Night Stalker (TV series)

In 2005, ABC aired *Night Stalker*, a television series that lasted just seven weeks. The show starred Stuart Townsend as Carl Kolchak, a reporter for the *L.A. Beacon* whose wife, Irene, was murdered. Kolchak investigates other bizarre killings, convinced they are connected to his wife’s death. He is aided by fellow crime reporter Perri Reed (Gabrielle Union), photographer Jain McManus (Eric Jungmann), and editor Anthony Vincenzo (Cotter Smith). The series was a reboot of the 1974 show *Kolchak: The Night Stalker*, reimagining the character as a younger man driven by a personal tragedy. Because ABC owned the rights to the original TV movies but not the Universal television series, it could only use characters from those movies.

The main characters include Kolchak, a believer in the supernatural; Perri Reed, a skeptic who looks for normal explanations; Jain McManus, Kolchak’s open-minded photographer friend; and Anthony Vincenzo, the editor who hired Kolchak as a favor after they worked together in Las Vegas. Recurring characters include FBI Agent Bernie Fain (John Pyper-Ferguson), a former friend who believes Kolchak killed his wife and made up a story to cover it up; “Edhead” (Loreni Delgado), a tech specialist; and Alex Nyby (Eugene Byrd), a coroner’s assistant. A guest character, Damon Caylor (Tony Curran), is a disfigured, blind cult leader who uses supernatural powers to force his convictors to kill their families.

The series was developed by Frank Spotnitz, a writer on *The X-Files* who had previously co-written an episode featuring Darren McGavin, the original Carl Kolchak. The first episode aired on Thursday, September 29, 2005, at 9 p.m., competing against *CSI*, *The Apprentice*, and MLB playoffs. On November 13, 2005, Spotnitz announced the show’s cancellation on his blog; ABC officially canceled it the next day. Although ten episodes were produced, only six aired. The last broadcast episode (Episode 6, 'The Sea') was a standalone episode, not the first of a multi-part story. Later, the seventh episode appeared on iTunes, and the final three were released there on February 7, 2006. All ten episodes aired on the Sci-Fi Channel in summer 2006, and the show continued in rotation on the network’s weekday marathons in 2007. It also aired on Chiller starting November 3, 2007, and in the UK on Bravo in late 2007 and early 2008.