Oct. 19, 2005
 
TV SERIES REVIEW
Reworking of 1974-1975 ‘Kolchak: The Night Stalker’ Continues Horror Tradition
 

Night Stalker stars Gabrielle Union and Stuart Townsend

By David M. Kinchen
Editor, Huntington News Network
 
Hinton, WV (HNN) – First off, I’m a big, big fan of Darren McGavin, 83, star of the short-lived 1974-75 TV series “Kolchak: The Night Stalker.” When I learned that ABC has returned 31 years later with a ‘reworking’ of the 20-episode series, I was as skeptical as Kolchak’s editor.
 
The original show, itself a spinoff of two excellent TV movies, inspired ‘”The X-Files,” according to Chris Carter, X-Files creator. It premiered on Friday, Sept. 13, 1974. There’s a DVD set of all the episodes and you can catch them from time to time on the Sci-Fi Channel. The DVD set retails for about $30 and I recommend this way of watching over the commercial-laden Sci-Fi channel.
 
Wire service reporter McGavin was out there every night, driving his 1960s Mustang and looking for vampires and other creatures to kill. He managed to kill them, but his skeptical editor Tony Vincenzo, played in the hardboiled Chicago newspaper tradition by Simon Oakland, always had to spike the stories Kolchak wrote because of police pressure. Truth be told, Vincenzo didn’t believe much of what his seersucker suit-wearing reporter wrote for the Independent News Service, roughly modeled on Chicago’s legendary City News Bureau, which counts Kurt Vonnegut, Seymour Hersh and David Brooks among its many alumni.
 

DVD set of all 20 episodes of the original 1974-5 series, the best of its kind ever

The new show, airing Thursdays at 9 p.m. on ABC has had poor ratings, despite an excellent cast and good scripts – and good reviews. As the network was quick to point out, the mystery series was the network's most-watched show among coveted 18-to-49-year-old viewers in that time slot in more than five years. I hope this means they’ll keep the show, which deserves a spot on the network’s schedule.
 
Stuart Townsend plays Carl Kolchak, now operating in Los Angeles – as spooky a city as the original series’ setting of Chicago. He’s got a sidekick, Gabrielle Union playing police reporter Perri Reed, at a second-string Los Angeles newspaper called The Beacon. Like McGavin’s Kolchak, Townsend drives a Mustang, one of the brand new ones and – amazingly – lives in a multimillion dollar house in what appears to be the Hollywood Hills. Having been a reporter on the primary daily in Los Angeles, I can’t figure out how he can afford to live in that spectacular house – unless he’s house-sitting for an absentee owner. That’s fairly common in Southern California.
 
As I said, the ratings are not all that great, so if you’re a fan of the original and want to make comparisons, or if you liked the “reworking,” now’s the time to watch. There’s a new episode this Thursday, Oct. 20 at 9 p.m.