Millennium (1996-1999)

Twenty-five years ago, last Monday, Millennium aired for the first time. A show from the creator of The X Files, it wasn’t really a spin-off, but it ultimately shared the same fictional universe. It was a darker, bleaker, vision of the conspiracy theory reality full of serial-killers and evil creeping up on the world. As a show it struggled to find a coherent story-line, and it died out as the actual year 2000 came, rendering the threat of the actual millennium moot.

The realization that a quarter century has come and gone since the mid-to-late nineties is hard to swallow. The passage of time is something we dull to, until we realize that so much has happened as we just lived.

But we haven’t “just lived” in that quarter-century. We have progressed and developed in our thinking. And, not progressed in the sense of progress. The crazy conspiracies and theories that were fun fiction in the safety of the nineties—between the cold war and the war on terror—have come home to roost. Not that they have proven to be true, but rather that we have decided to embrace them. These ideas were fun and a diversion to entertain because they were so obviously fictions. Today they are truly scary because people have lost the capacity to evaluate them and are being manipulated by evil men who want to control, exploit, and use the masses for their own gain.

So, don’t go seeking out Millennium. Don’t even go back to enjoy the much better X Files. Most people can’t handle such sophisticated fiction these days.