Oct. 23, 2005
 
TV SERIES REVIEW…Continued
’Night Stalker’ Lacks Humor of 1974-75 Original
 

Night Stalker stars Gabrielle Union and Stuart Townsend

By David M. Kinchen
Editor, Huntington News Network
 
Hinton, WV (HNN) – After watching last Thursday’s (Oct. 20, 2005) episode of ABC’s “Night Stalker,” it came to me in a flash what the series lacked compared with the short-lived 1974-75 TV series “Kolchak: The Night Stalker,” starring Darren McGavin as investigative reporter Carl Kolchak.
 
What’s lacking in the new show is the sense of humor McGavin brought to the show. He was a cool dude, without even knowing it. The new show takes itself a bit too seriously 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. I hope they lighten up a bit, a la the original iconic series.
 
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 brand new 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 at Amazon.com and I recommend this way of watching one of the great horror series ever to brighten up the small screen.
 
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. Actually, Vincenzo didn’t believe much of what his seersucker suit-wearing reporter wrote for the Independent News Service and was more than happy to follow the police department line after Kolchak had chased down one of his monsters and killed it.
 
Stuart Townsend plays Carl Kolchak, now operating in Los Angeles, after a stint in Las Vegas. He has an attractive partner, 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 that manage to look like the 1960s classics with great ease.
 
Let’s hope ABC has the patience to keep the show going. It needs a little tweaking. Maybe they can persuade the 83-year-old McGavin to do a cameo. That would be nice!