I was digging around my dusty old home VHS collection and discovered I'd taped many more episodes of this underrated late 90s weird dark drama series than I remembered. The show holds up pretty well and some eps, like The Owls and The Hand of St. Sebastian are more Fortean than much of its sister show The X Files. Wondered if anyone else remembered it, ran in America from fall 1996 - spring 1999.
I certainly remember it. I always enjoyed the X-Files, and when I heard about this show, I did watch a few episodes when they were on UK TV back in the late 90s (as I type this, I realise that the post I'm quoting is from a date much nearer to the time of the show's first showing than it is to today!). I didn't see many episodes, though, so when I was browsing in my local Cex store a couple of years back and saw all three seasons for sale on DVD for about £4 each, I snapped them up, with a view to catching up with the series ASAP.
Well, fast-forward a couple of years to 2020, and I still hadn't got around to watching any of the discs. But as luck would have it, events in March this year suddenly meant that I had a lot of time on my hands, so I persuaded my other half that we might watch a couple of episodes of an evening, 2 or 3 times a week, and maybe we'd get through most of the first season before I was called back into work. A couple of months and 67 episodes later, we found that we'd watched the entire 3 seasons!
Was that the one with Lance Henriksen in it - or am I suffering from False Memory Syndrome?
Exactly so, and although the acting is pretty good from all concerned, he holds the show together pretty much on his own.
I liked the series but it got pretty spotty scheduling and I kept missing chunks, they finally tied it up with an X-files crossover.
That scheduling would probably explain why I only managed to catch a few of the stories, which I now know were all from season 1.
They kept changing the premises of the show.
In S1 Frank Black was a former FBI profiler who moves to Seattle with his family to get away from "the darkness." He possessed a non-psychic empathic faculty that enabled him to see events as whatever godawful serial killer he was hunting that week saw them.
In S2, things got stranger. The Millennium Group, the crime consulting firm he worked with turned out to be a centuries old underground movement divided by a schism between the secularist Owls, believers in a scientific apocalypse and the end-is-near Roosters who expected a theological event at millennium's end.
And in season 3, he was back in the FBI, having come to be extremely suspicious of the the motives and methods of the Millennium Group. His former friend and ally, Peter Watts, has become something of a nemesis, although they reach some sort of rapprochement late in the series.
Apparently there's no DVD set, a damn shame if you ask me. Lance Henriksen said in an interview that he wanted to bring the show to a proper resolution, even if it meant wresting the rights to his character from the tight fists of Chris Carter or News Corps. or whoever owns them.
A proper resolution would have been good, of course. I suspect that Chris Carter would have tried to tell the tale over at least another couple of seasons, but the series was cancelled after season 3, so the X-Files crossover story (mentioned above by Timble) was the only way to attempt to tie things up. It worked up to a point - even to the point of being set around New Year's Eve 1999 - but we still never found out much about the who and the why of the Group themselves, and didn't get to learn whether Frank Black's daughter's powers would become a significant factor.
I utterly HATED that show, I watched it out of loyalty to Chris Carter and quit three episodes in, life's depressing enough thank you Mr C!
Although I did catch one ep that [my hero] Darin Morgan wrote/directed with 4 demons sitting in a coffee shop reminiscing on their exploits - now that was damn funny!
Never mind, it's not for everyone! I thoroughly enjoyed (I
think that's the right word for such a determinedly downbeat show!) the whole series, and was left wanting more. There were only 2 or 3 complete duds in over 60+ episodes, IMO. Season 3 was becoming a lot like the X-Files, though, so I can see why the schedulers might have thought they didn't need both programmes. But yes - the "4 demons" episode (
Somehow, Satan Got Behind Me) was up there with the very best, and very funny to boot, which you couldn't say about many of the episodes.
I'd be interested in the opinions of anyone else who has re-visited this show recently, especially in the last 10 years! Maybe you've watched some or all of it in lockdown? Meanwhile, we've re-started watching the X-Files from season 1. Hopefully I won't get to the end of
that one before I'm back at work...
