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Crime, Gore and Too Much to Abhor

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Prime time is going through one of its solar eclipses, getting gloomier and grislier this week with the arrivals of Fox’s relentlessly somber “Millennium” and the CBS crime hour “EZ Streets,” one of the most gratuitously violent series in memory.

In the new spirit of labeling for content, both premieres carry viewer discretion advisories. The labels should also read: Bleak, unattractive downer.

“Millennium” is from Chris Carter, creator of that inspired Fox series “The X-Files,” whose inky charm and ambiguity he aimed to revisit here, apparently, only to produce gruesome, foreboding television to slit your wrists by.

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And with its prodigious body count and facile approach to brutality, “EZ Streets” is exactly the TV offender that so many of the medium’s critics justifiably denounce. Yes, its grim, pessimistic universe of cops and mobsters suggests fury and gore, not serenity, and cushioning reality shouldn’t be TV’s goal. Yet plots with savage themes needn’t be pervasively savage, powerful evidence of that available in “Law & Order,” the superior, ever-magnetic--and nonviolent--NBC drama that “EZ Streets” will face in its regular 10 p.m. Wednesday time slot.

Back on the weighty front, “Millennium” gives new meaning to heavy, wearing an iron mask of gravity over a face as complex as a rutabaga. Occupying the 9 p.m. Friday hour that “The X-Files” is trading for 9 p.m. Sundays, it is dark, brooding, melancholy and, unless profundity is in the wings, pointless.

Well, not quite pointless, given its attempt to ride the coattails of Fox’s most popular series, “The X-Files,” by knotting its own sleuthing to things frightening and baffling. But pointless enough to give you pause after meeting the aptly named Frank Black (Lance Henriksen), a former FBI agent, who has returned to Seattle with his wife, Catherine (Megan Gallagher), and young daughter, Jordan (Brittany Tiplady), so that he can work there for a cadre of ex-law enforcement types known as the Millennium Group.

Although “Millennium” is less graphically violent than “EZ Streets,” its tone and imagery are very scary, a fright show that would be more acceptable were it not so pretentious and full of itself, as if Frank’s lines were inscribed on a tombstone as enlightenment for the ages.

Great minds arrive in pairs, apparently. Like the equally gifted heroine of NBC’s new “Profiler,” Frank is being tormented by an unseen, potentially lethal stalker, and is in demand as a crime solver because of an ability to tune into homicides via psychic impressions. All it takes is a body or body part.

The opening story’s first victim is a voluptuous peep-show stripper whom we meet as she’s gyrating for the creep who will later kill her, and Frank meets when she’s bagged on a slab. He knows instantly: “She was clothed, there was no evidence of sexual assault, he cut off her fingers.”

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Then it’s only a matter of time before Frank mind-locks with the wacko who did it, explaining to an awed police pal: “I put myself in his head. I become the thing that we fear the most. I become capability. I become the horror, what we know we can become only in our heart of darkness.”

So, in other words, the murderer is Joseph Conrad? Or is the apocalyptic epiphany that we’re all capable of vile behavior? Close enough, for Frank is constantly face to face with evil, examining the sinews of it, the nose-dripping, disgusting snot of it, the nitty-gritty, fiddlefaddle of it, the wicked, fingernail-scratchings-on-a-chalkboard soul of it, the wet, slobbery spittle of it, the absolute caca of it. It’s a job he undertakes with such a long, leaden face that just hearing him speak--Henriksen’s stereophonic tubes increase the tonnage--can cause a hernia.

In Frank’s future next week are still more angst, another serial wacko and a severed ear (“The killer knows the victim. He wants to watch him suffer”), all affirming why he has those thick pouches under his eyes. This guy just doesn’t have any fun.

That, along with script quality, separates “Millennium” from the vastly smarter and more rewarding paranormal adventures of FBI agents Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) on “The X-Files.” This often superb series also darkens chillingly, witness its recent story about murderous countrified mutants that yielded one of the most terrifying chunks of TV ever. And Sunday’s episode about a homicidal psychic photographer (don’t ask) also delivers (providing there isn’t a Game 7 of the World Series).

Yet even when most twisted, “The X-Files” artfully injects levity, as in the playful Mulder’s dig at Michael Jackson during last week’s show about black murder victims being discovered with their skin bleached white. Moreover, the unmatched, not-quite-romantic Mulder and Scully energize their escapades by playing each other like Strads. In contrast, Frank Black of “Millennium” initially stands nearly alone.

Meantime, the drive for comedy is a terrible fit for ferocious “EZ Streets,” which finds Ken Olin, the commanding actor from ABC’s “thirtysomething,” at times gazing dreamily beyond the camera, as if thinking of Hope. And no wonder, given what surrounds him here, a crime series in which wisecracking mob boss Jimmy Murtha (Joe Pantoliano) gets all the laugh lines as he and his blundering dullard sidekick (Mike Starr) terrorize and bump off victims with the nonchalance of blowing out candles.

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Olin is fine as undercover cop Cameron Quinn, as is Jason Gedrick (last season’s movie-star defendant on ABC’s “Murder One”) as recent parolee Danny Rooney, two sympathetic types converging from opposite poles in New York’s East Side. But everything else in this two-hour opener falls hard, from the artificial conflicts that serve the script, but not logic, to the merciless bloating during which nothing happens but mood music, to the needless violence and softening of homicide with clumsy humor. These cadences don’t come close to harmonizing.

The setup has Quinn on the outs with almost everyone in his department while trying to clear the name of his slain partner, and Rooney trying to go straight while surviving the destructive friendship of Murtha, who is a bad imitation of Joe Pesci’s “GoodFellas” sociopath with a joke writer.

Despite bombings, bashings and other tumult, “EZ Street” matches corpses with zzzzzzzzs. That includes the second episode, directed by Olin, which advances the core story while having Murtha’s vampish girlfriend and lawyer (Debrah Farentino) show up nude in the Catholic Church where Murtha has just given his cynical confession. Well, if the priest objects, he can always blow him up.

* “Millennium” premieres at 9 tonight on Fox. “EZ Streets” premieres Sunday with a two-hour movie at 9 on CBS and moves to its regular time slot Wednesday at 10 p.m.

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