,
and she is, first of all, she is such an unusual actress.
Her speech pattern is slightly different,
it's very interesting.
She's very sensitive.
She is powerful, in a way,
I would say Sarah-Jane is powerful.
- Oh, what do you wanna know about Butler?
Well, first of all, she's probably the one of the most
naturally sensual people in the world.
I mean, if there was a devil,
he's not gonna come at you with horns on his head.
He's gonna come at you and seduce you.
- Was it a woman
- Why do you ask?
- The way you were looking at me.
- She was very seductive.
She was super intelligent.
And everything she said was like, maybe that's true,
maybe that's true.
And I do remember,
these were conversations I would have with Chris like,
the devil always says so much that's true
that it confuses you.
It tempts you to lose your way.
- Mike Nichols said something incredible
that there's only three elements that make up all drama,
negotiation, seduction, or warfare.
Butler was a great seductress
- There's a scene in the interrogation room,
that's one of my favorite scenes.
If you remember, in the episode,
I'm sitting on the edge of the desk.
And Frank Black comes into the room,
and without looking at him I say, hi, Frank.
I think it was written
that I was just sitting in the interrogation room
waiting for him, and I said to Thomas,
can I sit on the edge of the table with my legs dangling
with my back to the door, so that when he comes in,
I already know who's coming in the room?
And Thomas said, "Yeah, I love that, that's fantastic."
Hi.
- You were in my house
- And then it just started this whole
kinda different vibe to it, of this playful kind of,
don't think you have the power, you don't have the power.
- The equivalent to suddenly getting dosed
like walking into a marijuana lounge in Amsterdam
when you suddenly, can I have a Coke,
and then suddenly you're stoned.
And that's what it was like to be around her
because she was always like touching, hitting that button,
touching that button.
Yes, she's a wonderful actress, by the way.
But she had that naturally
and then put her talent on top of that as an actress
and really, yep. (laughing)
- It was electric.
That's the only way to describe it.
It was looking right at somebody
and really daring them to play, and to play dangerously.
- The character evolved.
I don't think that any of us really realized
what that character would be when we first,
that very first episode,
as I think a lot of things in Millennium, you learn a little
and then characters and storylines would evolve
and it turned out to be something completely different
than what you thought it would be.
- There was a guy who played a captain at a police station
in the show, and he ended up getting killed
They hung him from the ceiling by a hook.
And then it got almost supernatural
because I had to talk to him while he had his throat cut.
(intense music)
And he's sitting in a chair,
and I'm trying to almost supernaturally talking to him
like it was a dream.
(dramatic music)
Some things that came into the show were like, whoa.
You know, because I'm such a primitive
that I need some reality.
I mean, is this a dream or is it really happening?
I mean, and I have to make the choice
because otherwise my reality would be corrupted.
- We did open the door to the supernatural
and the show evolved to allow for that over time,
which I think was the right thing to do.
It was just something we understood as the show went on.
- I kinda like the idea of the yellow house, really.
And that was Frank's safe haven.
Of course as time went on, a lot of the problems he has
slowly crept into the house, with his wife, his family,
the house, everything.
- We're raising a daughter, Frank.
The real world starts to seep in.
You can't stop it.
The thing that really would frighten you, I think,
is not your own personal loss or being harmed yourself
but the kind of pain that you would go through
for the loss of someone else,
the danger of having your child in danger,
that's scary stuff.
That's where I don't think people even know
how they would deal with a situation like that.
- Once certain perpetrators had attacked my family,
it's a whole other thing.
Now I'm as vulnerable as anybody, with the thought of,
how am I gonna live up to what my beliefs are?
(eerie music)
- When we did Millennium, the first season,
Chris let go of the guys who were supposed to run the show
almost right away.
And that was a big problem because suddenly Chris and I
were literally running two massive shows at once.
I mean, that was, what, 48, 49 hours of television.
When that first season ended,
we knew we couldn't do that again.
so he asked me if I wanted to take over Millennium,
leave X-Files and just take over Millennium,
and I didn't want to leave X-Files,
I was emotionally attached X-Files, and I didn't feel ready.
- When 20th Century Fox saw
what was happening with the movie, X-Files movie,
and with The X-Files,
they actually sort of went out on their own
and reached out to Morgan and Wong,
who had just come off of their own show,
and asked them to step in.
So, actually, that announcement
kind of came as a surprise to me.
But, you know, they're fully capable folk.
They had done great work on The X-Files.
I thought they would continue
to do great work on Millennium.
- It was just different.
It was a different take on the show
and it was more anthology, I would say,
that they didn't focus specifically on killers.
It was more about the Group.
- When we went in the second season,
it became a whole new show, as far as I was concerned.
And I liked the first season,
I liked where it was going, first season.
I liked the grittiness.
Second season got a little wandery.
And even though we did some interesting stuff,
really interesting stuff.
- Except it wasn't really into the kind of procedural
serial killer kind of stuff then, but I liked
when it started to get into more of the mythology.
- Yeah. - More biblical mythology.
- Yeah, and we were really interested
in the Millennium Group specifically,
and what they might really be,
and that was what they were gonna do,
so we were, yeah, we actually just walked into
exactly what they were planning.
- Glen said, "We're not gonna do
"too many internal POV visions for Frank.
"We're gonna try to tone that down a little bit,
"so use it sparingly and, you know,
"when it's really important."
- It was interesting too because at the beginning,
of course, in the first season, it was all intuition.
So that and the visions were used
to just visualize his intuition.
But we really like the idea of taking everything further,
taking the Millennium Group further,
and then taking the visions further and saying,
there is something, he is connected to something.
(dramatic music)
- I've had these visions before you.
(gasping)
- And, you know, that he's able to handle this.
I think that was one reason for Laura and for her
not being able to handle it,
'cause she was having the same sort of thing that he was,
but he was able to deal with it a lot better.
- Frank Black in the middle of season two
begins to go through this change.
Who am I when I'm not the Frank Black
who's the profiler working for the Millennium Group?
Who am I when I'm not married to Catherine,
when I don't have this sanctuary of the yellow house
to go back to?
Who am I if my father is gone?
(dramatic music)
- We wanted to do like a kind of Christmas mythology
type of episode,
and we like the idea of using Frank's father.
That was really a collaboration to come up with
what his relationship was like with his father.
- Well, take off your coat, stay a while.
We've got a lot of years to talk over.
- I don't think we do.
- We also wanted to further explore
where his visions came from
and the idea that his mother was sort of contacting him.
- She told me that her grandmother helped to draw it.
- So?
- Not my mother, Frank.
Yours.
- The Christmas show we did, which I loved, I really did.
It was so fantastical.
But the people in it were real and they were wonderful.
And so, to have a theme that comes like different rivers
meeting at this moment and then branch out again,
but keep the audience connected so they're involved.
You can talk more about things, you know what I mean?
So rather than solving them at nine o'clock.
(dramatic music)
- [Lecturer] To us on Earth,
the stars are fixed, and the planets, sluggish.
- Luminary was one of my favorite shows
because it was so understandable.
I remember myself as a young man back in the '60s.
If I wanna go from New York to the northern tip of Canada
or Alaska, I would have done it if I'd gotten the idea.
I felt invincible.
- I didn't wanna die.
I wanted to be alive.
- And if you add spirituality to that
and try to find your soul, you know,
a young man trying to find his soul, it was, again,
it was Frank Black putting himself out on the edge
trying to rescue someone.
Alex, Alex, come on.
Alex, come on.
I think there is an element of rescuer
in Frank Black for sure.
I mean, there has to be, because otherwise, what drives him?
That's got to be it.
One soul is worth all the people in the world.
One at a time.
- And I had people say to me,
"John, how can you like this show about monsters?"
And I say, well, you have Millennium all wrong.
Millennium isn't about these monsters.
It's about how people like you and I respond to monsters,
to the evil in humanity, and Frank Black is our icon.
He's the person who cares, he's the person who steps up
to fight these monsters.
The second aspect that was important to the '90s
and to the context of Millennium
was the ascent of the internet.
- There were, in the early days of the internet,
people who would point a camera at a turtle.
They'd call it Turtle Cam.
They'd say, look, my turtle.
And you could anytime day or night see
what this guy's turtle is doing.
Then, a girl said, a girl named Jenni said,
I'm going to create JenniCam.
- I am Jenni from The JenniCam.
- It's gonna be just like Turtle Cam, except it will be me.
She put a camera on herself 24 hours a day,
and it included her doing mostly mundane tasks,
but also having sex and eating dinner and who knows what.
But when I saw that,
I realized that we could have a crime scene
that no one knows where it is, no one knows who it is,
no one knows who the victim or the murderer is,
that's a brilliant setup for a classic
kind of locked room mystery.
- Millennium specifically featured this aspect
in a second season story called The Mikado,
where there was a serial killer who was committing crimes
on the internet and Frank had to go and try to find out
where are these crimes actually being committed,
we can see the website,
and when it reaches certain number of hits,
he's going to livestream his murder of this victim.
(dramatic music)
(computer beeps)
(all gasping)
- God!
We gotta tell somebody. (modem screeching)
- What are we gonna tell them?
- We need proof, hit print or something.
Hit print, hit print!
- A big part of Y2K fears,
where the fear that the technology of world
is outrunning our ability to deal with it.
And The Mikado was a lot about that,
about how technology not only helps you,
it helps the people who are victimizing you.
(eerie music)
There was like a very millennial thing that happened
while in between the two seasons in real life,
there was a suicide cult that believed that a comet,
it was crossing paths, and visible from Earth
was gonna transport them to heaven,
and they're called The Heaven's Gate Cult.
They all killed themselves.
I thought, this is a terrific idea for a Millennium episode
because nothing could be more millennial.
Broke the story with Morgan and Wong, actually,
and then wrote the script,
but by the time the script came out,
I think they were on to a whole different conception
for the season than we had started with.
And that was when you go to the Owls and the Roosters stuff.
- [Mr. Dean] Only twice in 2,000 years
has the Millennium Group been so divided.
But this is our darkest hour.
- I never thought members would kill members.
- [Peter] You think the Owls took the cross?
- It's my feeling that, it's a classical feeling
that all power is corrupted eventually.
And they all are power only because they are so clandestine.
They don't rear their head, they don't face the music
for everything they manipulate.
And so, it wasn't a terrible surprise to me.
The hardest thing was Peter Watts
because I did grow to really respect him.
But as the Millennium Group goes,
he was so mysterious and so at a distance.
I was always wary of them and knew that it can be corrupted.
I should have called the police.
- Are you with them?
I'm not even sure I'm with you.
I don't know who or what you are exactly.
There is a line in Shakespeare where it says,
to sup with the devil, you need a longer spoon.
And I felt about them that way.
Terry O'Quinn did a great job of playing Peter Watts,
and I thought he has, talk about a seduction of friendship,
this guy, he was my buddy, he was this, he was that,
but he always had an agenda,
and I could feel the agenda whenever I talk to him.
So it always kept me like a little on guard,
supping maybe with the devil.
- So Anamnesis, basically, was going to be,
we were going to be doing the Easter episode. (laughing)
I mean, I can't even imagine the blasphemy
we would have gotten if that had been--
- Been the Easter episode. - The Easter episode.
♪ Oh god I feel for you ♪
♪ The plot of our lives ♪
♪ Sweats in the dark ♪ (gun firing)
(people screaming)
- I don't really remember there being any problems
until the first day of shooting,
- Yeah.
- when suddenly Standards and Practices went, wait a minute.
- When they realized we were saying
that Jesus and Mary Magdalene had had a child,
which they didn't really pick up on then,
and then our Standards person got, she was wonderful,
and she goes, "You guys can't do that."
- And Glen goes, "Why not?" - Yeah.
And so, we were on a conference call for hours.
- [Both] Three-hour conference call
- going, we're shooting right now.
- Yeah, and, yeah, that was crazy.
And it was funny because part of that call
became Darin's inspiration
for Suddenly Satan Got Behind Me,
because at one point Linda actually did say,
- Because I am Broadcast Standards and Practices,
and I bear the burden of maintaining a nation's morality
on my very shoulders.
- There was so much comedy in that episode.
You're killing yourself laughing, watching those old guys,
and all that prosthetics.
- You're talking about the devils, you know,
having lunch at the donut shop.
- Hey, maybe I'm old-fashioned, but I tell you,
things didn't use to be this way.
- I actually screamed from the rooftop
at the guy that wrote that.
He was down on the street and I was up five flights
on a roof.
And I holler down at him,
is it your intention to mock everything that you respect?
I screamed it at him.
I just had to surrender.
Again, look, man, I'm only an actor.
And I have a limited education.
And these scripts come in
with guys that have been in college, graduates,
they write well, they're very inventive,
and now it falls in my lap
like I was catching an unborn cow in my arms, you know.
(chuckling)
Bloomp, there it is and I gotta live with it, that's it.
You know, anyway, there you go, one of my metaphors.
(chuckling)
(Twohey groaning)
I'm Rocket McGrain and I do whatever I want
to maintain my upbeatness.
- Every show takes on a life of its own
because people come in and add to the voice
and/or find their own passion in the project.
There were people who investigated things
that I actually hadn't imagined.
- Yes, we drew really interesting talented writers,
but I also think they were shaped by that experience.
They had to say something or they weren't any good.
So the writers had to think about them differently
than they would think about any other show on television.
♪ His head against the locker ♪
♪ Started laughing hysterically ♪
♪ When suddenly ♪
- You know, I'll be honest,
I was gonna leave after season one
'cause it was just so hard, it was honestly so hard,
I never experienced that much difficulty doing stuff,
you know, getting episodes out the door
because the story process was extremely difficult.
For me, you needed a story that was as interesting
as something you could make into a movie
for it to be a good episode,
and it was very, very hard to come up with these things.
- What I remember more than anything about that show is
I've never been so tired,
I've never worked so hard in my life.
I mean, it was a really, really hard show.
Everybody will just say it was very satisfying
because the end product was so good
but boy, oh boy, it was hard.
- When you're working hard on a show like that,
what happens is you get very, very fatigued,
and what happens is you have this,
you're carrying around a feeling of despair.
Yet, the only solution is rest.
- I liked Glen and Jim enormously,
and they're hugely talented.
And we talked very frankly about how I would exit the show,
what was happening.
- It was introduced that Catherine would be leaving,
and that that's how season three would continue.
I remember my mom and her
having a deep conversation about it,
and then my mom coming to tell me,
and I remember feeling very confused,
that I didn't understand why, and like, I didn't know.
I felt sad about it, I really loved her,
and she was really fantastic.
- If I get sick,
I don't want you to watch me die.
Well, at least I saved my daughter. (laughing)
And again, so, if there was a way for mom to exit a show,
that was kind of the most noble thing to do.
(eerie music)
- When it was announced that Millennium would come back
for season three, which was very exciting,
and Morgan and Wong would be leaving,
I had to look, sort of take an overview
of what they had done and where they left off.
I had to shuffle and think about the character Frank Black
and how we would be reacting in my mind,
how I wanted him reacting to the facts of his life
as they were set out in season two.
- I just absolutely assumed as did many other people
the show is over, they killed many main characters,
and I think 80% of the Earth's population.
I was interviewing for other shows and they asked,
"Is it going to be renewed?"
I said, let me tell you the final episode.
I told them exactly what was gonna happen, and they go,
"Oh, nobody would ever renew that."
Then they renewed it, we just rolled up our sleeves,
we went in, we said, let's brainstorm ideas.
- Chris and I were not eager to resume
running two TV shows simultaneously again.
And Chip had done really good work.
And Ken was really experienced,
was part of Ten Thirteen at that time, and so,
I think we felt Chip and Ken together would be a good team
to shepherd season three.
- They burn down the world at the end of season two,
and I thought they were doing it kinda out of malice,
and they really were not.
I found out just from Jim Wong in the last month.
He said, "Oh, you should have come by and asked us,
"'cause we had a million ideas about what to do."
I think there's something that I wasn't so excited
about then which now after I don't know how many seasons
of Homeland I'm much more comfortable with,
which is that you paint yourself
into really difficult corners
and it's fun to get out of them,
that you can have situations you think are impossible,
that you think will stop the storytelling,
that you think will do everything, and they don't.
And it's better just to live with that,
so that was a lesson I feel like I learned
looking back at season three of Millennium.
That was one of those things I would never do
that same way again.
And in that one,
it would have been just so much more interesting
to deal with the specifics of that contagion
and slowly open up your world,
instead of, yeah, pretending it didn't happen.
- It wanted to go back to the procedural season one.
And so, that's what we, we came in
and we started coming up with those kinds of stories.
- It was a much trickier season, yeah,
we weren't really sure what kind of stories
we were going to be telling.
- We needed another female character,
and something very different
from what Megan had brought to the show,
and obviously it's a completely different character.
- Emma Hollis, I believe was a Chris character.
I think he wanted to bring in a female character
that was more operational, that is,
Catherine have been sidelined
both by their marriage problems, right, but also by the fact
that she was maybe not conceived properly in the beginning,
that this family wasn't really quite functioning
the way we were hoping.
- I feel like she was brought on
because I think everybody realized
that the workload for Lance,
if it's a one man show, was too much.
And she was there to help shoulder some of that weight,
to be his partner.
- Whath I remember mostly was seeing Klea Scott
and just going, we have to get this actress.
- At that point, Lance had a relationship with his wife
that was sort of male-female baLance,
and then Kristen Cloke's character, Lara Means,
and that male-female baLance.
But after, you know,
everybody died at the end of season two,
they needed (laughing), they needed a new chick,
and they needed a new partner, FBI partner.
That's how they wrote themselves out of the end times,
was that it had only affected the Pacific Northwest
and he was going back to the FBI in D.C.
and was gonna get a young partner.
So they opened, you know, the casting was for that.
Anything in particular you're looking for?
Learned afterwards that the network felt like
the demographic for Millennium was white males 18 to 35
on a Friday night, that's what they were going for,
and they didn't feel like seeing a black woman. (chuckling)
You know, that wasn't the audience, that's how they say it.
My agent at the time, Craig Wyckoff, threw down for me,
I didn't know that, with the woman who was casting,
and he said, "Look, if Klea is awful
"and a total waste of time,
"I will never send you another actor,
"I won't bother you again.
"Just take a shot.
"Let her do the first read."
- Now it's all diversity, diversity, diversity, diversity.
It was not then.
This is now 20 years ago, right?
And it seems crazy but it was hard to get her,
not approve, ultimately,
but it was hard to get people into the idea of her
'cause it was seen as this kind of nerdy,
white college show, you know.
But we saw her and she just blew us away.
And she had this kind of great physicality
that most TV actresses do not.
She was just kinda magnificent, the way she moved,
and the way her hair was, and she was just so cool.
- But I thought Klea had so much humanity
and poise and dignity and beauty.
I just think she's lovely, I think she's a lovely person,
and a lovely actress.
And I felt like that kind of light
was what you needed to contrast against Frank's blackness.
- Interesting thing you had an older man, a younger woman,
a white man, a brown woman, and there was no sexual energy,
it wasn't about that, it was about something different.
And so, we thought, like, what is this relationship?
And Lance told me early on that
he had had somebody come up at a fan event and say
that he had been a mentor to them.
And he'd been really surprised
because he didn't think he was old enough to be a mentor.
He just couldn't believe his life had brought him
to a place where he was a mentor.
And I was so clear, that's what was happening with us.
It was not gonna be just any old acting job.
We were gonna invest.
- First two-part episode of season three,
which is The Innocents and Exegesis.
It's very interesting for what it protends for Frank Black,
because he encounters here these oracles.
Basically, these people who were part of a CIA program,
they were remote viewers,
meaning that they could put themselves
into the heads of other people.
- Preparing for the role and knowing,
really believing that you have to do something
that's gonna take down a plane full of innocent people
for the good of your sisters, is a lot to work with.
(gun cocking)
Oh, god, no!
(gun firing)
I love the idea that they were clones,
and it made me wonder, do they all have like a hive mind,
like one knows what the other is doing?
Because in the script, I mean, this woman is willing to
back off over a cliff and kill the young child
to keep people from knowing the truth.
So, it added a lot of elements for me to work with.
- Frank realizes through his exposure through them
that they're a family like his family,
and it was wrong that his family was used
as part of the agenda for the Millennium Group
in season two.
So it's just as wrong for him
to try to use them for his agenda now.
And what he eventually does of course is he lets them go,
they go into hiding, and he doesn't use them
the way that would benefit him
because he realizes they're a family, they're people.
Their abilities don't make them a commodity, they're people.
- You know, the idea of an overarching story in Millennium
is obviously troubled in a certain way.
And I think that one of the things that, you know,
we never kind of nailed properly was what that would be
or, honestly, if you even had to have one.
- Eventually, if you kept going the way we're going
in season one, which is a serial killer every week,
that may have also gotten tiring.
It's hard to say.
I mean, once we got into the anthology thing in season two,
could you have continued on that way?
Maybe, that may have been a better way to go.
Then what we did in season three, but it's hard to know.
- I mean, one of the reasons
the mythology maybe never got pinned down properly
was that there were a series of people that came through
that had their own opinions about that,
and so it didn't have a proper custodian for that.
Like, Chris had an idea in the beginning,
and then Morgan and Wong came in, and then I came in,
and it was a little bit scattered.
On the other hand, the same people
in some of the standalones made just absolutely, to me,
like, fantastic television, like, the best I've ever seen
in a lot of ways.
- We didn't know exactly where Chip and Ken were
in their charting of the mythology, if you will,
serialized elements of Millennium as we were doing that,
'cause we were preoccupied with X-Files,
so really, all the episodes we did in Millennium
season three were pretty self-contained
'cause we weren't following it closely enough
to weave ourselves in successfully.
So we tried to come up with ideas
that we thought were powerful and wouldn't conflict
with the rest of the flow of the series.
♪ Yeah ♪
- There was ones that were fun and a little lighter
that you could like giggle, and like,
Kiss guest starring, and that was crazy. (laughing)
- FOX decided the way they were gonna save Millennium was
have this very dusty rock band Kiss, sorry, (chuckling)
they're like, it was like, it wasn't like,
we're gonna hook you up with U2.
It was, no, we're gonna hook you,
which was even a little dusty then, but Kiss?
Okay, but we want a Kiss crossover episode.
Everybody is like, there's no way, uh-uh,
this would never happen in the Millennium universe.
- That's it, no twist, no mystery?
- It's supposed to be scary.
- Kay and Erin came running over to my office, saying,
"We have a scene you have to do."
I'm like, what is it?
They go, "It would be Frank profiling fictional killers,
"and it would be boring to him because he's such a genius."
I was like, it's in.
- Where's it go from here?
- A lot of people get killed?
- That was a great idea for a scene
and it turned out to be a great scene.
The cast were troopers, you know, they always,
whatever they got,
they would figure out a way to bring soul to it.
And I think you have to admit
that Lance brought a very interesting performance
to that piece.
But they rolled with it.
It was not what they were expecting, but it's Millennium,
a lot of stuff can happen in that show.
(eerie music)
- When you're an actor at a show like Millennium
and you don't know what's gonna happen,
you start writing it yourself in your head.
It's very difficult not to just suggest things to people.
You know, like, the director said,
wouldn't be great if, you know, it turned out
that I was really a bad guy,
that I was running the Millennium Group clandestine,
you know, head of the hydra, you know,
behind the Millennium Group, and stuff like that.
And there was a lot of speculation about that
because nobody knew what was going on
in the minds of the writers.
- The first episode, I remember, season three
that I really liked, that felt like
we were getting back into our groove with Skull and Bones.
- Skull and Bones is one of my favorite episodes
of the third season, I think.
It's a really strong story
that exposes some of the machinery
behind the Millennium Group.
Frank is tracking down someone else like him,
someone named Ed.
And Ed has for the last 15 years, taken down notes,
and he's written all these notebooks
about what he's seeing in the world.
He'll look at a newspaper article
and he'll start taking down notes,
and he'll start to to see what's behind the curtain.
What is this current event story
and what's really behind the current event story.
And what's behind that is the conspiracy,
is the Millennium Group.
- There's this Turkish proverb,
no matter how far you go down the wrong road, turn back.
So we started to do that not even just in seven
but in the episode before with Skull and Bones, to start,
like, talking again about what the show is really about.
- Who, Agent Hollis, is prepared to do what is necessary
to assure our future?
- Yeah, that was where we first started to see
the Millennium Group, you know,
in text as a kind of bad thing possibly, right.
They started a conversation with Agent Hollis
at the end of it where he talked about their role
in sort of turning back the tide of chaos,
whatever that was.
We started to get their sense of
what they felt their role was in the world.
- The only thing I wanted was a little more resolution
to the Millennium Group.
I personally felt like we needed to figure that out,
and I felt we were always right on the brink,
on the cusp of it.
I was always hoping it would happen in my episode
that I would, like, figure out the Millennium Group.
- So season one you think the Millennium Group
is just a consulting group.
Season two, you realize,
oh, they're an ancient secret society.
And then season three, you rectify both of those things
by saying, they were, and then Tolson and Hoover
co-opted it. - Yeah.
- And that's why FBI agents
are also in the Millennium Group.
- But I do think in season one, Peter Watts was like,
he didn't have Frank's gift,
and he was there to enable Frank to do his best,
but he wasn't able to see what Frank saw.
But I do think as life goes on, unfortunately,
people do get defeated by life sometimes.
- I think it made it much more interesting
and compelling character to play, to have him have secrets,
to have him have friction with Frank.
And so, by having him have the sort of secret life,
it gave a lot of color to the character,
which I thought was pretty cool.
- I really liked Terry.
But when he became the enemy, suddenly I started seeing,
and they would light him different.
So now we're standing in the shadows and I'm looking at him,
and is supported my feeling of, have you been lying to me
the whole time we've been dealing with each other?
And I felt it very strongly, you know.
- Frank undergoes a very important development, I feel,
at the back half of season three,
starting with Borrowed Time.
And we see very emotional scenes in that episode.
Frank breaking down over the idea of losing Jordan,
his daughter, who has become mysteriously sick,
and he feels he cannot go on.
- You're talking about the only great thing
that ever happened to my life.
Do you understand that?
- It came out of a father's deep concern for his daughter.
My daughter had been through a fever episode.
It was just the most frightening thing.
And they're just burning up and they're in such pain,
and there's nothing you can do about it.
And, in a way, it started with that.
- When did this start?
- She was fine in school an hour ago.
(Jordan groaning)
- Lance actually really, really committed in that episode.
First of all, his pain that his daughter was dying,
I think for him was, as I remember it,
was sort of done privately, and like,
a lot of people were cleared off the set
'cause it was so raw for him.
And he also suggested a lot of things for the script.
So, for example, when she's put in the ice bath,
the way it scripted it was that a doctor did it or nurse,
he said, "No, no, no, I will do it myself."
- I know, I know. - No!
- I'm here. - Daddy, Daddy.
Daddy, help!
- "Because if she's gonna go through that,
"I'm gonna be with her."
So there were a lot of things he brought to it
that had to do with bonding with Jordan.
- Well, I think that he was connected emotionally
to not only his movie daughter, to the actress,
and to watch a child struggle with being on the edge
of life and death, and for him to put himself as a father
through those emotions, I think it was wrenching for him.
- Why is this happened to him?
Why is he facing these trials?
Why after losing his wife,
is he now in the position to lose his daughter?
And I think this is sort of a necessary break, you know,
they put the brakes on Frank here.
It stops him from being angry,
and it stops him, and he says,
okay, I have to take stock of where I am in my life now.
And what's important isn't this agenda,
isn't me taking down the Millennium Group.
What's important to me is my daughter.
- While I feel that Frank Black maintained his integrity
as a character, I think that over time, he did change.
- I think he was battered, for sure, and had lost a lot,
and had not been able to protect
everything he helped to protect
at the beginning of the series.
But I think he was still hopeful.
- Do you know there was an element of sadness
that the show was gonna go out
and I wasn't gonna be on the right side, you know.
I wanted to be running down the hall with Frank Black
or I wanted to be, at least have the car waiting outside,
and then they would get in jump in the back of the car,
we zoom off together.
I wanted to somehow be a part of, be on the right side
at that ending moment, and I felt like
the compromises that she made for her father
put her on the wrong side, but that's what I love.
What was I supposed to do?
He's my father.
- Do what you have to do.
- That's why Lance and I we had this all this thing.
Where are we gonna go from this?
I mean, I'm thinking they weren't going to cancel us
in 1999 for sure. (chuckling)
They wouldn't do that, that would be ridiculous.
The show's called Millennium.
Why would they cancel us right now?
This makes no sense.
They'll at least give us six episodes
so we can finish the story.
But we had this idea that, oh well, we will come back
and it'll be like time has passed
and Emma Hollis is deep, deep in the Millennium Group,
and you think she's totally evil, and now we hate her.
She's bad, so we're gonna let the audiences hate me.
And then, you see her and Frank meeting,
and you think he's the bad,
but then you find out she's just deep cover,
like she's just gone so deep into the Millennium Group
and it's all to undo the working,
and she's actually secretly meeting, you know,
so we had all these ideas together,
how we could swing back around and be a team again.
- I came here to put a bullet in you.
But I don't have to, the Group will do it for me.
- And it's become fashionable now on a TV show
to sort of kill off the most important
and most beloved characters.
I don't think that's why we did it.
But it certainly is powerful to lose somebody emotionally
on the show for the writers, not only for the writers,
because they had made a connection to this person,
but for the lead character Frank Black
and what that meant to him.
- [Frank] Catherine.
- They're very romantic characters.
They're heroes, they truly are.
And I think Frank remained a hero to the end.
(eerie music)
- I was really hoping there was gonna be a season four
just because it would have taken us to the millennium,
and it seemed like such a no-brainer.
- Well, we were all kind of making bets on it.
How can you cancel a show in 1999 that's called Millennium?
- The crew was dedicated, totally dedicated.
They loved the show.
We had really solid fans that loved the show.
And then, when they didn't pick it up,
well, there were a lot of disappointment.
- Because you've been promising the audience this.
Really, what was happening kinda behind all the layers
of the story, where you were promising the audience
that this thing was gonna kinda burst
when the millennium happened.
And it just never got a chance to burst.
- So, it's such a terrible trivia question.
When was a TV show called Millennium canceled?
Right before the millennium.
- You know, it's funny,
I think the show would have gone into a fourth season.
The ratings were such that it supported a fourth season.
I think, really, I'm to blame
for the fact that it didn't go longer
because I had another show that was coming out on its heels,
Harsh Realm, and one thing supplanted the other.
- FOX was always chasing the ratings The X-Files got
on Friday nights.
And every show that came in to that time slot after X-Files
got lower ratings.
And what they didn't realize, I think, was that
it was the beginning of the decline of network television,
and they were never gonna see those ratings again.
And so, unfortunately, for Ten Thirteen,
every show that we put in that time slot
never reached the aspirations they had for ratings-wise.
- X-Files visits Millennium came up,
which was an interesting idea, but, you know,
you had to bring everybody into it,
and people, some were interested, some weren't interested,
and it got made.
- First of all, it's all X-Files writers writing it,
so there's always gonna be places,
are we gonna lean toward the show that's a huge hit
and makes billions of dollars for FOX
or are we gonna lean towards the one that we love
that was canceled?
And all the forces, all the vectors,
sort of leaning toward
we're gonna give short shrift to Millennium.
- And this may seem like so obvious from the outside.
But it was only when we actually tried to do it,
we realized, yeah, but this is The X-Files.
This is actually The X-Files,
which is a completely different series
and has completely different requirements
than the Millennium series had.
And so, ultimately, after many, many permutations of it,
we realized this has to be a scary monster show
to some degree, which is not really what Millennium was.
And so, it ended up becoming an X-Files episode
with Frank Black as a guest character,
and I didn't love it, you know.
I was a bit disappointed in the result, but we did our best.
- You armed?
- Oh, yeah.
- Shoot for the head, that seems to stop them.
(dramatic music) (eerie music)
- I think when a show outstays its welcome,
even if it's a great show, some of the luster comes off it,
and that didn't happen with Millennium.
There's nothing about it that feels dated
except the fact that it's longer, the episodes are longer,
and there are fewer commercial breaks.
- You know, I think people still care about it
after all these years because Chris was right
in inviting the writers
to basically liberate the unconscious
and to put our greatest fears, our cowardices, and shame
onto the screen.
- From the beginning, he said to me,
when I came on The X-Files, you know,
"I don't wanna do television
"that is consumed and thrown away.
"I wanna do television that lasts, that people go back
"and look at years after it's done."
- I think you could practically make that show now,
and a bunch of people have tried to make it.
It was very influential.
A lot of shows have copied it
and copied the general tone and feel.
- I knew a producer on Profiler
who referred to his show as Millennium light.
- I'd put it with The X-Files.
I put it with 24, Twin Peaks.
The shows they're making now are drawing from those shows
to do what they do now.
They just took it to the next level.
- I think people are kinda catching up to it in a way
'cause it is so dark, darker than anything
that was on television at the time.
- There used to be the TV style and the feature film style.
And TV style, when you slammed the door, the sets wobbled.
And it was brightly lit and everything had a happy ending.
And cinematic style was much more like Millennium.
Millennium was on the vanguard
of let's make these little movies.
- It just looked great, played well all the time.
I love the characters.
I really love the characters.
- Frank Black, who's this very complex character
and who was such a good person,
and has all these terrible things happening
but is always striving to make things better
and to make things come out right.
And I think that a character like that
is always gonna really speak to a lot people,
and of course Lance was just so good.
- He brought this weird intensity that certain actors have
who can carry a series, and Lance is just one of those guys.
When the storytelling supported him properly,
you just couldn't look away, he's fantastic.
- Frank was just someone you wanted to root for.
He's kinda that Gary Cooper silent hero type,
so I think that everyone is gonna root for that.
And Lance is just great, he just is.
I think, you know, you have instant empathy for him
on the screen.
- What I loved about that show was
the examinations of the nature of evil.
Because bombs are still going off,
because we do terrible things to each other
and we don't know why, and we don't know if it's,
we don't know what happens.
Is there something in the nature of humanity
that wants to self-destruct?
Is it innate in us?
Can we battle it?
Is it outside of us?
Is it in us, is it a psychological evil?
Is there a devil?
- You know, you want the show to be considered a success
in its longevity, but you also want the show
to be considered a success in its artistry,
and that's where I'm really proud of the show
is that I think some great work was done
by some really talented people.
And I think when people go look at the show,
I think it stands up as a whole,
and I think that its legacy is that it wasn't just
a flash in the pan, it wasn't just a second effort
that it had integrity.
It makes me feel good that, you know,
people connected to it.
- I've never had that many friends, 'cause in real life,
if you have five friends that you call your best friends,
you're a very rich man.
But to have hundreds of thousands of people
from all over the world expressing that they love the show
and they like Frank Black, you know,
I'm grateful and humbled by it.
I'm not just saying that, I really mean it.
- Looking back now, I think that there was still good work
to be done on Millennium, maybe still good work to be done
in the future on Millennium.
Certain people would love to see it come back.
I think there are ways to bring it back.
(eerie music)
- I as the director would have liked to have seen
some of the stories go further, particularly with Frank,
and even Watts when all that happened.
I mean, he was also one of my favorite characters.
- What I would do. (Erin laughing)
- Wow, Kay has thoughts for them.
- Yeah, I do.
It would be the Jordan Black Show.
That's what I would do.
And it would be Jordan being involved in the new version
of the Millennium Group, whatever that would be.
- It is a shame that the show got cut off when it did
'cause it was just getting into the meat of that character
and there was so much room to grow with it.
And so, I am really curious
where they would have written her.
I don't know, maybe she'd follow her father's footsteps
and go that way with her career.
She would have become
a really strong female lead growing older.
(dramatic music)
(voices screeching)
- It would be interesting to see how she grew up
and what happened to her, you know, how she's handling it.
- Yeah, it's a really natural way to do the show.
- I would be really intrigued
to see what Frank is doing now. (chuckling)
- Is he completely out of it, or?
- I don't think so. - Yeah.
- I think Frank would still be out there
trying to make things better,
and, yeah, I would be really curious
as to where Frank is today.
- I'm sure in some fictional alternate world,
Frank is still having a relationship with Lucy Butler.
- Frank.
- What?
- I just want us to be together.
- She's connected to him and she understands him
probably better than anybody else,
which is kind of horrifying and scary.
- I'm a lot stronger as a person than I was actually
doing the show 20 years ago.
I think it would be a lot more fun to be
not so nice this time round.
And I think I'd play a little more hardball.
- There were so many layers to that show
that if you were into fan fiction,
you could just write 1,000 books on each episode,
there were that many quantum layers of plot.
- I would like to see him pouring through Ed's notebooks
from Skull and Bones,
putting together this alternative history
of what the last 15 years were really all about.
And putting it together and trying to couple that
with his own knowledge, and figuring out
did the Millennium Group really go away?
- I would try and get in something
that's a very public failure of law enforcement
in which avatar would use it to make fools of them,
would use encryption, would use social media,
would use all the tools that we have in our current age.
- I wanna introduce this idea of information sickness.
Right now, the information we deliver to ourselves
as a society is not good.
It's full of errors.
It's full of undecidable arguments.
It leaves people depressed and confused.
If you look at the news.
- And I want you all to know
that we are fighting the fake news.
It's fake, phony, fake. (crowd cheering)
- You either wind up as part of a howling mob
or cowering in terror under your desk
because that's the worthlessness of the information product
that's being delivered to us, and we need to fix it.
- I'd like to see Frank Black called in on a story
in, say, Bulgaria, where he doesn't speak the language,
every sign is in Cyrillic, and he has to get involved
in something that happened and find a person
in the most foreign difficult place on Earth.
And how does he do it?
There's a lot to talk about in this world, there really is.
And I don't think we would ever run out of material.
- I think, you know,
Frank Black seeing the evil in the world,
but seeing it in himself as well, that's key.
That's key to me, that's key to the world we live in today.
And I think, right now, people are frightened
and looking for someone to blame,
and they're not, too many people are not their best selves.
And I think a character like Frank Black
offers the opportunity to face the darkness in the world
with hope and goodness.
- Well, I think with The X-Files
doing that six-episode event series,
I think that's an interesting model.
(dramatic music)
People definitely want dark stuff on TV,
no question about that. - Yeah, there's definitely,
I think there's room for it.
- We could do it on FX, and make it really down and dirty
and super violent and everything.
- I dare them to do one like pilot length thing
for Millennium, I dare 'em.
It would be like dropping a rock on David Duchovny's head.
(laughing)
He actually said that to me at one point.
We met, you know, Millennium had started and everything,
and he said, "You know what you're like to me, Lance?
"You're like a baby brother in a crib,
"and I just wanna drop a rock on your head."
And I said, really?
And I thought, looks like we're gonna be friends.
(chuckling)
And then, now I sit here and I go,
if they dared to do a Millennium,
it would be like dropping a rock on David Duchovny's head.
(chuckling)
That's where we should end this.
(clapping)
(chuckling)
I dare you to put that in there.
(laughing)
(gentle instrumental music)
(dramatic music)