Hacker Cinema
Millennium
1996 · TV series · 3 seasons
Created by Chris Carter
CrimeDramaMysteryScience FictionFantasy
A retired FBI serial-profiler joins the mysterious Millennium Group, a team of underground ex-law enforcement experts dedicated to fighting against the ever-growing forces of evil and darkness in the world.
4 positive1 neutralfrom 5 commenters
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6 comments on Hacker News
besides already recommended Fringe, Millennium and Halt and catch fire I enjoyed at same time as X Files in 90s also new Outer Limits, opening credits were great and episodes are always thought challenging, I'm just rewatching it and still enjoy it, though technical quality is horrible since I think FHD was never released
but if you wanna straight up X Files just based on 50s check out Project Blue Book, it's like retro X Files, you won't get closer than that to X Files
If you enjoy The X-Files, you really should check out Millennium, by the same creator (Chris Carter) and broadcast at roughly the same time.
It's very intense, with an Emmy-deserving performance by star Lance Henriksen (whom you may remember from the movie Aliens). It mixes Christian theology and eschatology, mythology, horror, and serial killers, leavened with delightful humour.
The first season is mostly "serial killer of the week", but is important to establish the characters and long-running story arcs.
The second season is a delight, with some of the best writing of any TV show I know, and a lot of complex situations with no easy answers.
The third season changed (and cheapened) everything, and is only worth watching for completists.
Millennium is still the best spin off, and the episode parodying Scientology is still amazing
Season 2 of Millennium ranks up there with my favourite television ever. Season 1 was mostly "Serial killer of the week" episodes, and Season 3 was clearly the studio trying to make TV as they understood it, and ruining everything. Season 2, though, was quirky, dark, passionate, eerie, theological, and funny.
Reminds me of an unusual and short-lived sci-fi series called Space Above and Beyond; it predates the current trend significantly.
“The series featured a very dark and desaturated color grading, apparently inherited from the cinematography of series such as The X-Files and Millennium, co-produced by the same team, but taken to a greater extreme. The strength of desaturation employed in many scenes reaches the level that makes them almost black and white (quantitatively, the saturation in CIE xy color subspace of a typical scene in Space: Above and Beyond is in the range 0.03–0.15, approximately 1/4 of a typical contemporary film or television program).”
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space:_Above_and_Beyond
As a fan of the "Millennium" Swedish TV miniseries, with a fantastic Noomi Rapace as the original Girl with the Dragon Tattoo[a], I found this piece fascinating.
I knew very little about "Scandinavian Noir," and in fact didn't even think of it as a genre until reading the OP.
Now, I want to read the "Beck" novels and also watch its Swedish TV/film adaptions, if there are any.
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[a] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_(miniseries) -- In my humble opionion, the Swedish TV adaptations of Stieg Larsson's books are much better than the Hollywood movie adaptations, which tend to be much flashier and have more special effects but don't feel or bite quite as hard as the Swedish TV miniseries.