Just watched the first two episodes of Night Stalker, the remake of the Darren McGavin original series, thanks to the new iTunes Music Store. Stuart Townsend takes the role of Kolchak, the delectable Gabrielle Union as his colleague Perri Reed.
Basically, it's X-Files and Millennium Lite, which should come as no surprise because it's done by Frank Spotnitz, who did most of the work on the mytharc episodes of X-Files and also was majorly involved in the writing for Millennium. It's creepy and exciting in spots, but I can't help that I've Seen All This BeforeTM.
I was never really a fan of the original, so I didn't have any real expectations or make any comparisons in my head. But it seems to me that while the original dealt with individual nasties, the pilot seems to be heading towards a kind of meta-explanation for all the horrors that Kolchak will uncover, ala Millennium. "Pieces of a puzzle," as Kolchack tells Reed in the pilot. That, of course, also has echoes of the way the mytharc in X-Files developed beyond all reason, until "Biogenesis" and a single spaceship became the explanation for everything in the X-Files.
I think that's a mistake, myself, because attributing every evil in the world to one cause is kind of like blaming Satan. Sure, it's nice to have a convenient scapegoat, but at the end of the day, it's more plausible, and certainly more terrifying, to think that there are multiple evils out there so that there's never any ultimate triumph, no central base you can blow up and End The Threat ForeverTM. I liked it in the first season of X-Files where this seemed to be the case, where the weirdness didn't seem connected, merely the result of a weird universe. To serve up a meta-explanation, or to even set up one, is just boring.
Of course, they could confound our expectations by having it turn out not to be a Big Boss Evil at the end of the level, but knowing Spotnitz's style, I doubt it. This is very much by-the-numbers formula stuff, and it all feels so very 1990s. The titles have words flitting in front of the camera like the opening of Millennium. Even the music sounds like it was composed by Mark Snow.
I don't see this lasting very long.
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