“X-Files” creator Chris Carter decided he wanted to do something even darker with his first proper follow-up, and “Millennium” was born. The series followed cult actor Lane Henriksen as Frank Black, a former FBI profiler who now works with a mysterious group called the Millennium Group (led by Terry O’Quinn), in order to avert a major disaster in the year 2000. (In later seasons, the group was exposed as trying to artificially instigate the apocalypse.) The series was unrelentingly bleak, following serial killers and occultists, week in and week out, and also somewhat creatively unstable. After a fairly straightforward first season (punctuated by moments of supernatural weirdness), fellow “X-Files” vets Glen Morgan and James Wong took the series to far stranger and more creatively ambitious places with the second season, which charted the creation of the Millennium Group and introduced more overtly supernatural elements (highlighted by the terrific “Somehow Satan Got Behind Me,” and “Jose Chung’s Doomsday Defense,” which resurrected a fan favorite “X-Files” character, both written by the sublime Darin Morgan), winding up with a season of television as good as the very best of “The X-Files.” Tellingly, after the limp third season, Frank Black was finally put to bed on an episode of “The X-Files” called, of course, “Millennium.”
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