For Robert Mclachlan, however, the sunshine is the enemy.

“I hate it,” laughs the North Vancouver-based director of photography for Millennium. “I don’t think any cameraman likes shooting in bright light.”

McLachlan is responsible for the dark, ominous visual style of X-Files creator Chris Carter’s stylishly grim TV series about Frank Black (Lance Henriksen), an ex-FBI agent who uses his ability to get into the minds of serial killers to solve crimes for a clandestine crime-fighting organization.

While People magazine described Millennium as “far and away the best new series of the year,” many have been repelled by the violence and grisliness that pervades the hit series about the struggle between the forces of good and evil as the millennium approaches.

Episodes have featured victims being decapacitated and buried alive, and issues from incest to mad bombers have been dealt with so chillingly that many of Millennium’s supporters and critics have at least agreed on one thing: It’s got to be the most disturbing show in the history of television.

“The world is a very scary place,” Carter recently remarked in defence of the series. “More and more you can’t, in most neighborhoods, go out and walk around at night. To me, the darkness is a response to the world I live in.”

Millennium has become so popular that, like its progenitor, it has spawned scores of web sites and the Fox network just ordered 24 more episodes.

“We all thought we were going to get more bummed out by the subject matter day in and day out but you keep some perspective to it and it gets people aroused a lot of the time,” recalled McLachlan, 41, after setting up a shot on the second floor of the Scotiabank building at 1196 Granville.

With its olive-colored walls, dark wood-and-mottled-glass doors and air of musty antiquity, the location is the very picture of retro-grunge. Gumshoe Mike Hammer would feel quite at home here, but today these old offices are posing as the Brooklyn Police Precinct under the watchful eye of easygoing visiting director Peter Markle (The Personals).

In today’s episode, Henriksen’s tormented character has come to the Big Apple to work with the N.Y.P.D.’s Lieut. McCormick (Bill Nunn). He also locks horns with a suspicious Moscow cop. Their mission: to try and thwart Russian hitmen who’ve been wreaking bloody havoc in Little Odessa as they pursue a villain believed to have been responsible for the Chernobyl disaster.

“Everybody warned me I’d be getting phone calls constantly from him, wanting to do it this way or that. I don’t know if he’s too busy trying to keep two series afloat but I haven’t heard from him in ages. At the same time, if I have a question I can get hold of him absolutely anytime.”

It’s no wonder Carter doesn’t get on McLachlan’s case. He has an impressive track record in the business. Perhaps more importantly, the laid-back lensman and onetime national cycling champion who’s now into gardening and collecting Canadian Impressionist art, is a model of stability .

Since moving from his native San Francisco to North Vancouver, where he studied film at UBC and SFU, the soft-spoken filmmaker produced more than 300 TV commercials with Michael Chechik, his partner in Vancouver’s Omni Productions. That’s where he got his reputation as a high-speed shooter.

While writers and directors come and go, McLachlan and his crackerjack camera crew have maintained the show’s bleak, compellingly distinctive visual style for the past 10 months. They’re part of a crew of 200 who put in 14-hour days to meet the enormous challenge of creating a million-dollar-plus episode of an intense, envelope-pushing series each week.

“There are such high expectations for this show,” says McLachlan matter-of-factly. “Fox gave it the biggest buildup of any show in history when it premiered (to 32 million viewers first time out). That’s the challenge.”

McLachlan says one of the pleasures of working on Millennium is being able to experiment with radical imagery and employ classic film noir lighting techniques as long as he stays within the show’s basic template.

“It’s a grim show and you don’t want pretty pictures as much as a terrible beauty,” he explains as he takes a seat in the fake New York cop shop.