How Long to Watch “Millennium”?

Created by Chris Carter of X-Files fame, the Fox sci-fi crime thriller series Millennium starred Lance Henriksen as Frank Black, a former Washington, D.C.-based FBI agent who in the opening season returned to his native Seattle with wife Catherine (Megan Gallagher) and daughter Jordan (Brittany Tiplady). Gifted with a sixth sense enabling him to "see" through the eyes of dangerous criminals, thereby helping him keep one step ahead of those criminals in order to stop their reigns of terror, Frank utilized his talent on behalf of the Millennium Group, a secret organization purportedly dedicated to thwarting serial killers and also preparing humanity in case one of the various "end of the world" scenarios floating around turned out to be true. Frank also offered his services as a criminal profiler to his old friend Lt. Bob Bletcher (Bill Smitrovich), a Seattle homicide detective. Catherine provided indirect assistance to her husband in her capacity as a counselor to crime victims and trauma patients. During the series' first season, Frank dealt mainly with straightforward murder cases, but after the bizarre death of Bob Bletcher, he devoted more and more of his time to cases involving the supernatural. In these, he was occasionally aided by Millennium Group representative Peter Watts (Terry O'Quinn). Later on, the pressures of their work led Frank and Catherine to separate, whereupon Frank and his daughter Jordan (who had apparently inherited vestiges of her dad's "gift") were left alone in their Seattle home. Replacing Bletcher as Frank's police liaison was Det. Bob Geibelhouse (Stephen James Lang), while Frank's new Millennium Group contact was Lara Means (Kristen Cloke). It gradually dawned on Frank that the Millennium Group was not as beneficent and altruistic as it first appeared, and in fact may have been using Frank's psychic talents as part of a campaign to take over the world. Things got curiouser and curiouser as the series progressed, culminating in an apocalyptic second-season finale in which a deadly virus was decimating the populace, killing Catherine and rendering Frank insane. When Millennium was unexpectedly renewed for a third season, the producers hastily "re-invented" the events of season two, so that the virus was not nearly as all-consuming as it had been cracked up to be; also Frank had completely recovered from his mental breakdown (many of the horrific sights he and the audience had witnessed were written off as "delusions"), and had moved to the Washington, D.C.