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Fox's 'Millennium': Turn of the Stomach

Chris Carter appears to have fashioned a career out of his own indigestion. It's just a theory, but here goes: Carter eats spicy foods at bedtime, has terrible nightmares, wakes up and writes them down and later turns them into television shows. Which Fox buys.

The writer-producer did it first with "The X-Files" and now tries again with "Millennium," an even grislier drama series about an ex-FBI agent who specializes in monstrous crimes committed by people with extremely sick minds. Gosh, what a funsy idea for a TV series.

"Millennium," which premieres tonight at 9 on Channel 5, is not so much a television program as a horrible ordeal. But Fox has shown there is quite a market for horrible ordeals. Other networks have come up with, or are trying to come with, ordeals of their own. NBC's Saturday night is one long Creep-a-teria.

Some folks hail these shows for "pushing the envelope," for being daringly "dark," for having an "edge." They and like-minded viewers will love "Millennium," which pushes the edge of the envelope darkly. It suggests paranoia should replace baseball as the national pastime.

Weather-beaten Lance Henriksen, looking as if he's been through the mill and left the mill in ruins, plays the former FBI guy who's now a member of the Millennium Group, a hush-hush crime-fighting elite that believes many ghastly crimes are part of a vast conspiracy. In the premiere, Henriksen moves to Seattle with his wife, played by the beautiful Megan Gallagher, and soon plunges into his first case.

Even though the guy knows he is being pursued by a homicidal maniac who got away, he takes surprisingly few steps to protect his wife and family, and the home they buy is pretty but shockingly vulnerable.

Carter, who wrote the premiere, wastes no time in sleazing things up. The episode opens backstage at a porno peep show. A sexy woman strips in a private booth for a heavy-breathing weirdo: "Tell me what you want. Do you like me? Do you like to watch my body?"

Soon the walls run red with rivers of blood. But that's only the beginning. The psycho is off on a spree, and the unsavory details accumulate rapidly. It seems the murderer likes to sever heads, cut off fingers, drain bodies of blood and then burn them. Some of his extra-special victims are allowed to live for a while; he buries them alive after sewing their mouths and eyes shut and lopping off a hand or two. This is all described or shown in unseemly detail.

To help justify the wretched excess, Carter dresses up the story with quotes from Nostradamus, William Butler Yeats and Revelation, the wackiest book in the Bible. There's talk of Armageddon, "the great plague in the maritime city" and a "blood-dimmed tide." Henriksen stalks around as if he's carrying all the woes of the world on his shoulders, or perhaps in the haunted hollows of his sunken face.

It could be argued that the show is a grim reflection of its time, but it could be more convincingly argued that it's just stomach-churning tripe made to seem cynically hip.

Our hero, such as he is, has a talent for probing the psyches of killers even before he meets them. He gets vibrations from visiting the scenes of the crimes. "I see what the killer sees. . . . I put myself in his head," he explains. Yes, this does sound ever so slightly like the heroine of NBC's "Profiler," who says, "I just sort of picture [the murder] happening."

They're essentially the same show, except "Millennium" is more pretentious and far more revoltingly graphic.

Jonathan Demme's hit movie "The Silence of the Lambs" appears to be the inspiration for such shows as these. It was a scary movie, perhaps the scariest big Hollywood thriller since "The Exorcist," but do people really want to have that kind of experience every week? If these programs keep succeeding, they'll be able to have one every night. You begin to wonder whether the most inane sitcom in the world isn't a preferable alternative.

Henriksen's character unwittingly puts his finger on the problem when he complains about the wear and tear on his soul: "The cruelty, the unspeakable crimes -- it all becomes numbing, depersonalized, common." Exactly. That's what happens to frequent viewers of excessively violent "entertainment."

If "Millennium" is a hit, what's next? To outdo "Millennium," producers will need to push the dark envelope even further over the edge. How about "Calling Dr. Kevorkian"? That might make a good show. Perhaps some producer is pitching it to a Fox executive at this very moment.