Night Stalker
ABC, Thursdays at 9/8 pm
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Thursday, October 06, 2005
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posted by Frank Spotnitz at 6:22 AM
Saturday, October 01, 2005
In the face of very stiff competition, here's the official, and very heartening, ratings news from ABC. Thanks to all of you who helped spread the word and tuned in to give us such a strong premiere.
Against competition including CBS' "C.S.I.," the series debut of "Night Stalker" built on its Adult 18-49 lead-in by 8%. In the hour, "Night Stalker" produced ABC's best Adult 18-49 (2.6/6) number with regular programming in more than 7 months - since 2/10/05. Among Adults 18-49, "Nigh Stalker" qualifies as ABC's highest-rated scripted series debut on Thursday in more than 5 years - since 3/3/00.
* Like its lead-in, "Night Stalker" gained audience from start to finish in Total Viewers (7.1 million to 7.2 million) and Adults 18-49 (2.6/6 to 2.7/6).
posted by Frank Spotnitz at 2:01 PM
Thursday, September 29, 2005
New York Times
September 29, 2005
What Lurks in the Darkness? Reporters Work a Dire Beat
By NED MARTEL
"Night Stalker" is ABC's revival of a much-loved franchise, whose stories supposed that boogeymen really were out there, ready to pounce. In the series premiere tonight, such a hunter of humans takes an animalistic form that is vaguely lupine, canine and feline all at once.
If you need to know which, or if you need to see fangs and claws up close to fear them, then let the opening installment skulk off into the darkness. Next week, the series hits a sleeker, creepier stride with an elaborate conceit: a killer, long locked away, bends minds on the outside and orders them to commit more murders.
The series is driven by two urbane reporters at an imaginary Los Angeles newspaper, The Beacon. Stuart Townsend refreshes the crusty Carl Kolchak role that Darren McGavin inhabited in the original 1972 made-for-television movie and in the 1974-75 series. Those who loved the old vampire hunter may pine for Mr. McGavin's creased face and straw hat. The rest of us can admire Mr. Townsend's update of a smoldering loner who is still aching after the loss of his wife. The premiere presents Kolchak's vision of that violent death, but he still has trouble making everyone believe what he saw.
After that mysterious attack, Kolchak left Las Vegas, the site of the slaying, and his new job demands that he delve into other people's tragedies. Mr. Townsend appears convincingly detached and intuitive when head-scratching crises arise, while those around him assemble facts through confrontation and rationality. He knows more than he lets on, and his restraint is a survival skill: "How long would I last if I wrote what I believe?" he asks a colleague.
At The Beacon, his ego-checking counterpart is the gifted and gorgeous Perri Reed (Gabrielle Union of "Bring It On" and "The Honeymooners"). When their editor (Cotter Smith) tells them, "The two of you are expected to get along," trust that they won't. Perri would box Kolchak out of more assignments if he didn't come up with so many insights that make her look good. Their shared tag-along is a fidgety photographer (Eric Jungmann) who means well but bumbles between them.
When the series works best, the camera is glimpsing wildness in the margins of Los Angeles. By day, The Beacon's offices inside a skyscraper look down on sunbaked streams of traffic. When night returns, winds rustle the plastic of a half-built exurban house, which is perhaps too close to untamed beasts on the frontier.
The suspense before horrific acts is acute, teased out with clever juxtapositions. On a television screen in a dark hotel room, three vulnerable pigs tremble during a flickering cartoon, just before the wolflike thing invades. In another tense moment, a woman on a treadmill keeps pace to the Kinks' paranoid song, "Destroyer." Then a would-be murderer arrives, heeding something akin to the song's "little yellow man in my head."
A veteran of "The X-Files," Frank Spotnitz, a writer and an executive producer, revived "Night Stalker," and at the beginning and end of each episode, he puts Kolchak at a keyboard in an unaffordable house in the Hollywood Hills. As Mr. Townsend's voice-over mimics James Ellroy's hard-boiled prose, key words pop on screen like unnecessary flashcards. But not all the details of these early episodes are so showily emphasized. Tiny, tattoolike squiggles appear on the hands of certain characters, and a mystery is slowly emerging about who gets them and why.
"Night Stalker" has come prowling when the evening hours, vacated by sitcoms, are welcoming supernatural arrivals. The eerie has replaced the cheery on television, and every network apparently wants to get a little "Lost," or at least a little devotion from intense fans of trippy science-fiction series. "Night Stalker" shows up in the deadly slot where other ABC shows have failed, and the series seems more prepared to compete against CBS's "CSI" in the gory-corpse category. Even beyond that, there's something stylishly scary at work here, if viewers and writers can stick with one another through the darkness.
Night Stalker
ABC, tonight at 9, Eastern and Pacific times; 8, Central time
Frank Spotnitz, developer and executive producer; Dan Sackheim, executive producer and director. Pilot written by Mr. Spotnitz and directed by Mr. Sackheim. A Touchstone Television production.
WITH: Stuart Townsend (Carl Kolchak), Gabrielle Union (Perri Reed), Eric Jungmann (Jain McManus) and Cotter Smith (Tony Vincenzo).
posted by Frank Spotnitz at 8:09 PM
Kansas City Star
A strange new drama stalks prime time
AARON BARNHART
"Night Stalker" (8 tonight, ABC, KMBC-9). Weird, intriguing and sinister, "Night Stalker" is the closest thing to an "X-Files" revival you're likely to see until the year 2015, when David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson finally agree to make another movie together.
The resemblance isn't by accident. "Kolchak: The Night Stalker," an ABC movie-turned-TV-series with Darren McGavin in the 1970s, was a direct influence on "X-Files" creator Chris Carter. And two former Carter associates on that show, Frank Spotnitz and Dan Sackheim, are producing the new "Night Stalker." (Also no accident: "Kolchak" is just out on DVD for those interested in comparison-watching.)
Carl Kolchak (Stuart Townsend) blows into L.A. one day as a newly hired crime reporter and the next thing you know, he's all over a grisly abduction-murder. He's uncanny about the details. Even for a newspaper guy, he knows way too much. What's his secret?
Everyone has their theories behind Kolchak's prescience, and they are laid out in the show's expertly told pilot episode tonight. Gabrielle Union, as Kolchak's skeptical colleague at the paper, plays Scully to his Mulder.
For all those who are not confirmed "CSI" fans, this is worth a look.
Who knows, with everything that's gone right for ABC in the last year, maybe this won't be the ratings roadkill it appears to be.
posted by Frank Spotnitz at 8:07 PM
New York Post
FRIGHT 'NIGHT' RIGHT
By LINDA STASI
"Night Stalker" Tonight at 9 on ABC *** 1/2
SOMETHING shocking is coming to a TV screen near you tonight - something so weird, so unusual, so strange you won't believe they're able to do that on TV.
What is it? A really good, really weird show- that's what.
And as we all know while enduring this TV season in hell, good is rare - but very good is downright spooky.
"Night Stalker" already had two big things going for it. One, it's a reprise of that great, '70s cult hit of the same name, and two, it comes your way via Frank Spotnitz, one of the lead creative people on "The XFiles."
If you weren't around for the first go 'round of "Night Stalker," it revolves around transplanted Las Vegas reporter Carl Kolchak (Stuart Townsend), whose wife was killed by an unknown assailant (an assailant that crashed through their windshield and had a lot of fur and rather long incisors).
Either the assailant needed an extreme makeover or he/she/it wasn't human.
The feds tried to nail the murder on Kolchak, but it didn't stick.
Frank moves to L.A. and gets a job at "The Beacon" with his former, loyal boss who's now editor- in-chief, Tony Vincenzo (Cotter Smith), a TV Italian- American who isn't a mobster (like I said, an unusual TV series.)
Carl isn't an easy guy to like; he's got a chip on his shoulder so big it could dislocate it at any moment.
He makes no attempt to be nice to the senior crime reporter on the paper, Perri Reed (Gabrielle Union). First thing he does is poach her story about a young pregnant woman who was murdered, and then, when the woman's sister and little girl are also viciously attacked, he tells Perri that she's not getting the real story.
Vincenzo forces them to work together, along with a Jimmy Olsen- kind of kid photographer, Jain (Eric Jungmann).
Maybe the most memorable moment of the night is when Kolchak walks into the newsroom and says hello to a guy in a beige suit-it's not just any guy, but Darren McGavin, the original Kolchak, digitized into the action. Nice touch.
Like "The X-Files," there is all kinds of mysterious and unexplained stuff going on, and each week, it may or may not relate to what happened before.
Next week's episode, "Five People You Meet in Hell," is the creepy story of a Manson-like convict (Tony Curran) who's been blinded and disfigured by acid as an act of jail-house vengeance.
So why are the prosecutors, judge and cops in his case inexplicably killing their own loved ones?
What more can you want in a show-monsters, good writing, good acting and Darren McGavin.
posted by Frank Spotnitz at 8:05 PM