Night Stalker

Bomb Rating: 

Unlike, say, "Arrested Development", there's a legitimate reason that "Night Stalker" got canceled. It sucked.

This television series, a remake of a 1970s series of relatively the same name, aired in 2005 and didn't make it very far before being canceled. Unlike, say, "Arrested Development", there's a legitimate reason that "Night Stalker" got canceled. It sucked.

To be fair, I only watched three full episodes and part of a fourth, so I didn't get to the unaired stuff, including an episode one of the producers called "the best we did" on the extras. From that comment right there, you can see what morons these guys are because they waited too long to show their best stuff and in television that basically amounts to death.

That being said, I'm dubious that their best would do anything other than make me roll me eyes. Stuart Townsend stars as Carl Kolchak, a paranormal investigator who works at a newspaper covering crime with Perri Reed (Gabrielle Union) and Jain McManus (Eric Jungmann).

Now here's the thing, every episode (well, the three that I watched) starts with some hokum and goes from there. In one episode some girl drowns, but only in her mind, and it kills her. In another, a serial killer kills via ESP. In the two minutes of the fourth episode I watched, a guy self-immolates at a gas station.

These ridiculous, paranormal things are followed by about 50 minutes of Kolchak providing some stupid explanation about how it all happened. None of it is believable or makes sense, though I suppose it's not supposed to. As far as I know, some of the "talent" behind the cameras was also involved in "The X-Files". Even though I never watched that show, I suspect that one would be better off rewatching old episodes of that one rather than spending any time at all with "Night Stalker."

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