Pilot Season – Forever Knight

    To simply answer the question: no, ‘Angel’ did not rip off ‘Forever Knight.’ They both took a basic, similar idea and did some easy things with it.

    For those unfamiliar with this very Canadian mid-90’s supernatural police procedural the basic premise is such: Nick Knight is an 800 year old vampire attempting to atone for being, well, an 800 year old vampire by working as a modern day policeman and searching for a way to become mortal again. He has a regular human police partner and the precinct’s pathologist doubles as his confident/love interest. They Solve Crimes.

Even the font screams Canada.

    Throw in (far too much) backstory and some vampire world-building and you’ve got a pretty decent show on your hands, enough for three seasons and syndication rights that let everyone walk away with a profit. For a while it had a cult following but ever since genre shows started getting actual production budgets and quality writing staffs its star has faded quite a bit.

    This has the exact inverse of the problem I had with ‘Nightmare Cafe’ in that this does have a two-part pilot and doesn’t really need it. It certainly doesn’t know what to do with it. The first episode was doing pretty good in establishing the premise and weaving in a contemporary murder mystery with seeming connections to our protagonists’ past and then in the second half it all falls apart.

    For the first, say, thirty minutes I was rather impressed, for a given value of impressed. After a brief flashback to the night of his undeath (get used to flashbacks) the episode starts in a museum as an off-screen vampire murders a guard and steals a South American blood sacrifice cup. Cut to clearly temp credits and voice-over narration bluntly stating the premise. Fine so far.

    Cut to our hero striding through a press gaggle filled with reports with nothing better to do than throw questions at him about the ‘vampire murders.’ Our vampire hero scoffs at vampires then uses his vampire power to mind-control the lead reporter into going home. Obvious, but fine, it’s the pilot. He and the other officers talk about the murdered guard for a bit then Knight heads off to talk to the person who found the body: the Assistant Curator.

    If there’s one key weakness to this pilot (and there isn’t, there are several) it’s this character, who functions as several different plots devices without ever being written as an actual person. They talk for a little bit, native South American art in the background, before Knight vampiresplains the history of the pieces to the historian and so clearly this is all about vampire stuff, got it.

    A short scene establishes the coroner is in on the secret and introduces the fact that he wants to be mortal, although he doesn’t want to just kill himself, which is a distinction the show never really bothers to explain. They introduce Da Chief who insists he have a partner because of the notoriety of the killings, he and the partner banter, he drives home and on the way interacts with some homeless kids to establish he’s a good dude, then goes home to his walk-up loft and pours some blood into a copy of the stolen cup from the museum and dribbles it onto his chin all dramatic like because, y’know, vampire.

    Several unimportant scenes later he and the partner intervene in a white guy with an Uzi mowing down some women, which is later established as due to him ‘smoking crack,’ thank you 1992, and vampire Knight uses his vampire powers to vampire the situation off-screen. Meanwhile those homeless friends of his are killed by an off-screen not-vampire. He vampires over the museum, clearly a little drunk on vampire powers, makes out with the Assistant Curator with no setup for why she’d be into it, then vampires back home.

    The pathologist, upon learning he vanished after the Uzi-crack incident, hightails it over to his apartment where he’s busy doing the vampire equivalent of falling off of the wagon, although he’s still drinking what was established as animal blood, so really he’s just being dramatic and whiny. She very-early 90’s at him about willpower and addiction and is about to bounce in frustration when a clearly into it Assistant Curator calls and leaves a message on his answering machine to give her a call sometimes and he admits he’s so upset because he almost lost control and killed her. DUN into commercials.

    After commercials the Assistant Curator is narrating research to herself about how if you had two of the cups you could maybe cure vampirism and stares again at a picture from ye olde times showing Knight is old as fuck and maybe this could’ve been a reason she was into it but again no work is put into this motivation.

    Then we’re back to Knight in his apartment telling backstory to the coroner, who must’ve heard this story before, going into how he was turned into a vampire by a guy who was involved in the cups and maybe he’s back and here all the energy drains from the episode. Part one ends on a cliffhanger where he overhears his Sire or whatever inviting him to meet over the radio (?) because he’s a DJ (??) and he does and they walk into shadows and TO BE CONTINUED.

    Part two opens with seven full minutes of recap, backstory, and walking through fog. The two stories going on simultaneously in part one, the real vampire murders and the fake vampire murders, are pretty awkwardly split apart and when they do converge it’s all a bit hijinksy. It all ends with our hero vampire, supposedly weakened by drinking cow blood for years, kills the much older, powerful vampire who’s been recently feeding on human for the second time in a single episode and I hope I’m not blowing your mind by revealing that he’s not really dead and ends up recurring on the show as a foil and not quite enemy. Poor Assistant Curator, who at some point developed magical stalking powers that let her know where Knight was at any given moment so she could show up and be put in danger at plot-relevant times, dies by supposedly not turning into a vampire after being attacked and then the stinger is her being a spooky vampire outside the window and the character shows up exactly once again in a different season.

    I’ve been a bit harsher than I meant to on this but I think I’m starting to see why even the best of these shows keep shedding actors and barely make it to the three season mark. The engines are there in the pilots but they’re not built for distance. The premise is fine, if not really done justice do, it’s the writing and the characters that eventually bring it down. As I go through more and more of these pilots I’m starting to flip my initial assumptions on their head. I originally thought it was all about the high-concept pitch, and maybe you need that to get in good wit the investors, but really it’s the characters that keep you coming back. Something like ‘Murder She Wrote’ is laughable when you just bluntly state the premise but it lasted as long as it did because dammit Angela Lansbury was just that much fun to watch. I would’ve watched the hell out of that show if they made her a vampire halfway through season three.