LemonMacPhisto said:
Is Millennium worth checking out, or is it as terrible as the 4400?
While I find your general approach in this and other threads dirty, obnoxious and harrassing, I would say that Millennium's first season is incredibly strong from the get-go. The pilot is a bit heavy and the family drama gets considerably better a few more episodes in, but it's a very well-crafted show in that first season with great acting, excellent dialogue and overall writing -- all helped with a massive budget from Fox.
I would also add that in terms of real world implications, Millennium actually tried to show serial killers as relatable in that they weren't one-dimensional characters all the time, but complex, sympathetic and guilt-ridden, showing that guilt isn't enough to stop people. Murderers are not so different from "civilized people" and that we all can snap in the wrong circumstances and upbringing. I think it's tremendously important in a culture (here and abroad) in which people are so ready to take out their hatred toward those in prison.
However, there was an element of incorporating "evil" with which I was not comfortable because it appeals to the worst kinds of thinking in our society -- of writing people and their treatment off as pointless because they're "evil". There was also a sensationalistic thread of millennial prophesy (it was the late '90s) as behind the supposed increasing depravity in society. This is largely a myth right wing conservatives have been proclaiming with the empty mantra of "family values" over big government, while ignoring the suffering of blacks and their celebrated lynchings in the supposedly simpler times, or refusing to fund essential programs for the poor, which only leads to more violent crime. It's a minor element in most episodes and I prefer to just ignore it.
I don't think Chris Carter would have written the show with these elements nowadays, aside from the fact it's past the year 2000. He has a strongly liberal critical approach to evaluating American society that runs throughout The X-Files, touching on themes and events from Watergate, Vietnam's atrocities and the ill-treatment of its veterans, and WWII atrocities. He'd know this not the time to be satisfying ourselves with simplistic notions of "evil" to explain conflict in the world.
While The 4400 had and continues to have problems with budgets affecting casting and effects, it's vision is far superior, and it has grown into something incredibly moving and insightful in Seasons 3 and the latter 2 thirds of Season 4. In contrast, Millennium seriously declined, as Fox destroyed a subtle, interesting show through new heads Morgan and Wong in Season 2. They made it simplistic, preposterously conspiratorial, and melodramatic; the dialogue and character motivations just became silly and obvious. There were only a few good episodes by other writers. Season 3 was mostly embarrassing as well, as an exhausted Carter and Spotnitz wrote some of the worst scripts of that season.
The 4400, in the end, is a much better and more important show in its spirit of conveying the nature of humanity (no good and evil or easy answers to ethical dilemmas) and the issues of our time, but it's craft isn't always as subtle. In its first season, Millennium is amazing, more refined, and has beautifully dark ideas and dialogue.
Hope they keep Gillian's hair long for the movie. 
It's coming! 
