ANXIOUSLY AWAITING THE `MILLENNIUM' : CHRIS CARTER ANTICIPATES THE HYSTERIA.

Byline: Jonathan Storm Knight-Ridder Tribune News Wire

Who cares?

Chris Carter does.

Carter is the angst-ridden, overworked executive producer of ``The X-Files'' and now ``Millennium,'' the season's best new TV paragon of paranoia. As you read this, he's writing scripts for both. He has worked on both simultaneously since summer.

``Hopefully, I won't get them confused,'' he told a bunch of TV critics back then.

``It's an amazing juggling act to watch,'' chirped Megan Gallagher, who plays Catherine Black, ``Millennium's'' female lead.

``Parallel universe,'' he quipped.

Nonetheless, he was willing to stop for a few minutes last week to chat on the phone from his office in Vancouver, where the shows are filmed.

Why?

Because the topic was not just TV but the coming millennium and the seeming disarray of the society approaching it. The topic moves him.

``There is an evil creeping into the world,'' Carter said.

``Justice has been stolen from us. In this litigious society, this culture of blame, it is very hard to act altruistically, which is our nature.''

If this all sounds a bit heavy, coming from a guy who makes TV shows, then you haven't been watching TV much lately, and you probably haven't seen ``The X-Files.''

You most certainly haven't seen ``Millennium,'' since it doesn't premiere until 9 tonight on Fox (Channel 11).

At the end of ``The X-Files' '' award-winning titles, ``The truth is out there'' flashes across the screen. At the end of ``Millennium,'' it's, ``Who cares?''

It's not intended in its usual shoulder-shrug meaning, but rather as a question: ``Who are the people who care?''

``Millennium'' is the story of one of them, Frank Black, who is blessed and cursed with the ability to understand the most horrific criminals and thus to capture them. Working with a shadowy handful of like-minded folks, who call themselves the Millennium Group, he tries to seek out and destroy evil.

Black, played by Lance Henriksen, who was the heroic android in ``Aliens,'' has brought his wife, Catherine, and their little girl to Seattle, where he has bought a comfortable old house and painted it bright yellow.

``That yellow is no mistake,'' Carter says. ``He's trying to paint out the darkness. The show will examine an idealized hero and an idealized relationship between a man and a woman, whose problems don't center on personal issues, but on how difficult it is to raise children in this world and make them safe.''

Besides whatever slime is stalking his family - ominous, intimate Polaroid pictures periodically come in the mail - Black will face a grim assortment of adversaries, performing the most gruesome of deeds. In tonight's premiere, young men are buried alive, half-naked women bathed in blood. It is a dark, scary and riveting production.

But ``the reason for the show is not the darkness,'' Carter says. ``The reason is the light at its center, this man, Frank Black, who is acting heroically in a world and in a society that I believe does not promote heroism.''

The millennium is a hot topic these days - not surprisingly.

``It's a huge date,'' says Carter, who just had his own big date. He turned 40 last Sunday. ``No matter what your religious beliefs, or how apathetic you are, you can't help but be reflective forward or backward as we approach.''

Carter faces tough critics in the likes of Harold Bloom, however. Self-appointed (perhaps justifiably) ultimate authority on Western literature from Homer to Hemingway, Bloom has been moved to write a book: ``Omens of Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams and Resurrection.''

Television, it's not. In fact, it decries the ``debased'' and ``commercialized'' use of millennial images, evidenced, for instance, in TV's current preoccupation with angels.

Bloom disdains the popular culture; Carter is one of its focal points.

``Commercializing of these images, and of this time generally, helps us to understand it and interpret it,'' Carter protests in rebuttal to Bloom's haughty gaze.

Carter says he knows a little about Bloom. ``His life experience and mine are quite different, but our feelings toward the millennium probably would be more alike.''

A born-and-bred Southern Californian, Carter landed a screenwriting job at Walt Disney Pictures in his late 20s. Bloom, 66, signed into the ivy-covered halls of Yale at about the same time in his life.

Carter believes that light can outshine the darkness, even in times of legendary upheaval.

``Millennium'' posits that the coming of 2000 is moving creepheads and crazies out of the woodwork and into the spotlight, spurred not necessarily by any organization, but simply by the collected power of 2,000 years of end-of-the-world prophesies.

Frank and the Millennium Group seek to limit the chaos that the criminals crave. Catherine seeks to prevent criminal minds from forming in the first place.

``She'll have a much bigger role than revealed in the premiere,'' Carter says. ``She and Frank work at two ends of the spectrum. She's a clinical social worker. He's trying to catch the people who didn't receive help.''

They're both responding to the failure of the social safety net, Carter says.

``I'm not trying to deliver a big signpost marquee message with `Millennium,' but these ideas have to resonate in order for the show to be timely. ... If this show is just to entertain, then there's something wrong. It better have a philosophy. It better have an idea at its core.''

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Photo

Photo: Members of a top-secret group - played by Chris Ellis, left, Lance Henriksen and CCH Pounder - try to stem end-of-the-millennium hysteria on the new Fox series ``Millennium.''