A KILLER SERIAL.

Chris Carter's `Millennium'

As I write, we are coming to the end of the 1996-97 TV season in which the most arresting new series was "Millennium," on the Fox Network. "Millennium" not only survived the Nielsen wars, more remarkably, it survived its own, initial, all-but-guaranteed success. And, as if that weren't enough, it became a genuinely good show.

"Millennium" is the creation of producer Chris Carter, whose "X-Files" has by now become an indelible reference-point of contemporary popcult ("X-Files" calendars, "X-Files" conventions, an "X-Files" movie in the works, and an overcrowded "X-Philes" chat room on the Internet). When "Millennium" premiered, Fox even gave it the traditional "X-Files" time slot--Friday night at 9 P.M. E.S.T.--bumping its established older sib to Sunday. And, before the first episode was shown, it was hyped, on the tube, in the trades, even on the backs of comic books.

Now that sort of buildup can be, and often is, a recipe for disaster. As the New Yorker observed, the "X-Files" began unobtrusively and built a cult following before exploding into the shared mythology it now, undeniably, is. "Millennium," on the other hand, was being celebrated as a major debut before anyone outside the Fox bunker had seen the thing. And when I saw it, that first Friday, all atwitter with anticipation, I turned to my wife and said, with all the authority of a media critic, "This won't last a month."

So I was wrong: So sue me. But let me explain how right I was to be wrong.

Here's the setup. Frank Black (Lance Henriksen--remember the good-guy android in the movie Alien?) is an ex-cop, F.B.I. agent, whatever, living in Seattle--that most squeaky-clean and boring of American cities--in a nice house with his nice wife Catherine, a social worker, their cloyingly nice young daughter, Jordan, and--natch--their dog.

The problem is, Frank's not quite right in the head. He quit his job because he had a breakdown, and his breakdown was because he could, somehow, see in his mind's eye the commission of the most awful crimes by serial killers. Is it ESP? Or is it that Frank somehow shares the seething, maggoty impulses of the men he should track down?

At any rate, he's moved to Seattle. But he's also joined a group calling itself Millennium: a group of flee-lance investigators, consultants, and, yes, psychics dedicated to tracking and stopping serial killers.

That's the setup; here's the hook. The Millennium group has been formed because, as the world approaches the apocalyptic year 2000, unknowable but undeniable occult forces are urging the human race toward an orgy of self-slaughter. Millennium is dedicated to resisting, insofar as it can, the blood-dimmed tide of the end of the age. Every week, then, Frank is summoned by the group to track down another serial killer, while also trying, twitchy and all-but-affectless fellow that he is, to maintain something like a normal life with wife, kid, dog.

Now you understand my skepticism. A series where, week after week, a sensitive locates a murderer? How many variations can you play on that one-chord theme? It's like the old Perry Mason series: every episode the same situation, the same courtroom drama, the same breakdown-on-the-witness-stand climax: TV as the coma-state of alpha waves.

What makes "Millennium" different--and vastly better--is its tang of brimstone. Occult forces driving us all to chaos? Somewhere in heaven, H.P. Lovecraft is smiling. Producer Chris Carter is a master connoisseur and purveyor of digestible paranoia: Each episode of "X-Files" begins with the legend, either "trust no one," or "the truth is out there." In "Millennium" Carter raises the ante: Each episode opens with three phrases: "Wait." "Worry." "Who Cares?"

They are a mantra of urban dread: of the citizens who watch from their suburban houses while a girl is beaten to death in the cul-de-sac, and don't even think to call 911; of our sense that something has gone terribly wrong and we can't fix it.

So who can?

This is a great age for serial killers--not in fact, but in fiction. Think about Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. Think about David Fincher's brilliant, influential film, Seven. Think about the fact that most of the best-selling detective novels these days are ones about serial slayers. Why?

I think it's because the idea of the serial killer has something to do with our sense of the astonishing fragility of our carefully constructed "normal" lives. Husband, wife, kid, dog: At any moment, that delicate equation--even in shiny Seattle--can be shattered all too easily.

Not that it really will be. The Jon Benet Ramsays of the world are, thank God, few. The important thing is our sense that it could. Forget Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" of 1841. It was in 1887, in A Study in Scarlet, that Arthur Conan Doyle invented, at the same time, urban dread in the form of the serial killer and Sherlock Holmes, supreme rationalist, as his inevitable adversary. (The next year, 1888, remarkably saw the advent of the patron saint of urban dread, Jack the Ripper.)

Carter's Frank Black is an heir of Doyle's Holmes. Not as rational--who at the tail end of this century could be as rational as Holmes?--and not nearly as assured, he is nevertheless committed to maintaining the solidarity of love against the vile forces who both attack him and whose seduction he feels. He is a splendid neurotic, splendidly portrayed by Henriksen.

"Millennium," then--at least if you watch it the way I do--isn't finally about serial killers at all. It's about--and it's a heartening antidote to--our real fear that present happiness may not last. That anxiety may grow as we approach the year 2000, but that anxiety is always there anyhow.

And watching Frank Black overcome it every Friday night may not be a solution, but it is bracing.