Night Stalker (TV series)

Night Stalker

Night Stalker DVD cover
Created by Frank Spotnitz
Jeffrey Grant Rice
Starring Stuart Townsend
Gabrielle Union
Eric Jungmann
Cotter Smith
Theme music composer Philip Glass
Country of origin United States
No. of seasons 1
No. of episodes 10 (list of episodes)
Production
Running time 42 minutes
Production company(s) Big Light Productions
Touchstone Television
Release
Original network ABC
iTunes
Original release September 29, 2005 (2005-09-29) – February 7, 2006 (2006-02-07)

Night Stalker is a television series that ran for six weeks in fall 2005 on ABC in America. The series starred Stuart Townsend as Carl Kolchak, an investigative reporter whose wife was murdered. Kolchak spends his time investigating other strange murders, believing they are linked in some way to his wife's murder. He is helped along the way by a fellow crime reporter Perri Reed (Gabrielle Union), photographer Jain McManus (Eric Jungmann) and editor Anthony Vincenzo (Cotter Smith).

Night Stalker was a remake of the 1974 series Kolchak: The Night Stalker. ABC owned the rights to the original television movies, but not the Universal television series, and was limited to using only characters that had appeared in those movies.

Its first episode was broadcast on Thursday, September 29, at 9 p.m. against CSI: Crime Scene Investigation on CBS, The Apprentice on NBC and the 2005 MLB playoffs on Fox. Night Stalker was canceled after six episodes due to low ratings. However, the Sci-Fi Channel (now known as Syfy), which frequently shows canceled network genre shows, showed all ten filmed episodes during summer 2006. The ratings were poor on SciFi Channel as well. In 2007, the show continued in rotation on the network's weekday series marathons.

The last episode to be broadcast was the first of a multi-part episode, so viewers never saw the end of the sixth story. However, some time after the cancellation, the seventh episode appeared on Apple's iTunes Music Store for download. On February 7, 2006, the final three episodes were released on iTunes.

Night Stalker has been re-run on "Chiller" (channel 257 – DirecTV) and, in the UK in December 2007/January 2008, on Bravo (channel 121 on Sky Digital).

Characters

Main characters

Recurring characters

DVD release

Night Stalker: The Complete Series was released on May 30, 2006. The set includes all ten episodes; commentary on the episodes "Pilot" and "The Source, Part Two"; deleted scenes; a featurette entitled "A Conversation with Frank Spotnitz"; and unproduced scripts for the DVD-ROM.

Other airings and cancellation

On November 13, 2005, Frank Spotnitz announced on his blog that Night Stalker was canceled. ABC announced the official cancellation of the series that following Monday. On July 28, 2006, the series began on the Sci Fi Channel.

In Australia, the Seven Network free-to-air station and Prime in regional areas screened the series between early June and September 2007.

Episodes were broadcast on Saturday nights on Chiller, beginning on November 3, 2007.

Episodes

What would have happened

When Night Stalker went off the air, many plot lines were left unfinished. The DVD of the series includes four unbroadcast episodes. The first of these, The Sea, has an audio commentary track in which the executive producer Frank Spotnitz reveals some details of where he intended to take the storyline, had the series not been canceled.[1] Below is a brief summary.

References

  1. Night Stalker (2006). [DVD set]. Buena Vista Home Entertainment.

External links

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