Night Stalker
ABC, Thursdays at 9/8 pm
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October 13
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October 27
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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