Millenium - UK first run

[Guest mv666]

Hey guys,

Great to find this forum. I've loved Millenium since it first aired in the UK many moons ago. I was hoping that someone on here would remember how the very first season aired in the UK, though. Was it Channel 4, Sundays at 9pm or 10pm? Or was it the Sci-Fi Channel? It's something that has been bugging me for a good while now. If anyone knows exactly that would be great.

Thanks,

John

[Earthnut]

I feel confident that either Graham (The Old Man) or Libby would know, they live in the UK. I'm in the US>

Welcome mv666. Hope we see you here often.

[Guest mv666]

Thanks Earthnut :) Hopefully I'll find an answer as it's annoying the hell outta me. I used to record them on VHS when they were first on but after getting the DVDs I never used them. Left them in storage for a few years and when I got back they were nowhere to be had. Those and Seinfeld VHS that were taped off telly, too. I like to keep stuff like that for collection/nostalgia purposes. Really miffed that they're gone.

Cheers,

mv

[Libby]

I was sure that info was somewhere on the website but I can't find it.

I didn't watch the first season, but I recall the effort I had to make to find Millennium season 2 episodes on TV to record because they were bounced around all over the timetable, but usually in the early hours of the morning. That was on ITV, and after quite a bit of googling (with lots of false leads) I found this:

https://forums.thedig...p/t-492358.html

Its a shame that Millennium never reached a wider audience over here. ITV spent a fortune on it and then did their usual thing of mucking around with the schedules and ended up putting it on really late and bizarre timeslots. Amazingly its still blamed as being the thing that made ITV stop spending money on American shows.

They showed Millennium on ITV 3 and it was on at 2am in the morning !!

I'm not sure they ever aired season 3. (But by then I'd found out how to download episodes.)

[Guest mv666]

Hey Libby. Thanks for the info. I don't even recall it being on ITV, which now makes me think that I must have first watched series 1 on Sci-Fi. It was definitely a regular slot anyway and from what I remember it replaced some other series that I used to watch at the time - that's why I first checked it out.

Mad that ITV do so much stupid stuff with their scheduling. I used to watched Tour Of Duty many moons ago and that was fired into a late slot as well. Monday nights (or Tuesday mornings, more precisely) at 12:35am, although I do remember fluctuations in that too.

[The Old Man]

Hi

I remember waiting for Millennium to premiere in the UK and I can remember it was on Sky One. I think it may have been Fridays or Sundays at 9pm, both ring a bell. I recall eagerly awaiting it after the teaser trailers appeared back when everyone was so into The X-Files.

It premiered on Sky One, and I remember all of the merchandise that Sky had for the show in their monthly collectible guide that accompanied the monthly Sky Magazine. It had sections in for all the great shows at the time including The X-Files and Star Trek. The Millennium stuff was very cool and all official from Fox. I wish I still had one of those little booklets.

To jog my memory I've looked back at the 2001 news archive on M-TIWWA and in 2001 (I remember posting about this at the time) Sky had the UK broadcast rights to Season 2 but had never screened it. The premiere of Season Three of Millennium on UK Sci-Fi Channel was changed due the tragic events on September 11th. The season 3 opener dealt with a tragic airline accident and so UK Sci-Fi re-scheduled the series by screening Season 3 Episode's 7 & 8 instead. The decision was later made to revert back to the original screening order and Season 3 Episode 1 was screened 02.10.01 at 9pm and again at midnight GMT.

[Guest I Made This]

As far back as I can remember, Millennium debuted on UK tv on Sky one in December of 1996 and ran until June 1997. At that point ITV broadcast the series' first run on UK terrestrial television after having spent around £480,000 per episode on it. The weekend of its debut they aired an admittedly excellent documentary called Millennium:Fact or Fiction which features interviews with Chris Carter and Lance Henriksen. The series itself debuted the following Sunday night at 10pm where it ran for around 12 weeks (Loin Like A Haunting Flame) before it was pulled of the air and did not resume until July 1998. The series, best to my knowledge, was very badly treated on ITV who shunted it around the schedules and who ended up putting it into a grave yard slot on a Thursday night at some stupid time like 12:40am or something like it. Sky One showed the first two season, did not show season three, which, as noted above made its debut on the UK Sci-Fi Channel as it was known at the time. The series now regularly airs on the Horror Channel.

Oh, I also found this, you may want to check it out, it's a feature run by The Telegraph newspaper in the UK which detailed the reaction of critics to the show and its content when ITV first unveiled the show.

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/4703588/Should-they-be-showing-us-this.html#

[Libby]

That's a very interesting article - thanks for posting that link. I collected a large number of published interviews and articles, but I don't recall reading that one. I passed all the articles/interviews I'd collected to someone else who put them up on his/her website. I'll contact them and pass on that link.

I'm not surprised that UK TV couldn't figure out how to deal with MM and ended up dealing with it badly. I got the impression that most executives who make the decisions don't actually look at the show itself, just make decisions based on possible ratings. Possibly they thought they were getting an X-Files offshoot, rather than a show that dealt with the darker side of life.

[Guest I Made This]

You're very welcome Libby. I came across it this week when looking for Millennium articles and it reminded me very much of some of the controversy over the content of the series when it began. Clearly in the UK Sky and ITV thought they were getting their hands of a 'new' X Files. Sky scheduled the series at 10pm, immediately after The X Files whilst in the week leading up to its Sunday night debut, ITV ran a week of programmes related to UFO phenomena with interludes hosted by Tom Baker...even though, of course, Millennium had nothing to do with UFOs and wasn't classifiable as Sci-Fi.

[Guest Cigar Burn]

I remember watching it at the young age of 16!

First season was sky one on a Sundays night, second season was sky 1 on a Thursday night.

I remember me and my dad sitting there watching the last episode of S2 and then the voice over saying 'The next series will be back next year' and him saying to me 'didn't they just kill everyone?!'