S01 E09 - Troy L. Foreman Interview

Following on from last weeks episode on the expanded universe of Millennium, Dylan is once again joined by Liam, as well as one of the producers of the documentary 'Millennium After the Millennium' Troy L. Foreman. They discuss the back to Frank Black movement, the documentary and of course the show itself. 

Artwork provided by Artfully Liam https://www.instagram.com/artfullyliam/

Watch the documentary here  https://www.amazon.co.uk/Millennium-after-Lance-Henriksen/dp/B07V1Q64YM

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:44

Welcome back to To Hot for TV. We are the podcast that looks at all things expanded universe. Now, last week you will have heard me and Mr. Artfully Liam talk all about the comics of Millennium and indeed the brilliant documentary after the Millennium. And I'm once again joined by Liam. So say hello, Liam.

SPEAKER_04 1:02

Uh hello to the listeners that believe I am still card Liam. So hello.

SPEAKER_03 1:07

And this time we're also joined by one of the executive producers of the Brilliant Documentary After the Millennium, which we talked about last week. It's Troy Foreman. Troy, welcome.

SPEAKER_02 1:18

Brilliant documentary. I like that. I like that. Hello, everyone.

SPEAKER_04 1:22

We start well, Troy. You know, we start it's like a smooth, it's like a smooth coffee blend. We're starting well.

SPEAKER_03 1:30

Uh no, thank you so much for joining us. We said a lot of very lovely things about your documentary last week. We had a great time watching it. It's a brilliant documentary, and I hope that uh anybody who listened to it that hadn't seen the documentary goes and finds it and watches it because it's it's a proper love letter to the show. But I wanted to start off and just to ask you like, how did you discover Millennium? Because I remember it getting a big push at the time after the sort of the initial X-Files Mania and things like that, but it didn't make it to the UK for quite a while. So when did you sort of pick up on the show?

SPEAKER_02 2:02

Well, I was always a Lance Hendrickson fan, first and foremost. He's like my favorite actor. And um, for some people who are old school, back in the day we used to get this magazine called TV Guide every week. And um, every fall issue had had a big fall issue where it would talk about the upcoming shows for the new fall season. And one of the shows it mentioned was Millennium, it's a nice write-up about the show. And I I couldn't have been more excited because again, I'm a big Lance fan, and of course, Chris Carter was involved. So they had me from the get-go. So that's how I found about the show.

SPEAKER_03 2:34

Amazing. And so what was did the show grab you right from episode one? What was the appeal of the show and the character of Frank Black?

SPEAKER_02 2:41

Well, first of all, I'm into that kind of the serial killer kind of stuff. I'm into that. I've watched a lot of true crime documentaries. So this show was like right up my alley, and I remember watching the pilot. And after the pilot went off the air, I sat there in my chair for about five or ten minutes and didn't say anything. I was just blown away by the pilot. And I remember reaching out to a couple friends the following day, and they were like, You're excited about a show about serial killers? What the hell is wrong with you?

SPEAKER_04 3:10

We've all been there.

SPEAKER_02 3:11

But yeah, yeah. The show grabbed me from moment when I thought the pilot, to this day, I still think the pilot's one of the greatest episodes of television I've ever seen.

SPEAKER_04 3:18

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_03 3:19

Yeah, it's it's a brilliant pilot and a great in to set up the series. So you're behind the um the Back to Frank Black movement. So could you tell us a little bit about how that got started?

SPEAKER_02 3:30

Well, honestly, I I didn't start it. Uh back in 2008, I was doing a uh pop culture podcast, and I realized that the um anniversary of Millennium was coming up, so I wanted to do something about the show since I love the show so much. And I just started researching um or looking for fans who were fans of the show as well. And I came across Back to Frank Black. I think they'd been running for about a year, maybe a little less. So I just reached out to one of the guys from the um the uh fan campaign, a guy named James McLean, and I invited him to come on the podcast. And he and I did a podcast together talking about the show and realized we had some really good chemistry and played off each other really well. And I said, Hey, I'm thinking about starting a millennium podcast. Would you like to be a co-host or just come on every once in a while? And that's how it started. And from there, I ended up joining the campaign.

SPEAKER_03 4:23

Amazing. And so your podcast looked at the entire series of Millennium Podcast.

SPEAKER_02 4:27

Well, initially we had talked about doing an episode by episode kind of thing. But I thought to myself, so many podcasts have done that before. Not even Millennium Podcasts, but just podcasts have done that before in general. So we just decided to do whatever, whatever came our way, what we thought about talking about, we would do. Every once in a while, we would do an episode review, but mostly we wanted to interview the cast and crew. That was our big thing.

SPEAKER_03 4:51

And so what cast and crew did you get involved on the podcast?

SPEAKER_02 4:55

Oh, God, we've had everybody on the podcast. I think the very first interview we did was with um, and I'm not gonna remember his name, he played the judge in season one. Oh early episodes of season one. Marshall Bell. Marshall Bell.

SPEAKER_05 5:10

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 5:10

He was one of the first podcasts we did, and um he was really, really cool. And then from there, I because you know, I had never done anything like this before, like doing interviews or you know, reaching out to agents and publicists. I knew nothing about that stuff. But you kind of learn as you go. So the better I got at doing that, the better people we got on the show. So we've had pretty much everyone on the podcast except Terry O'Quinn, CCH Pounder, and like a couple other, but all the main people we've had on the show.

SPEAKER_03 5:42

And so from there, I guess the evolution from the podcast of meeting those people, you know, covering the the width and breadth of the show led to this documentary. Tell me a little bit more about how that came about and sort of the the inception of it.

SPEAKER_02 5:57

Well, actually, you know, the podcast actually led to the book Back to Frank Black A Return to Chris Carter's Millennium.

SPEAKER_04 6:03

There you go, Lats.

SPEAKER_02 6:04

Yeah, yeah, there you go. That's it. Yeah. Um the podcast led to that book. You know, we'd been doing the campaign for a while, and we knew from day one it was gonna be an uphill battle to get Fox to consider bringing the show back. So we, you know, we knew it was gonna be a difficult thing. So we were kind of winding down the podcast, the uh campaign, because you can only do so much. You know what I mean? Millennium was never gonna be, it was never X-Files. X-Files is just, you know, on another level. And unfortunately, Millennium never reached that level, but you know, there are hardcore fans like us out there who still love the show. So we were kind of winding down, and I thought to myself, what could we do to um leave with a bang? And initially we came up with doing a comic book. So we started working on that, and then that kind of morphed into me and James talking, and we're like, we have a ton of interviews here. Um, let's do something with those interviews. And we ended up meeting um Brian A. Dixon and Adam Chamberlain, who were running a uh independent book company called Fourth Horseman Press, and they were big fans. Brian used to run the website uh Millennial Abyss. I don't know if you ever heard of that.

SPEAKER_05 7:10

Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, back in the day.

SPEAKER_02 7:12

Yeah, Brian ran that website. So, you know, we ended up talking to those guys and ended up coming up with the idea for the book. So we did the book and released it around 2013, and um, all the money we made on that book go go went to charity, Lansa's favorite charity, uh, Children of the Night. And from there, I thought that was gonna be it. But then again, me being a nerd that I am, I was like, ah, there's something else we can do. We can we can still still do something else pretty big. And that's when I came up with the idea for the documentary after watching the Firefly documentary. I don't know if you've ever seen that. Yeah. And then there was a couple other documentaries I watched, and I'm like, those are cool fan documentaries, but if they're really fan documentaries, if if that makes sense. Like a little corny.

SPEAKER_04 7:56

Yeah. They didn't really have that broadstream, kind of mainstream crossover. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 8:01

It was a lot of people who went, oh my god, I love Firefly. It's so great. Okay, I get it. You love Firefly, but I really want to listen to the cast and them talk about the show kind of thing. And that's when I came up with the idea for the for the documentary, and then I took it from there.

SPEAKER_03 8:15

Great. And so do you have a background in in filmmaking or video production or anything like that?

SPEAKER_02 8:21

Zero.

SPEAKER_03 8:23

So how do you go about sort of you've got this idea of this thing you want to do, but you know, you've got the knowledge and you've got the will to do it. But how do you go about assembling a documentary with no sort of previous experience?

SPEAKER_02 8:35

I picked up a book called Documentary for Dummies. No.

SPEAKER_04 8:39

I think I've got that in its second printer.

SPEAKER_02 8:42

The great thing about, you know, reaching out to these publicists and agents, you get to learn you get to know these people and you get to, you know, you talk to them off and on. And every once in a while they'll have a client that you want to, you know, you want to kind of talk to outside of Millennium. And there was a couple people I reached out to that were producers and had done documentaries, and I just started picking their brains. And I just started doing research. And I researched for like a year and some change, learning about documentaries, making documentaries, the business behind it, the money, the all the craziness. And um, I was like, you know, I think we can do this. And that's when I started assembling the team. I'd initially reached out to this director, um, who I was pretty excited about because he had a little bit of a little bit of juice behind him. He had some really pretty decent credits on IMDb. And after about two months of doing prep, pre-prep for the doc, I realized that he was more into meeting people from the show so he could push some of his own projects.

SPEAKER_05 9:41

Right.

SPEAKER_02 9:42

So I kind of just like stepped away from him. And then I met uh I came across a guy named Jason Morris, who um had done a uh Millennium, uh, what do you call it? Web series called Millennium Apocalypse.

SPEAKER_04 9:56

Where he got his wife to play Jordan.

SPEAKER_02 9:58

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I reached out to him and I said, hey man, I'm thinking about doing a documentary. It seems that you're a fan of the show, which he obviously was. And then he and I just started talking. And over the years, I'd met so many fans from the show that I reached out to a couple guys, Andrew Shelton, who was a guy who I would always see enter our contest and you know, retweet our stuff. I reached out to him. And then Jason knew a guy named Um Matthew Gatsos who did the music for the score for the doc. And then there was another guy named Matthew Ingalls who had sent in the actual the cover of Back to Frank Black is Matthew Ingalls' artwork. And I just remember seeing that, and I was like, we're gonna use this for something later on down the road. So I just kept it to myself and I just put it away. And then perfect, it was it was the perfect cover for the book.

SPEAKER_03 10:44

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 10:45

That's the genesis of how everything got started.

SPEAKER_03 10:47

And then presumably, like you'd spoken to a lot of the contributors before on the podcast. Did you have like a sort of hit list of who you definitely had to get involved, who you'd like to get involved, and piece together the puzzle and the story that way?

SPEAKER_02 11:02

I thought you know, we we thought if we can't get the big three, then I don't know if there's really a reason to do the doc. So that was Lance, Chris, and Frank.

SPEAKER_05 11:10

Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 11:11

We couldn't get those three. I didn't think the doc was worth doing. But the minute I reached out to them, they immediately all came back to me and said, Absolutely, and whatever you need from us, you just let us know.

SPEAKER_03 11:21

Awesome. Where do you think Millennium sits in the careers of the big three? And the the documentary, it's sort of warts and all. That's not to say it was like a terrible production or anything like that, but the show evolves and there's a lot of behind-the-scenes stuff that means the show has to evolve that you cover. But like, how do you think they feel about the show in the grand sort of span of their careers?

SPEAKER_02 11:42

I gotta tell you, to be honest, everyone we've ever talked to about this show, it's been a highlight in their career. Everyone. Um, it's interesting. A lot of times we talk to people on the podcast, and you know, they've done other things beside Millennium. So, of course, we want to talk about their other stuff and promote anything they got coming up, but they always want to bring it back to Millennium. It was a special time for them. And especially for Lance, Lance loved that character, Frank Black, and he literally told us, he called me up one day and he's like, Hey man, how's the documentary going? I'm like, we're still in pre-production. He's like, Whatever you need for me, you just call me.

SPEAKER_05 12:20

Fantastic.

SPEAKER_02 12:21

If I'm available, I'm gonna help you. We want I want to get this off the ground because I want people to more people to know about Frank Black in the show.

SPEAKER_04 12:28

What I liked about the documentary, Troy, was that I think we both can agree, and Dylan from the the episodes that he's seen as well, that the show very much evolves over the three seasons. In fact, I would almost go to say it's it's effectively three different uh television productions that are kind of under the idea of it. And I did like the way that in the documentary you mirrored that story. So the individual chapters to do with the show, so your initial stuff and of course the redox that you did with Bill Schmitrovitch at the beginning compared that to the stuff with Claire towards the end, and that I found that the documentary actually mirrored the journey of the show. And what I was wondering was when you were doing that journey, what did you rediscover about your relationship with Millennium that you might not have realized before that kind of detailed look at it? Maybe areas that the podcast hadn't mind.

SPEAKER_02 13:19

You know, I think it's just a simple fact that it just made me appreciate the show even more, talking with everyone from the show. And you're right about the the three different the three seasons being three different like chapters in a book, kind of. Um, and we wanted to mirror that, and you hit the you hit it 100%. We wanted to mirror that with the documentary. So if you know we've picked certain select people from from each season of the series. I wish we could have more, there were some more people we wanted to talk to, but I think we kind of covered that. And the fact that you say that makes me feel pretty good that we we we actually did that.

SPEAKER_04 13:52

I know that in my discussion with Dylan, he actually noticed going into the documentary Raw, and he was like, Well, this is quite interesting how we've actually got licensed clips from 20th century in the documentary, as composed to a lot of kind of contemporaneous documentaries at the time. The only one I can think of that had that sort of access to the original source material, as it was, was the Irish Steffen Bear Deep Space Nine one that I think was done about 2018, 2019. But again, that was mainly affiliated with cast and crew. So I think it's kind of very much a testament to their trust and belief in you, Jason, and the others on the project, that you know you had access to that source material. Because I do think it adds to the uh adds to the production.

SPEAKER_02 14:33

I'll I'll be honest with you. When we initially started putting this together, we were like, yeah, it would be really cool to have some clips in the show and da-da-da. And I was like, okay, let me reach out to Fox Legal and see what they say, what what it would cost to do something like that. So of course, over the years I've I've got my little birdies at Fox. I had my little birdies, so I reached out to a couple people and they put me in touch with the legal department and they sent me this document. And they were saying, okay, so if you want to use 10 seconds of a clip from the show, it's gonna cost you this much. If you want to use a still from the show, it's gonna cost you this much. And let's just say one still costs more than what we put into the doc. Let's put it that way.

unknown 15:14

Okay, okay.

SPEAKER_02 15:15

It was expensive, it was super expensive. So we kind of got depressed.

SPEAKER_05 15:19

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 15:20

And I'm like, I was like, what about fair use? Is there is there anything we can do with fair use? So we reached out to a lawyer who actually ended up being the lawyer for the documentary. Okay, and um, he explained to us fair use and what we could possibly do. So we had to only use a certain amount of the clips from the show. So if you notice they're real short clips.

SPEAKER_04 15:38

Yeah, very much.

SPEAKER_02 15:39

Miss Lead our clips were longer, but we couldn't do that because of fair use. So the clips are really short, but I still think they add to what the documentary was all about.

SPEAKER_04 15:47

Absolutely. I think that actually works to its to its betterment because you're effectively using those short punctuations to illustrate what the principals are saying on screen at the top.

SPEAKER_02 15:57

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 15:58

Does Fox have an official viewpoint on the documentary?

SPEAKER_02 16:02

Not heard anything from Fox.

SPEAKER_03 16:04

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 16:05

It's interesting because I know they know we exist because there's been multiple times over the years where they've emailed someone from Fox has emailed me and said, Can you guys stop sending letters to, you know, to Fox about bringing Millennium back? Can you stop doing this? Can you stop doing this? And we've never really gotten in any kind of trouble with Fox. I think one time they told us to take something down. But other than that, we've really hadn't had any issues with Fox, and I've heard nothing from them about the doc. But again, we we hired a lawyer, a really good lawyer, and he he went through the doc like multiple times and said, you know, this this is safe to put out there. You guys should be okay. Blah, blah, blah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 16:43

I guess when it's sort of unofficial, they they can't they can't be seen to sort of condone it because it opens too many floodgates for other things that perhaps, you know, people who did wouldn't take the care that you've taken. But at the same time, it when, you know, it's not officially licensed, so they can't they can't wave the flag about it. But people in Fox must have seen it and seen it as the sort of love letter to the show that it is, I think.

SPEAKER_02 17:06

Well, thank you for naming that, because we were really uh conscious about not overstepping with the doc, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_05 17:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 17:14

And putting something out there respectful to the cast and crew, but also being mindful of Fox and the legal ramifications and stuff like that, taking advantage of. Because we really could have done a lot more, but we chose, you know, what do you want to- We don't want to go down that road. We want to end up with dealing with Fox or whoever owns the show at this time. I think it's Disney now. But yeah, we were really, you know, aware of that when we did the document.

SPEAKER_04 17:38

It did strike me as quite entertaining because looking at what you were allowed to, quote unquote, by litigation, kind of incorporate into the documentary, and you look at contemporaneous of that now with the issues that you know we touched upon uh in the dock and that we've seen since about why the show isn't on streaming for a larger audience. And I suspect, you know, looking into what was kind of said explicitly and i implicitly in the doc that it is to do with a lot of licensing stuff, that the heavy use of music and stuff inside the show. I mean, I can think of several Morgan and Wong episodes that completely orbit around the use of a Bobby Darren track, or you know, it's it's all the music's almost another character in it.

SPEAKER_02 18:20

Yeah, the the big the big hurdle has been music. Right. That's the big hurdle. Um I I do know years ago, I had like again, I had some birdies at Fox, and I know there was a meeting they had, the executives, and they were talking about some of their um franchises.

SPEAKER_05 18:37

Okay.

SPEAKER_02 18:37

And I know they had brought Millennium up as to possibly maybe do a reboot or bring it back, or I know there was talk about that show, LA Law and a couple other shows. And for some reason it just didn't go anywhere after that. I know they let La La Land Records license the music to the show, so they released two sets of um scores for Mark Snow. I know they did that, but yeah, I I know there was talk about Millennium years ago about doing something, but it just kind of fell off from what I was told.

SPEAKER_03 19:09

That's a shame. Um, do you think there are more stories to be told in that universe? Do you think, as you say, being a reboot, we looked at the comic series that, you know, there's the scope for, I guess, audio plays, all sorts of things, or bringing back the show or a a different version, uh a continuation. Do you think there's more scope to tell stories in the Millennium universe?

SPEAKER_02 19:28

Absolutely. And if you talk to, you know, when we talk to Claire, Claire has always said, you know, Lance and I, we we've always discussed, you know, Claire's deep in the the Millennium group, and she's actually helping helping Frank Black. And there's there's definitely stories there. And also there could be a story where Jordan now, because we know she has some kind of ability, Jordan could be in the millennium or working for the FBI and Lance could be like her mentor or whatever. There's still tons of stories. And even Chris Carter told me that. He's like, I what bugs me about Carter is like he told me, he's like, hey man, I know how to bring the show back. And I'm like, really? Well, what are you gonna do? He's like, Yeah, I'm not gonna tell you. He goes, but I know exactly how I would bring the show back. And he goes, There's more and more, there's more stories to tell. So absolutely.

SPEAKER_03 20:16

Amazing. So back to the doc. Was it important to you to sort of make this accessible for someone who's perhaps not too familiar with Millennium in terms of telling that story? Because you mentioned earlier there's lots of documentaries that are quite fan ish. And there's always a danger, I think, as fans. We've all got this gene to go, oh, I want to concentrate on this specific theme in this episode and this, you know, what happened with the making of that episode. But was it important to go, we need to get the whole series and we need to make it, we need to tell a good story at the heart of it that can appeal to anybody?

SPEAKER_02 20:48

Yeah, it was really difficult to walk that line to please the hardcore fans, but also have a doc that could bring in new fans and not ruin too much about the show. It was hard to walk that line. We had a writer at Joe Madre, who was the writer of the doc. It was it was interesting. We had we had we had an idea where we wanted to go. We did all our interviews, we were happy with the interviews. Jason and I sit down, start watching the interviews, and we're like, crap, now we gotta come up with the narrative. We didn't really think about that at the beginning. Shit, what are we gonna do? And Joe Madre comes in who helped Lance co-write his uh autobiography, Not Bad for Human. And Joe's just an incredible writer. And he came in and he just took what we had and he put it all together and made it something accessible to the new people, but also hopefully uh a love letter to the hardcore fans. So I'm I'm hoping we walked that tight rope. But there are some people who say we didn't, some people think we did. I mean, what are you gonna do? We we tried to do our best. What are you gonna do?

SPEAKER_04 21:48

I just wanted to follow on from what Dylan's question was there and say were there for you any heartbreaking personal omissions that you thought, that's great, we got that, we're just gonna, it's just not gonna go. It just sits outside of the narrow. Stuff that you really sit there and you thought, man, that that's heartbreaking, but it doesn't work.

SPEAKER_02 22:06

You know, not really. Okay. Um, I think we we got what we wanted. I I'm hoping people who are new to the show will come in and watch it and go, oh wow, that's that seems like a pretty freaking cool show. Let's go out and well, good luck finding the DVDs. Let's go out and see if we can find it somewhere or borrow from a friend of ours. I don't think there was anything that we we we missed. I don't think. Yes, people that we didn't get in the dock that we'd love to have in the dock, unfortunately, but schedules didn't work out. You know, we only had a short window to shoot interviews, and of four C schedules didn't work out.

SPEAKER_03 22:40

Well, I I'm someone that's relatively new to Millennium, and I found it a very accessible documentary and got you know got me excited to watch more more of the show. So it definitely works on that level. And I know Liam is a hardcore fan, and it works for him too. So I think you you've you've trod that line perfectly.

SPEAKER_02 22:57

Well admin, that makes us feel good then.

SPEAKER_04 22:59

It was really difficult trying to give Dylan a certain selection of episodes. So the dexterity of the show without kind of getting him lost in all of like the mythology and the milieu. So, you know, your your man kind of jumped from Gehenna uh to somehow Satan got behind me, you know, to show that you know, and he was sitting there, he was messaging me going, this show can do anything, it's it's fucking amazing.

SPEAKER_02 23:24

Well, Dylan, let me ask you a quick question. What did you think of the pilot when you watched it?

SPEAKER_03 23:27

Uh I thought it was an amazing bit of television, and I think I I the pilot is something that I think I saw at the time. I was just like, okay, this sets up everything the show wants to be. It's mysterious, it's dark. You get Frank, you get his home life, and you're like, okay. I mean, it's it's something that I took away from the documentary. Lance says, Where's the warmth or something like that within in this script? And they go, the yellow. Where's the light? Where's the light? Where's the light? Yeah, exactly. And that was something that I pulled straight from that first episode of like they moved to this yellow house, and I'm like, okay, so the home life is gonna sort of be the sort of withdrawal from the darkness of the episodes. But it's like it's such a a brilliant pilot, and like I defy anybody to watch that and not want to watch more of the show. It's just like I mean, I keep saying brilliant, but that's all I can say. Uh, and I'm uh while I've jumped around for the purposes of my own podcast and things like that, I am gonna sit down and do the whole the the whole run of Millennium.

SPEAKER_02 24:23

Oh, yeah, you should, yeah, definitely.

SPEAKER_04 24:25

I have warned him, Troy, how hard it's gonna be to get the DVDs.

SPEAKER_02 24:29

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 24:30

I've got my I've got my ways, don't worry. Okay. How long did it take you to shoot, edit, write? Because I know you sort of you sort of wrote it in after you'd done the interviews. How long did it take to sort of the from pre-production through to the end of post-production on the on the documentary?

SPEAKER_02 24:47

I think it took about a little over uh about a year to do everything. The interview section was pretty interesting because the great thing about the show is either the cast members were in the LA area or they were in Vancouver.

SPEAKER_05 25:02

Right.

SPEAKER_02 25:02

So we only had two places to actually go. The only other interview outside of that was when we interviewed John Kennis Muir, I flew down to uh North Carolina for like a day to shoot his interview. But um, yeah, it took about a year. Uh uh, it's interesting. When Jason and I were, we were going through this, you know, Jason would get the notes, he would make a cut, he'd send it back to us, we'd watch it again, he'd we'd make notes, send them back, send it back to him, he'd do another cut. And there was one point where he came, he said to me, he's like, Man, he goes, I love the show, but I'm getting kind of tired of it right now. Constantly cutting and watching this and watching clips and da-da. He's like, I'm kind of getting tired of the show right now. We we all kind of got a little burnt out, but you know, once once we saw the final project, we were like, okay, I think we did something pretty cool here for guys who've never done a documentary before.

SPEAKER_04 25:52

That passion translates, actually. And as you said, Troy, you watch a really fine line, it's a groundswell between it's it's a it is a fan documentary, but it's not a documentary pitched for fans. It's very inclusive. And I think you tell a greater story there, not about just the show, but about where television was in the 1990s at that point as well. Because I look back on it now and I think, well, I I I struggle to think of a time where a creator would be given such narrative latitude to do something like Millennium, you know. It was in the wake of Fincher 7, you know, before the Mind Hunter Redux. And to do something that dark on what effectively one of the big four networks, I I can't think of a time since that a creator's had that much latitude, really.

SPEAKER_02 26:37

Correct. Yeah, I mean, he got all that juice from the X-Files, and they were happy to reach out to him and say, hey, can you come up with something else? It's interesting, that first season, if you're not prepared for it, that's a dark, dark season of television.

SPEAKER_05 26:50

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 26:51

I mean, of course, that show would fit into today's television landscape, no problem. But back then, that was a hard watch for a lot of people, and I think that's what kind of hurt the show moving forward. Was that I mean, I love the first season, I think it's brilliant, but it's dark.

SPEAKER_04 27:07

Yeah, do you know what I find with the X-Files? You can sit there, maybe watch two or three of them on the go, enjoy it, you know. With Millennium, I really soak it in. I can only watch one at a time. You know, I can't sit there and watch something like Luminary and then go off and do two or three more episodes after that. It kind of needs time to percolate. And I think the documentary does a very good job of that, you know. It allows you to marinade in the the different types of um of stories of the show. I just have a vivid memory of, you know, that first season and how, you know, cynical and kind of world weird with the yellow house as the beacon of lights and hope. And then watching the beginning and the end, you know, and all of a sudden we're talking about comets and Dodge Doug Hutchinson's got a stick-on beard, and it's just, you know, you're sitting there going, Wow, this is a totally new take on it. Totally. I can imagine for you, you know, what that sort of watching that live, you know, as a viewer as you were going through it and seeing that evolution because you came to it live at the time, didn't you?

SPEAKER_02 28:04

Yeah, I watched it from the very first episode live, yeah. Every every every every week, every Friday.

SPEAKER_04 28:09

It was really hard to get here. It aired on one of the um the main four networks, ITV, and it was like Sunday night at 10 o'clock, and they heavily trailed it as you know, from the creator of the X-Files. And after about two or three weeks of people being, you know, thrown into furnace ovens and uh, you know, having their eyes and lips kind of sewn shut, gradually this broadcast time Troy got later and later in the evening. And by the time we got to like the George, I think it was somewhere like quarter to one in the morning.

SPEAKER_03 28:42

I think I think that's a lot because the X-Files is all about what you don't see. But but with Millennium, it it sort of, I guess Carter's got this confidence from the X-Files that he's gonna go, right, I'm gonna go out there and show you the sort of graphic nature of what we're dealing with here. And I think uh which again, you've got to differentiate it because you don't want it to be like a watered-down X-Files or something like that. You've got to give the show its own identity and its own stamp, which again you get from the pilot straight away.

SPEAKER_02 29:10

I think the thing about the X-Files and Millennium is, you know, the X-Files, you know, nothing against the show. I thought it was a great show, but it was about conspiracies and aliens and, you know, all this kind of stuff. Millennium was way more grounded.

SPEAKER_05 29:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 29:23

And it was it was based in actual fear, like, hey, my next door neighbor could be some kind of psycho. You know, I could talk to him, everything's cool, and then he's going out killing people and sewing her eyes shut. It was more grounded, and it's like, yeah, wow, this is really terrifying because this can actually really happen.

SPEAKER_04 29:38

Here's an interesting one, Troy. Do you find, because I know I certainly do, that the show has gained in cultural relevance now in 2026, on its 30th anniversary, in a way that perhaps the X-Files hasn't, because you touched upon, you know, folk stories and supernatural there. But because Millennium is so earthy and so grounded in fear, I I find actually in the world that we live in now, it's it's it's a terrible shame it's not still available because it is so relevant to today's world.

SPEAKER_02 30:11

100%. 100%. And it's interesting with the with the news of the reboot of the X-Files. I and I was talking to some friends about this the other day, and Frank Spotness said this one day in a in a podcast. Nostalgia can be a double-edged sword.

SPEAKER_05 30:25

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 30:25

You know, the X-Files coming back is great. Molder and Scully, that dynamic, the conspiracy stuff was great, but that's kind of uh played out right now. And I don't think something like that is gonna work in 2026. It might, but I don't think so. So, but Millennium is just something that you hear about the atrocities that happen in that show in real life all the time. You know what I mean? So it's still a relevant type show to me to this day and and into the future.

SPEAKER_05 30:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 30:55

Uh I think it's it it will be interesting to see what the X-Files reboot does.

SPEAKER_02 31:00

I'm stoked about it.

SPEAKER_04 31:02

How lucky are we that we've got Ryan Kugler? Absolutely.

SPEAKER_02 31:06

Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 31:06

I I think because conspiracy theories were very fringe back in the 90s, whereas conspiracy theories have sort of gone mainstream now. Whether that is to the detriment of society or not is another podcast elsewhere. But um I I think now with sort of the access to information we have, be that information correct or not, there is something really interesting to be done with the X-Files. And I'm I'm sure they'll tap into that. So yeah, I'm I'm excited to see where it goes.

SPEAKER_02 31:34

Yep, you and me both.

SPEAKER_04 31:36

Yeah. I can only imagine the kind of the relevant fears and kind of worries and concerns that it's gonna kind of preoccupy itself in 2026. The only thing I've seen trained is a very brief thing in Deadline, where they did a character breakdown for various bits and pieces for um, and it kind of seems to be orbiting around some sort of missing girl in kind of like uh folklore of like the Native Americans or something like that. So I kind of think that has a very interesting route to go down because that's what really struck me with Sinners and what Kuglu did with the kind of uh the cultural kind of shift post-World War II of race relations in 50s America, you know. I think that could be tapped into something quite spectacular.

SPEAKER_02 32:16

Yeah, I I'm I'm really stoked about it. I think he's the right person to do it. Um, I'm just hoping, again, I'm not a massive, massive X-Files fan. I again I love the I like the show, um, but I'm hoping fans who love the X-Files give him a chance and give the show a chance.

SPEAKER_03 32:31

Yeah, absolutely. Back to the documentary. So what was the rollout of the documentary? Did you do festivals and things like that first? How did you how did you get it in front of people?

SPEAKER_02 32:41

Yeah, so the first thing we did, we did a um, we did the thing where we'd raised, we tried to raise a little money to help us, you know, finance the documentary. Once we got done the doc, we just submitted it to a bunch of festivals and just crossed our fingers and hoped people would get what we were doing. And um, luckily, we got I I remember the first one we got in, uh Jason messaged me and said, dude, we got picked for a festival. I'm like, get out of here. That is so cool. And we we got picked for like, I think 30 festivals.

SPEAKER_05 33:12

Amazing.

SPEAKER_02 33:13

Won, I think, at least 10 to 12 awards. We've done a couple panels for the doc. It's it's been well received. We're we're we're we're really happy with what the documentary's done and and what people were saying about the doc. So yeah, we we submitted it to a bunch of festivals.

SPEAKER_03 33:30

Amazing. And so what was the reception like from the fans and indeed the the people at the festivals?

SPEAKER_02 33:36

Oh, they they loved it. Um, they were just happy to like we're just happy to see someone talking about the show because it's such an underappreciated show. That's what we hear all the time. Amazing. Such an underappreciated show. It should be on streaming. Why is it on streaming? We're glad you guys are doing this to get it back out there. You know, messages we got from the casting crew were just that made it all worth it. At the beginning of the doc, when we started working on this, the first thing Jason and I said to each other was like, if this turns out to be campy and corny while we're doing it, we were just like watching dailies of it. If it seems like it's campy and corny, we're just gonna cut and we're not gonna do it. Because we wanted to do a, like you said earlier, a love letter to the people who worked on the show.

SPEAKER_05 34:16

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 34:16

And to let them know that there are fans out there that still love and appreciate what they did on that show. Because some of them didn't even know. Claire didn't even know that people still that people enjoyed her work on a show.

SPEAKER_04 34:26

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 34:27

So yeah, that was the goal of the doc. If like if they're happy with it, then we'll be happy with it. And we hope the fans are happy with it. And and of course you're gonna get your negatives from fans out there. Why didn't you have this person? Why didn't you talk about this? Why didn't you do that? And I'm like, we only had so much we could do.

unknown 34:43

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 34:44

So yeah.

SPEAKER_04 34:44

So I think that's universal for 98% of fandoms, though, isn't it? It seems like the fan gene is equidistant with the right to complain, but they are.

SPEAKER_02 34:53

Well, you know me, being an Aries, I'm the first thing I say, and I had to calm myself down and stop responding to people because initially I started responding to people. And I was like, you know, if you don't like that, go out and shoot your own. Good luck. Good luck. Yeah. If you could do better, go do better.

SPEAKER_04 35:11

What I like as well, Troy, is when you did the revisitation in 2018 with the the new stuff with Bill Smitrovic, it kind of seemed that almost buoyed by the success of that original iteration of the documentary. Uh, and indeed what I noticed again with the name change, you know, after the millennium, and it's a kind of second iteration. It seemed that, you know, you could really see that nostalgia for people kind of translating into a a kind of appreciation of the fact that they knew you were speaking the same thematic language of the show, so to speak.

SPEAKER_02 35:46

Yeah, 100%. 100%.

SPEAKER_03 35:48

What was the thinking behind revisiting it again for the Tech Inversion?

SPEAKER_02 35:53

So with our initial distributor, we had a five-year deal with those guys, um, Factory Film Studios, and those guys were great. After five years, you know, we got the rights back to the documentary, and we were talking, and we knew we had so much extra footage from the interviews. Because it's interesting. The interviews we figured would take would be like 10, 15 minutes, maybe 20 minutes per person. But man, we would get these guys and start doing these interviews, and they would be 45 minutes, an hour. Thomas Wright was the one of the funniest ones. His was like an hour and 15 minutes, just so much stuff. He was like doing impersonations of Lance and on set and just a bunch of crazy stuff, man. And we had so much footage. We're like, you know, maybe we should revisit this and put something out. And then Jason reached out to Smitrovic because initially we tried to get him, but his schedule, he wasn't available. But um, I guess he heard about the dock and um he ended up being a part of it, as you well know. So we decided, you know, we have all this extra footage. Let's put something else out there. Because there are some people that still haven't seen the dock. I mean, there's only so much we can do as independent filmmakers. I guess I'm calling myself a filmmaker. There's only so much we can do to try to get it out there because we don't have the budget for these big cam marketing campaigns, which is just basically word of mouth and social media a little bit. But um, overall, I'm just happy with what's going on.

SPEAKER_04 37:15

I did like the um the kind of the the almost very uh tongue-in-cheek nods to the show and some of its format, and as well, just little things that I thought kind of translated really well, like whose idea was it to shoot Sarah Jane Redmond's interview in a church? That was brilliant.

SPEAKER_02 37:30

Sarah Jane Redmonds?

SPEAKER_04 37:31

No way. Hey, wowsons.

SPEAKER_02 37:33

Yeah, she um when we reached out to her, you know, we were talking, she's like, you know what would be really cool if we could shoot her my interview in a church. Right. And Jace and I are like, oh, a a church? Yeah, that would be really cool.

SPEAKER_05 37:47

Gotta get a fucking church.

SPEAKER_02 37:50

But luckily, the hotel we stayed at in Vancouver, there was a big church right across the street from, or actually right next to us. And on a whim, we just walked over there one day and they were having an open house. And we we walked in and there were some people standing there, and we were just sitting there talking to them, and they were telling us about the church. And we said, Hey, um, by the way, we're shooting a documentary about the TV series Millennium. And I'm like, oh, really? We've had a lot of people shoot shows in there. Supernatural shot in there, they shot a bunch of movies in there before. And uh we were just talking to them. And after about 15, 20 minutes, somehow they said, Hey, sure, you guys can shoot. We'll give you an hour and we'll give it to you for free.

SPEAKER_04 38:32

Oh, wow.

SPEAKER_02 38:33

So they gave us an hour like on a sun. We just had to make it like a uh make sure we shouted them out in the in the credits.

SPEAKER_05 38:39

Right, okay.

SPEAKER_02 38:40

Um but yeah, we called Sarah Jane and like, Sarah, I don't know how we did it, but we got a church, but we only have an hour. And she came in and she she set the chair up the way the chair set up in the shot with the cross behind. That's all her.

SPEAKER_03 38:54

Oh, really?

SPEAKER_02 38:54

Sarah. Yeah, that's all Sarah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_03 38:57

Amazing. After the documentary, like you've got a number of other sort of projects, IMDB credits and stuff. Did is this something that sort of spurred you on a filmmaking journey after after this?

SPEAKER_02 39:07

Yeah, I mean, going through this process and and working with the team we had, it was a really positive experience. Uh you you never know what you're gonna get when you have diff five different personalities working on something like this. Yeah. Um, but we all seemed to have one mind when it came to this project and what we wanted to do. So that's kind of spurred me on to working on. We have a couple other things in the pipe right now. We ended up starting a film production company called Resurrection Films because of this. And now we're working on a couple other projects. We just released a campy horror film called Space Rodent, which is out right now. Uh it's pretty, pretty funny. Um, and we have some other projects in the pipeline. So yeah, it's it's pretty much spurred that on. Again, I've never done anything like this before until I did this documentary.

SPEAKER_03 39:52

Amazing.

SPEAKER_02 39:54

And um, Jason, although he's a filmmaker in in the LA area, he'd never done a documentary before. You know, none of us have done anything like this. So the fact that we were able to put this out there and do something pretty decent, pretty proud of it.

SPEAKER_04 40:08

Amazing. Um 30th anniversary this October for the fall. Is there anything in the pipeline that you can talk about avoiding spoilers to celebrate the show? I know that they're doing uh I think I think there was plans to do an interview with Chris at the X-Files Museum, but um I haven't seen too much kind of forward motion, kind of like celebrating the anniversary, which is a damn shame because it's such a an underappreciated show.

SPEAKER_02 40:34

All I will say is yes. I'll leave it at that. I'm the kind of person who doesn't like to jinx himself, so let's just say I'm work I'm working on something fingers crossed, it's gonna be something really, really cool. But that's all I'll say.

SPEAKER_04 40:48

Okay. Well, following on from that to an extent, one of the um and it touched on what you said earlier about the level of trust that the cast and creatives had in you and Jason and and indeed the campaign. Uh, one of the things I took away and that I was quite that I didn't know about the show was the level of kind of the mayor culpa from Chris Carter saying that effectively his desire to launch Harsh Realm pretty much killed the chances of a see a fourth season, which I had no idea at the time.

SPEAKER_02 41:17

Yeah, I mean that's that's true. But there's also the changing guard at Fox. Right. Um, the guy that Greenlit Millennium had left. And the guy coming in was like, we need to, we need, we need, we need to brighten up the schedule a little bit. We need some more comedy, we need this, we need that, and Millennium and Brimstone, another favorite show of mine. Oh, it's Brimstone.

SPEAKER_05 41:36

Love her, love her.

SPEAKER_02 41:37

It still hurts. Um wasn't fitting what his his vision for the network.

SPEAKER_05 41:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 41:43

So that combined with Chris Carter coming out with Harsh Realm, yeah, pretty much he's like, I'm pretty much the reason why this got taken off the air. And it is to an extent, it's him and then it's Fox as well, the lead changing leadership.

SPEAKER_04 41:56

Yeah. I mean, that came across and it was at the time that you know, you talked about that being the natural kind of culmination of the back to Frank Black campaign. Uh it it seemed like 2014, 2015, you know, we were dealing with the industry, and there was a huge influx of money going into IP and properties at the time. Game of Thrones was massive. The money that was being thrown at Owley television was just obscene huge. And it seemed like I mean, at least to my perspective, the time and the moment culturally that you released that documentary, it it almost seemed, and with the IDW launch with Joe Harris's comics as well, that if any time they were gonna bring the show back, that would have been the moment.

SPEAKER_02 42:38

That's correct. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 42:40

Yeah. How much of that was serendipitous, Troy, and how much of that do you think happened by design?

SPEAKER_02 42:45

I I I think, you know, we said it from the beginning, it was gonna be an uphill battle with this, bringing this show back. We knew the likelihood of it coming back was small.

SPEAKER_05 42:56

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 42:57

But we still wanted to to to soldier on and, you know, pray for a miracle. We almost had a miracle. At one point I mentioned that there was talk about the show bringing it back, you know, if my little birdie was telling the truth, which I'm sure he was. Um, but he he reached out to me and said, hey, there's a meeting going on right now. The executives are talking about IPs, one of them is Millennium. But I think there were some concerns. I think with Lance's age, right? There was a concern with the the niche element of the show, the cult status of the show. They didn't think it would generate enough interest, which I don't think is true. Yeah. There was such a missed opportunity back then. I think the doc came out, I think you're right, the doc came out at the right time. But yeah, it was just it's just a it's an it's a cult show. People see it as a the higher ups see it as a cult show. Yeah. And pretty much nothing more, which is which is sad in in my opinion. Um, if given a chance, I think Millennium could have done something, at least closed the story.

SPEAKER_04 43:58

Yeah, absolutely. I mean Last year, and just wanted to touch on that we lost Mark Snow.

SPEAKER_05 44:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 44:04

One of the things I took away from the documentary was just how beautifully done, executed, and performed a as a tribute to Mark's music was the score. Now you touched upon the m the millennium score being released uh commercially, but also the documentary score was released. And I think that really for me said a lot about how much it paid tribute to that. How much of that was deliberately done? Did you kind of immediately find that that was the right tone you wished to did you want to go somewhere that was close to Mark's original vision?

SPEAKER_02 44:38

I'm gonna tell you something I don't think I've told anybody publicly yet, but we had been talking to Snow about doing the music for the doc. Oh, wow. But the only thing that hurt us is Mark was such a busy guy. He just didn't have the time. But initially we were gonna get Mark to do the score for the documentary. Years ago, we had run this fan campaign where we're like, create what you think a millennium movie trailer would look like. And we were like, what kind of prize could we give away? And I and I called Mark and I said, Hey man, we're doing this contest, we're gonna have some fans create what they think a millennium movie trailer would look like. Would you possibly be interested in creating new music for the for the winner? And he did. Wow. The the person won the contest, they did this great trailer and we sent it to Mark, and Mark scored it with millennium type music, but knew. So we were gonna hopefully have him do the score for the the documentary, but unfortunately he couldn't do it. So Jason knew Matthew Gatsos. They were they've been friends for a long, long time, and Matthew's uh is a talented musician. And basically what we said to him was we're looking for a score. It needs to be Millennium Mystic.

SPEAKER_04 45:48

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 45:48

And that's basically all we said to him. And then he just went and did his thing. And I think he did a fantastic job.

SPEAKER_04 45:54

One of the things like kind of expanding on that that I thought, you kind of touched on it there, was the um, and I remember at the time hearing about it, was the open invitational, I shall say, to create a title sequence for the dock. And the finished product, I think, is fantastic. Even down to I I remember I remember watching the doc for the first time. And the the shot that sold it for me, and this is just me personally, was when he managed to recreate the weeping woman bending over from the original titles of Millennium.

SPEAKER_05 46:22

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 46:23

Some of those images were so visceral. Tell us a little about um, you know, the hunt for that and what sort of submissions you had.

SPEAKER_02 46:31

Uh that that the winning submission was Andrew Shelton. He was the one, he was uh he's uh ended up being an associate producer on the dock. And he was the guy I told you that would constantly be retweeting our you know contests, he would constantly post stuff about the show, he would always retweet our stuff, and he was just one of the guys I would always take notes and take notes of people who sent stuff in. I was if I thought it was really good, I took a note like, hey, this guy could possibly do something down the road for us. And Andrew was one of those guys. So when we put out the contest for the opening credits, I remember we got some we got about seven submissions. And I remember most of them being pretty good. There was a couple we were like, eh. But the minute we got Andrews and Jason and I watched it, we're like, that's it. That's the winner right there. Hands down, that is exactly what we were looking for. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And doing that moonshot, I think in the documentary, there's uh there's a part about where he talks about coming up with the credits and doing the credits. I I I thought it was fantastic. He we knew he had he was the winner from from moment one. Moment one.

SPEAKER_04 47:35

It certainly speaks for it. And I remember one of the shots that I personally liked as well was the watch disappearing into the water as well. And uh, I just remember sitting there looking at it, how many fucking times did it take him to do that?

SPEAKER_02 47:44

He it's funny you say that. We were just talking about that the other day. Um, it took him hours to get that hours. He's like he was getting so frustrated with that shot. But yeah, it took him hours to get that one little shot. But yeah, he he he's fabulous, man. He did a fantastic job. It's Andrew Shelton. He's on a Twitter, follow him, guys.

SPEAKER_04 48:03

Well dude, well do. Uh, and also, you kind of touched on it earlier. You loved the work of Matthew Ingalls there. You know, I I do art myself, and I think that what Matthew did, especially with that kind of visceral cover of Back to Frank Black of the book, was really captured a kind of noir element of the show. Was he somebody that again approached you guys in the campaign, or was that organic?

SPEAKER_02 48:24

Again, you know, he sent in that that drawing that we ended up using for the Back to Frank Black book. And again, I made a mental note. I saved it in my little folder that I had on my, you know, on my computer, like, ah, this guy could be someone we talked to down the road. And then when we came about, came and uh started talking about the documentary, he's the first person we thought of for art. So I just reached out to him and I said, Hey man, would you be interested in being a part of this and doing some artwork? And literally, like a couple weeks later, he well, I didn't even say anything, he sent some sample artwork.

SPEAKER_05 48:54

Right.

SPEAKER_02 48:55

And boom, we're like, he's the guy. And so so yeah, so it was it was really fun doing the documentary because every several weeks or so he would send in some new artwork, and it just got better and better and better. And we still haven't used all the artwork that he he had sent us. There's so much more that we haven't used.

SPEAKER_04 49:12

Yeah. That's uh you can tell it's a real labor of love, what he'd done there, because you know, he'd done some fantastic mashups. I I saw one piece he'd done where he'd done a revisitation of Chris Carter as the smoking man or something. Yeah.

SPEAKER_05 49:26

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 49:26

That's brilliant, you know, just so so entirely in keeping with the show. Obviously 2018, the last iteration of it. I remember that we released a huge kind of almost a box set deluxe edition of the dock, you know? And it had multiple discs. I think the soundtrack was included in that as well, wasn't it, in the last release? If there was to be another release of the dock, what do you would you like that to look like now? I mean, you spoke earlier about the fact that it's not really readily commercially available, especially over here too much. What does a 2026 version of that look like?

SPEAKER_02 50:00

You know, we still have footage that we haven't used. That's for sure. I would love to get more interviews with especially Terry and Glenn and Jim and Kristen released a sound the soundtrack with it again, maybe uh an expanded version of the soundtrack, because I think there's still more music out there that didn't get released. Yeah, I mean, I I I'm I would keep it simple. Yeah. Um, because you know, we had those, like you said, those big packs with stickers and and and trading cards and all kind of stuff. But I would I would want to keep it simple. I just I just wish we could have got O'Quinn and Glenn and Jim. Um, but just due to their schedules, yeah, we we couldn't do it.

SPEAKER_04 50:42

Well, I was really struck by I think about maybe about I and again it kind of you wonder if the Millennium documentary kind of opened a few doors in kind of the cultural significance of this. But I I remember seeing that they did a Lost documentary about two, three years back that I've spoken to Dylan about. And Terry contributes to that, and he and he and he did a recent podcast, I think it was one where he was talking about his cooking, but he even talked about the role of Peter Watts in that. You probably know the one I'm referring to.

SPEAKER_05 51:08

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 51:09

But he seems to talk about it with a real affection when he does. He just strikes me as somebody that doesn't really live in the past moment of their career.

SPEAKER_02 51:17

You just hit it. When we reached out to him, and I did twice, and both times his people wrote back and said he doesn't want to live in the past as far as his work is concerned. And he was like, he would politely pass on the doc. And I get it. I understand that. I understand why he did the lost doc, because the lost show changed television. And it was such a huge hit. I mean, I think Millennium changed television back in the day, what what what it what what it did and how it looked. But of course, it was a cult hit. It wasn't this huge, massive hit. Maybe one day we'll hopefully get him. I'm I'm I still haven't given up. I'm still trying to reach out to people here and there, but we'll see. We'll see.

SPEAKER_04 51:59

I know Glenn did a um I I I I I know you might be able to correct me if I'm wrong, so I I remember hearing about it. It was pre-file fest. Glenn did a QA over here, I think, uh in the pandemic on Zoom.

SPEAKER_05 52:12

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 52:13

And it was a commentary on Curse of Frank Black at a TV festival. And I was struck by how affectionately he looks back on that, you know, because I think I remember him saying it was that second season was pure artistry on their part. Chris had totally left them to their own devices to do the version of the cover they wanted.

SPEAKER_02 52:31

Yeah, absolutely. I I remember when we did the interview with um uh Chip Johansson.

SPEAKER_05 52:39

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 52:39

Um, he was he was so cool. First, he he came over to our little we we had rented a house or something to do the interviews, and he came over and he did the interview, and he was like, What are you guys doing tomorrow? I'm like, I don't know. He's like, Why don't you come over to Fox Fly? You can come hang out for a little bit.

SPEAKER_05 52:55

Oh nice.

SPEAKER_02 52:55

Oh, okay, cool. So we go over there and we're talking to him, we're having lunch. We walk through Howard Gordon's office of you know, Fox. He's he's you know, Howard Gordon, 24 and all that. So we're walking through his office, sitting on his little patio, having lunch. And um we end up walking over to where um the American Horror Story people are, and and James Wong was working on the show at the time. So we got to go over there and hang out with James Wong, and I remember sitting there with James Wong, Chip Johansson, Tim Manier, who, if you know Tim Manier, absolutely. Yeah. I'm just sitting there like a fly on the wall, watching these guys talk about writing and television and Millennium, and they're talking about spotnets and the work, and I was just like, I'm just like having a surreal moment right now because Manier is one of my favorite writers.

SPEAKER_05 53:40

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 53:41

Like, you know, and we were talking to James, and he was like talking about the show and da-da-da-da. I'm like, can we get a camera out real quick so we can get you talking about them sort of quick? But unfortunately, we didn't, but still it was it was so, so, so, so cool.

SPEAKER_04 53:54

Yeah. I mean, I'm gonna ask the kind of inevitable question there. Is I mean, I'm gonna preface this by saying, I'm a third season guy. Uh, I think when I was younger, it was second season. It was kind of all that mythology, you know, the kind of info dump hand of St. Sebastian stuff. As I get older, I found that a lot of the the the kind of the subject matter and the tonality shift in the third season about the way that it encompasses what starts as fairly procedural and then evolves into kind of taking in a lot of that mythology of year two. I found really that's my jamma millennium. Troy, what's your millennium takeaway on that?

SPEAKER_02 54:32

Season three.

SPEAKER_04 54:33

Hey, there we are.

SPEAKER_02 54:34

That's my favorite season. Anyone who knows me knows season three is my favorite season, especially those first couple of episodes are kind of rough. Yeah, because Michael Dugan was the uh, or Duggan, I don't know how you pronounce his name, was the showrunner at the time. But once you get to about Sound of Snow and from there on, it's it's brilliant television. And I and season three will always be my favorite season. We're in the minority, my friend.

SPEAKER_04 54:56

Yeah, well, I'm very pleased I'm in good company. Any anything as strange and kind of opaque in um in not just 1013, but in in TV as somewhere like Satin Dreaming of Mercury or 701.

SPEAKER_05 55:09

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 55:09

Some of those, and I I I almost wonder if they got a sense that with the new administration at Fox coming in, if the writing was on the wall. Because there seems to be such an exploration in that last dozen hours of TV or so.

SPEAKER_02 55:24

Darwin's Eye is another good one. I really love that episode. I don't know if they sp if they thought the writing was on the wall. I know they knew the ratings were not that great, yeah, but I think they thought the show had a chance of coming back. Right. But again, once Harsh Realm became Chris's main focus, yeah, and then once there was a change in leadership, it was it was all she wrote.

SPEAKER_04 55:47

Right. Do you think that looking back on not just the show but the documentary that you contributed in a weird way, if we kind of as much as I hate to think now that hopefully I'm wrong, but if the moment for a revival of the show is a niche project, as the suits would say, has passed, do you think the documentary in kind of forms a Rosetta capstone on the story of Millennium?

SPEAKER_02 56:13

That was the hope. Yeah. That was the hope. And like if if nothing else happens with the show, we hope people can go back and look at this and say, hey, this was a great series. It it had a lot to say. It deserved to continue on. And if, like I said, if nothing happens, this is the uh the feather in the cap for the show. That's what we hope.

SPEAKER_03 56:35

Well, look, thank you so much for coming to talk to us today about the documentary and about millennium in general. Do you have any projects, any social media links you want to plug at all?

SPEAKER_02 56:45

Yeah, all you need to do is just look up after the millennium, and you can find all our socials that way. Like I said, we do have a couple projects coming up. I don't want to jinx them, um, but one is definitely a documentary, another documentary, and we also have a couple film projects with Resurrection Films that we're working on right now. So yeah, we got some pretty cool stuff coming up, man. So um thank you guys for watching the dock and and um putting the word out there about the doc. Um there's still people that hasn't seen it, that doesn't know it exists, which is sad, but you know, I appreciate what you guys are doing and and and your love for the show, Millennium. Like I have love for the show since day one. And I'm glad I was able to do this and put this out there, and people appreciate what we did.

SPEAKER_03 57:29

Thank you so much. And if there's anybody out there listening who hasn't seen it, go check it out. Thanks once again to Troy and my co-host on the episode, Liam. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts as it helps people to find the pod. Look for Too Hot for TV on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube at TooHotTheNumber4 Pod. That's Too HotheV Pod for the latest updates and additional content. Next time I'll be joined by Martin and we're going to be jumping into the expanded universe of dark shadows. But until then, I've been Dylan and this has been Too Hot for TV.