by Susan Keiser, Staff Writer

Fifty years ago this week, on Friday, September 13, 1974, Kolchak: The Night Stalker premiered on ABC. It was an ironically lucky day in the history of television, between the first episode of Kolchak and the debut of James Garner’s iconic series The Rockford Files, as well as the Freddie Prinze, Sr. sitcom Chico and the Man. But five decades later, few TV characters are as pertinent to a post-truth society than Darren McGavin’s seersucker-clad reporter for the fledgling International News Service.

Kolchak: The Night Stalker is a literal Frankenstein’s monster of a show, in that Carl Kolchak was not the Night Stalker himself, and that it was flawed, but glorious; pieced together, but given life; short-lived, but well remembered. Two years earlier, in 1972, an unpublished novel about a vampire wreaking havoc in Las Vegas by Jeff Rice was adapted by horror master Richard Matheson into the John Llewellyn Moxey-directed ABC Movie of the Week The Night Stalker, which became the highest rated TV movie to date. The following year bore a sequel, this time set in Seattle’s underground, written by Matheson and then adapted by Rice as a novel, both entitled The Night Strangler.

The show, originally titled The Night Stalker for the first handful of episodes, only lasted a season. It was shut down early due to both low ratings and disdain from McGavin over the show’s direction, but it inspired future generations of conspiracy-laden television in ways that previous shows (such as Larry Cohen’s The Invaders from the 1960’s) did not. Chris Carter added government intrigue, an overwhelming conspiracy, and the tension of problematic workplace romantic tensions to this formula to create The X-Files, and X-Files producer Frank Spotnitz would indeed create a short-lived Night Stalker reboot in 2005. And Kolchak: The Night Stalker was also a place where veteran writers and directors (such as Blast of Silence director Allen Baron) could work with such up and comers as story editor David Chase, or Chase and noted pulp novelist Steve Fisher could handle a story from Robert Zemeckis and his writing partner, Bob Gale.

Darren McGavin was already known as the star of such TV series as Mike Hammer and Riverboat, and for his performances in The Man with the Golden Arm and the TV movie The Challenge, and became an even bigger star in his early fifties with Kolchak. He would ride this peak into a successful late career run, most notably as “The Old Man” in the 1983 classic A Christmas Story, Adam Sandler’s father in Billy Madison, and as veteran federal agent Arthur Dales in The X-Files, a nod to Kolchak’s direct influence on the hit FOX series. Rounding out the cast was the burly Simon Oakland as Kolchak’s frazzled editor, Tony Vincenzo, Jack Grinnage as fey reporter Ron “Uptight” Updyke, and Ruth McDevitt as the one INS staff member Kolchak actually cared for, elderly advice columnist Emily Cowles.

The “Monster of the Week” format has long been thought of as Kolchak’s Achilles heel, forcing the show to deal with repetitive themes long before its original run of twenty episodes ended in early 1975. There are no fewer than three episodes involving attractive women sucking the souls out of attractive young men: one a sequel to the original TV movie, one featuring a succubus terrorizing a college campus, and one where Helen of Troy (Cathy Lee Crosby) uses a computer dating service as a front to make sacrifices for the goddess Hecate. There are also two episodes that involve metamorphosis into animals, one of which has Tom Skerrit becoming a demonic hellhound after selling his soul to Satan, just to become a State Senator. And as much as I love the legendary Richard Kiel, having him portray an indigenous American spirit that steals jewelry in one episode, and as a Spanish moss monster attacking Cajuns in another, spreads him a bit too thin.

Needless to say, Kolchak: The Night Stalker has not aged perfectly. The scripts are written and directed by white men, while dealing largely with cryptids and legends from other cultures. Everyone does their best with the scripts, but there is a bit of cringe involved when Kolchak faces down a Black zombie or needs to figure out why there are swastikas in a Jewish village that’s already being decimated by a Hindu spirit, who initially appears to its victims as a loved one. Let’s not even get into Richard Kiel portraying an Indigenous American spirit/jewel thief.

The relatively small scope of Kolchak: The Night Stalker can be considered both its fatal flaw and its saving grace. Most of the episodes take place in Chicago (even if they are obviously filmed in and around Los Angeles), and most importantly, there is no overarching conspiracy that ties the Aztec gods with zombies and androids and aliens, that are conveniently made of invisible energy to save money. Kolchak is a lovable loser who may never get “the truth” out, but he’s hampered more by officials who just don’t want to explain how a werewolf got aboard a cruise ship, or why an unconvincing headless motorcyclist terrorized his former gang members. At its lowest end, Kolchak is Scooby-Doo-esque, like in the episode where he’s literally battling a medieval knight trying to kill everyone intent on turning the museum he resides in into a snazzy discotheque.

At its best, however, Kolchak is a throwback to the era when journalism did feel like an important service to the public, even if it wasn’t always the case. Fifty years later, we cannot even pretend to believe one person can make a difference in journalism, unless they control the purse strings, or give in to the succubi that are SEO-driven content and AI. We currently live in a time where a former President of the United States, and his running mate, can espouse blatantly false rumors about immigrants eating dogs, and gender affirming surgeries for undocumented workers in prison, but the Fifth Estate has been decimated so thoroughly by private equity, media consolidation, and “fake news,” that no one truly takes the press seriously anymore. When the actual truth is staring right in people’s faces, and they choose to ignore it, when the truth is dismissed as conspiracy and vice versa, we become Carl Kolchak, powerless to do anything but bear witness and maybe drive a stake into a monster’s heart once in a while.