Night Stalker is a television series that ran for six weeks in fall 2005 on ABCin 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, photographer Jain McManus and editor Anthony Vincenzo. Night Stalker was a remake of the 1974 series . 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.
Characters
Main
Carl Kolchak : The believer. Reporter for the L.A. Beacon newspaper; continuously searches for his wife's murderer and supernatural happenings in Los Angeles.
Perri Reed : The skeptic. Head crime reporter for the L.A. Beacon, but she trails after Kolchak like a rookie. She helps Kolchak in his cases of the paranormal, although she looks at the cases normally.
Jain McManus : Kolchak's open-minded friend. He is a photographer for the L.A. Beacon.
Anthony Vincenzo : Editor of the L.A. Beacon. A friend of Kolchak's who hired him as a favor after they worked together in Las Vegas.
Recurring
Agent Bernie Fain : Kolchak's former friend in Las Vegas but now a nemesis, an FBI agent who believed Kolchak murdered his wife and made up a bizarre story to cover up his involvement. The character is loosely reworked from Agent Bernie Jenks, Kolchak's Vegas contact in the original Night Stalker TV movie.
Alex Nyby : Coroner's assistant at the Los Angeles Morgue. A contact of Kolchak's who drools over Perri.
Episodes
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. Night Stalker was canceled after six episodes due to low ratings.
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. Below is a brief summary.
The bikers who were chasing Victor Caleca are the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, the pale rider being the biker with the long blond hair.
The mark on Kolchak's wrist is the mark of evil. If the series had continued, there would have been more living people with the mark on their wrists. Kolchak would have been told the opposite by a mysterious man later in the season, but the truth would be told to him by the end of the season.
The victims on whose wrists the mark appears only after their deaths are in fact marked as good.
Linda Caleca and Julie Medlock would have reappeared at some time in the future.
During the episode "The Source", Kolchak passes a sign with a pyramid on it. On the commentary, Spotnitz noted that the pyramid is the symbol of a group, and that all members have the symbol on their wrist. The pyramid means the opposition of Good and Evil.
The anonymous source Carl had been speaking to on his cell phone in the last broadcast episode, The Source, was in fact Carl himself.
Broadcast and release
Its first episode was broadcast on Thursday, September 29, at 9 p.m. against on CBS, The Apprentice on NBC and the 2005 MLB playoffs on Fox. 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. The Sci-Fi Channel, which frequently shows canceled network genre shows, showed all ten filmed episodes during summer 2006, starting on July 28, 2006. The ratings were poor on Sci-Fi Channel as well. In 2007, the show continued in rotation on the network's weekday series marathons. Night Stalker has been re-run on the Chiller channel, beginning on November 3, 2007. In the UK the series aired in December 2007 and January 2008 on Bravo. In Australia, the Seven Network free-to-air station and Prime in regional areas screened the series between early June and September 2007.
DVD release
Night Stalker: The Complete Series was released by Buena Vista Home Entertainment 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.
