Fox’s Forgotten 3-Part Crime Horror Masterpiece Deserves To Be As Big As True Detective
Laura Hurley has been writing about the entertainment industry for more than twelve years, after a decade as a content producer and editor at CinemaBlend after writing for WhatCulture and Examiner. Attending events like SCAD TVfest and San Diego Comic-Con over the course of her career, she has been immersed in the world of network, streaming, and cable TV.
Some of the most popular shows in television history have been crime dramas, and Law & Order: SVU is even on the verge of airing its 600th episode. That said, one crime show that was nearly universally praised when it premiered in 2014 was HBO's True Detective. Not only was it one of the first modern examples of movie stars coming to the small screen for prestige TV, but True Detective immediately set a high standard that not even future seasons matched. The show that arguably comes the closest in quality actually premiered nearly two decades earlier, on Fox.
Millennium pushed the boundaries on the kinds of crime and horror that could air on network television, years before Hannibal would do so the same on NBC. The drama was created by Chris Carter, the creator and showrunner of The X-Files on the same network. Despite Millennium's high quality, however, it never became the pop culture juggernaut that Carter's other Fox show did in the '90s. Now, almost exactly 30 years after Millennium premiered in 1996, it's all but forgotten.
Lance Henriksen starred as Frank Black, a former FBI agent with the ability to see through the eyes of the killers that he chased. That gave Millennium a slightly more supernatural edge than most crime dramas, and helped amp up the sense of horror during each case of the week. While more procedural than True Detective would be on HBO, Millennium still stands out for producing nearly 70 episodes over the course of three seasons. When it lost steam toward the end of its run, it was largely due to Fox shuffling its lineup rather than the format falling apart.
Millennium Is One Of The Forgotten Masterpieces Of Modern Television
Millennium flew under the mainstream radar even while it was airing in the '90s, despite having what should have been a recipe for success. The crime drama aired during the golden years of some of The X-Files' best episodes, so Chris Carter was a hot commodity for Fox at the time. It was similar enough to David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson's series that there should have been fans overlapping from one show to the other, while still not just coming across as another version of The X-Files.
It even stood out from the pack of other crime dramas of the era, including Law & Order, Homicide: Life on the Street, and NYPD Blue. Unfortunately, the show only ran for three seasons on Fox before being cancelled in 1999, and it has faded into obscurity over the past 27 years. Unlike The X-Files, Millennium hasn't been readily available on streaming services, with DVD box sets being the best way to view the series. In 2025, Carter blamed himself for the drama's early cancellation on the Fail Better with David Duchovny podcast:
Even though I'm really proud of Millennium, I pulled the plug on Millennium too soon because – we can talk about failure – for a show called Harsh Realm that I thought was going to be a hit. I didn't imagine myself doing three shows, so as it works out, I pulled the plug on Millennium.
However, in hindsight, Millennium's biggest failing may have simply been that it premiered on Fox before television was really ready for a show that could so effectively combine crime, horror, and a touch of sci-fi on a weekly basis. Twin Peaks ran into the same kinds of issues earlier in the '90s, despite major tonal differences between the two series.
Even in 2026, shows that span genres while producing numerous solid episodes per season are few and far between. Hannibal arguably came the closest (and even featured Gillian Anderson in a lead role), but network television has never delivered anything quite on par with Millennium over the past three decades.
Chris Carter’s Crime Horror Series Is As Good As True Detective
Millennium might have been a better fit for a premium cable platform, as True Detective would receive in 2014. Even though True Detective's first season, which holds an impressive 92% score among fans on Rotten Tomatoes, only ran for eight episodes, its quality and tone are a surprisingly close match to Millennium. The Fox show even landed on a strong dynamic between two stars thanks to the chemistry between Lance Henriksen and Terry O'Quinn.
Neither of them was nominated for the kinds of awards that Matthew McConaughey and Woody Harrelson were for True Detective, but it's not hard to imagine a Millennium renaissance if the three seasons are ever featured on a major streaming service. It's also worth noting that Millennium achieved a kind of consistency that True Detective never really reached. None of True Detective's subsequent three seasons reached the same kinds of heights, nor did HBO find the same kind of chemistry between co-leads after McConaughey and Harrelson.
Henriksen anchored the Fox series from start to finish, and his willingness to reprise his role as Frank Black on an episode of The X-Files in the seventh season is the only reason why Millennium got any amount of closure after being cancelled. The Millennium crossover wasn't the best episode in The X-Files history, but it was as good an ending as Fox gave Henriksen's show.
Thanks to The X-Files' availability on both Hulu and Pluto, that episode is also the closest that any streaming service has come to featuring Millennium. It never received the acclaim to make its mark on television history, but it was an excellent crime drama from the '90s that may just have been ahead of its time.
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