Night Stalker (TV Series)

Night Stalker (TV Series)

Night Stalker is a television series that ran for six weeks in the Fall of 2005 on ABC. 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 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 were limited to using only characters that had appeared in those movies.

Its premiere episode aired on September 29 on Thursday 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 airs canceled network genre shows, showed all ten filmed episodes during the summer of 2006. The ratings were poor on SciFi Channel as well. As of 2007 the show continues to air in rotation on the network's weekday series marathons.

The last episode that was aired 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 is currently being re-run on "Chiller" (channel 257 – DirecTV) and (as of December 2007/January 2008) Bravo in the UK (channel 121 on Sky Digital).