Fall TV Friday – 2005 – Night Stalker

Night Stalker – ABC – 1 Season (10 Episodes) – USA

In 2005 there was one show you didn’t want to come up against in the ratings. That show was CSI… you may have heard of it. It’s the one about Crime Scene Investigation. When faced with the number one show on television most networks would run and hide. For five years ABC had thrown various television lambs to the CSI slaughter. Push Nevada, Dinotopia, Kingdom Hospital, Life As We Know It. It was inevitable that Night Stalker would be next in the long line of one season wonders.

It wasn’t until 2006 when ABC figured out that instead of throwing away freshman shows with no established fan base up and pitting an established hit like Grey’s Anatomy against the CSI juggernaut that you could not only make a dent in the ratings but finally wrestle the ratings crown from its head.

Night Stalker is a remake of the 70’s series Kolchak: The Night Stalker. The original series is often credited with being the inspiration for The X-Files, or at least according to Wikipedia it is. Despite that claim this new Night Stalker can quite easily be accused of being a massive rip off of The X-Files. It stars Stuart Townsend, Gabrielle Union and Eric Jungmann or as they’re better known Charlize Theron’s husband, the black girl from 10 Things I Hate About You and the best friend from Not Another Teen Movie.

Which now that I mention it brings the grand total of cast members from Not Another Teen Movie to go on to star in a new show in 2005 to four. Well, technically three. Chyler Leigh in Reunion, Jaime Pressley in My Name Is Earl, Junggman in this and Eric Christian Olsen in the mid-season replacement The Loop. Not Another Teen Movie also launched the careers of Chris Evans from Fantastic Four and Joanna Garcia from Privileged. Somehow I don’t think Meet The Spartans will have the same lasting effect.

Back to Night Stalker; which opens with the following deadpan narration:

“I drive at night, a police radio as my compass; looking for answers I’m only learning how to ask. About things adults dismiss, but children are right to fear. Shapes that lurk in the darkness, nightmares that intrude from another realm. Forces that spring not from the imagination but live amongst us, unseen. These forces have taken something from me, something I can never recover. So I stalk the night, looking and knowing that our fear of the dark never really goes away, we just learn to pretend it’s not there.”

The rather silly named Carl Kolchak murmurs this chunk of narration as we watch him drive around in the dark while words like ‘questions’, ‘fear’ and ‘nightmares’ fade across the screen like in a bad bank ad. In just one scene Night Stalker establishes itself as a very silly show which appears to take itself a little too seriously.

As Kolchak drives around aimlessly following the directions of compass-like police radio we meet a random woman and her husband played by Hey! It’s That Guy! Pam’s ex-fiancé from The Office. (In other Hey! It’s That Guy! news Piney from Sons Of Anarchy turns up in a later episode as a veteran reporter.) The husband goes off to work and the woman is attacked in her home by a shaky camera and then dragged off into the night.

This is where Kolchak steps in. He starts snooping around the crime scene looking for answers when reporter Perri Reid (Gabrielle Union) and photographer Jain McManus (Eric Junggman) show up demanding to know who he is. Kolchak says he writes for the Beacon. Waahh!? But so does Reid. Turns out they’re both write for the crime section but Kolchak’s just started. I’m not exactly sure how big a newspaper the Beacon is, but if you were the head crime writer for a newspaper you think that maybe you’d be aware that a SECOND crime writer was being hired wouldn’t you?

Naturally enough though this odd couple are made for each other and as they both argue with the editor about who should be in charge of the story the show sets up the dynamic between the two of them that will play out exactly the same in every single episode. Kolchak will believe mysterious forces are at play, Reid will demand a rational explanation, something strange will happen, Reid will start to see things Kolchak’s way and help him solve the crime… until next week when she suddenly doubts everything he says again. All the while zero chemistry will pass between the two leads. Mulder & Scully these two are not.

Night Stalker is hampered not just by dodgy special effects and wooden acting but by being stuck with the clunky premise of ‘reporters investigate strange occurrences.’ Is the original series such a solid brand that ABC couldn’t have just thought up their own X-Files knock off where the leads work for a ‘special department’ in the FBI like in Fringe or Eleventh Hour rather than producing a show that feels more like Press Gang meets Unsolved Mysteries. Is it any wonder the newspaper industry has gone broke when it spends three wages on two lousy reporters and a photographer who doesn’t seem to take any damn photos? They work for days chasing just one story and by the time they file it they don’t even print the real story because ‘the public couldn’t handle the truth’ or some other such nonsense.

The pilot featured the story of a little girl who is kidnapped by strange dog creatures. Kolchak and co drive their car into a handy car sized cave where they find the little girl sitting on a ledge on the opposite side of a deep crevice. Kolchak saves the little girl and rather than explaining what happens the show washes it all away with a ‘writing the story for the newspaper’ montage. If you think about the events for longer than a second plot holes the size of Saturn start to appear. How do dogs manage to lift a little girl across a two foot wide crevice and store her on a cave ledge? Forget about everything else that happens in the story like the fact that they somehow kidnapped her by carrying her on their backs and just focus on that. How is that even possible? She didn’t climb up there herself, she was actually put up on a shelf by giant evil puppet dogs.

Night Stalker is a show in desperate need of a second draft. And a third. And then a fourth just to be sure. It’s an awkward marriage between silly monsters and an overly serious tone. Night Stalker dips its foot into Killer Instinct style awfulness but manages to stay above water, which is a mystery in itself. Don’t get me wrong Night Stalker is a ridiculous show, but for some reason I couldn’t stop watching it. In the last week I’ve watched six of the ten episodes that were produced. I don’t know why, but there’s just something about the slightly creepy premises of each episode that drag me in.

What can I say; I grew up on Unsolved Mysteries and those big books on ‘strange happenings’. I watched three episodes of the god awful Eleventh Hour for much the same reason. Night Stalker is not a good show but it is more fun than the overblown Invasion. I’d love to report that NS is more than just interesting premises dragged down by a mopey Stuart Townsend performance but it’s really not. There’s a reason why it was the lowest rating show on the ABC in 2005, and it’s not just because it was up against CSI.

Good, Alright, Bad Or Ugly?
Alright