Chris: Here’s a thing. As we reach the quarter mark of this ill-conceived project I find myself thinking about how much time I’ve spent trying to come up with clever openings for the entries that I lead off. I wouldn’t say it was stressful, but it does take up more of my time than I would like. So I was thinking of maybe adopting a standard intro that I could use at the top of each article that would encapsulate the general tenor of what’s to come. To that end, what do you think about this: “Christ, this again.” Or! Or! What about: “I know why I’m here, but what’s your excuse?” Last one: “… sigh.” No capitalization. Think it over. Meanwhile, let’s dive into the latest entry from Night Man, widely recognized as one of the syndicated superhero shows based on a Steve Engleheart character created for the Malibu Comics imprint Ultraverse that aired between 1997 and 1999. Our first episode “Bad Moon Rising” dispenses with the previous two entries Tragic Romance formula by killing off the girl NIght Man wants to fuck before the first commercial break, which I felt was a nice change of pace. Everyone knows what familiarity breeds. This time, it isn’t a Tragically Compromised KGB Assassin or TIme Displaced Lady Bankrobber who wanders into Sax Pro slash Vigilante Killer John Domino’s jazz club and becomes instantly smitten with him, it’s a recovering junkie and domestic abuse victim who just wants to meet her dirtbag ex in a public place so she can get her house key back without him making a scene. Well the joke’s on her because her ex has a little too much self respect to not attempt to insult, threaten and intimidate her into reconciliaiton.
Unfortunately for the dirtbag ex and lovers of ill-advised second chances everywhere, the recovering junkie has a Samantha Mathis thing going and as such catches John’s eye, causing him to intervene on her behalf. This might seem gallant, but no way he steps in if she’s below an 8, right? Maybe he makes an exception for a 7.5 if it’s been a slow week, but those are probably few and far between for ol’ Night Man, AmIRightOrAMIRightorAmIRight? So John sticks his nose in and the dirtbag ex is like aren’t you the entertainment and John smiles and says that’s right, but I also moonlight as the bouncer. And as God is my witness, it was kind of cool. I know I’ve never said anything even remotely positive about the acting chops of Matt McColm but that’s because he’s been terrible every moment he’s been on screen. Until now. Let it never be said that I’m irrationally unfair to actors just because they stink. Matt McColm pulled off being cool and charming and menacing. Good for him. Anyway, John scares the ex off but not before he slips the girl some heroin accidentally laced with bullshit science goop that makes it instantly fatal. The girl is alone in John’s dressing and decides to take one more hit of sweet sweet H to get herself in the mood for what promises to be a world class make-out session and keels over.
“Bad Moon Rising” is, for me, a welcome course correction after the turgid soap opera of “Lady In Red” and the gonzo incoherence of “That Ol’ Gang of Mine.” I appreciate the Go Big Or Go Home ambition of those two episodes, but they were exhaustingly incompetent. “Bad Moon” is a more straightforward revenge story, and, while it’s far from good, it’s good enough for me to enjoy the rough/amateur elements instead of feeling buried by them. I also felt like the casting worked better here too. Remember how “Ol Gang” wasted John Polito as Al Capone? “Bad Moon” introduces character actor Ed O’Ross as drug kingpin Anthony Gionello. I refuse to believe that there’s anyone on Earth, including O’ross’s own mother, who would know who I’m talking about just by his name. But we all remember that scene in Lethal Weapon where Gary Busey holds his arm directly over an open flame for an absurdly long time just to demonstrate how tough he is in order to intimidate a low level gangster who we never see again, right? Well, O’Ross played that intimidated gangster. He was also in Red Heat, Dick Tracy and Universal Soldier 1. He’s that kind of actor, and he’s exactly the kind of vaguely memorable no-name that Night Man should be serving up week after week. Someone whose name you don’t recognize and have no expectations for and yet are oddly happy to see.
“Ah, no time like the present to have some nice, relaxing heroin.”
Ronnie: It’s surprising this hasn’t happened before, a woman dying of a drug overdose in Johnny Domino’s apartment. Then again, didn’t the pilot feature a dead body in his apartment? I recall it fucked up his efforts to get laid. In any event, this situation is fleshed out in more depth, whereas the pilot used it more or less as a punchline. “Bad Moon Rising” is broadly about the impact of heroin on our community, be it Bay City or the larger human endeavor, with a science fiction twist. There’s been some contamination of the supply that causes it to kill instantaneously as opposed to taking a bit longer than that. It’s like the fentanyl that zoots cops up on contact. The mob boss suggests sloughing it off on the ghetto communities, because “it’s not like a street junkie is gonna be looking for a good housekeeping seal, right?”. As for the babe who soon pushes up daisies, it’s your typical meet cute wherein Johnny assaults an abusive boyfriend, the girlfriend ends up at Johnny’s place, but she decides to shoot up at the apartment. It’s weird. The onscreen product seems like it’d be cocaine (white powder ingested through the nasal cavity) but they state it’s heroin. Maybe heroin doesn’t look like heroin on television so they have to use cocaine, such as how on The Simpsons horses are used on film instead of cows. In any event, Johnny is arrested and crosses paths with an assistant DA who seeks to use prosecuting a local jazz musician to boost her chances of being elected DA. It’d sure be nice if this ADA (played by the woman who was irked by Jerry throwing away her thank you card in Seinfeld’s “The Pledge Drive”) was a recurring character whose agenda conflicted with Night Man’s, but it’s not that kind of show. “Planning”? “Forethought”? Come on.
“Bad Moon Rising” tries to show us the audience that heroin can and does kill anyone, be it the person who takes it for recreation to the mob boss son who’s addicted to it. Truly the drug epidemic touches all, except for Johnny, who definitely does not partake even though he is a Bay City jazz musician who lives above a nightclub. It’s as conspicuous as nobody smoking cigarettes in Marvel after Joe Quesada’s edict. I’m not saying Johnny has to be shooting up between sets with Big Time Operator and Marc Bonilla’s Dragonchoir, but it wouldn’t hurt. He gets arrested for being an accessory to doing heroin, so that’s close enough. Poor move on Sarah’s part. Johnny saves her from an abusive man, lets her stay in his apartment, and she thanks him by snorting some heroin right there. It’s the lack of consideration that bothers me.
Haworth, the woman running for district attorney, seems to be the show’s effort at political commentary, because she keeps on going on about the liberal judicial system that enshrines crazy wackadoo rights like “not being executed without a trial”. Political commentary might not the right term, because “Bad Moon Rising” doesn’t really have anything to say about the criminal justice system and its lack of ability to combat drug addiction. Johnny contrasts her bloodthirsty attitude with flattery, saying “now why would I wanna flee from an attractive, tough on crime, sexy prosecutor like you?”. She responds by claiming she’ll arraign him for murder. They fit Johnny with an ankle monitor that tracks his location, and wouldn’t you know it the thing even works when he’s Night Man. This is actually kinda clever: the device registers him flying into the air and shit, all of his Night Man activities, so they assume the thing’s busted. The show doesn’t spend a lot of time establishing Johnny juggling a dual identity so I appreciate it when it remembers that.
His agent did that to him after exhausting all possibilities of Murder She Wrote guest appearances.
Ultimately, Night Man must thwart a boy trying to lace a girl’s food with heroin. You know, to get her in the mood, by which I mean date rape her. The superheroin angle in “Bad Moon Rising” is unnecessary and poorly established, especially because it expects us to believe heroin plus some plant matter will equal ricin (as seen on Breaking Bad). The organized crime angle feels superfluous too. So what does work? I liked the interplay with Johnny and the ADA, him hitting on her while she threatens him with Siberian exile. They have chemistry… well, as much chemistry as a hunk of man like Matt McColm can muster with anything living or dead. That’s why I want her to be a recurring character. Imagine the Charles Lederer-like zippy dialogue between a himbo saxophoner and a fascist officer of the court, this tete-a-tete further complicated by the himbo’s nocturnal identity as the Night Man. The show needs a dynamic bad and a will they won’t they between the two would do the trick.
Chris: One of the things that I liked about “Bad Moon” (possibly genuinely? I’m losing the ability to tell the difference) is how lived in it felt. Like, the drug kingpin had this relationship with Night Man Sr and Lt Dann (BTW, how did they get away with naming a character Lt. Dann so close to Forrest Gump? And how did we take this long to bring it up?) that’s outside of and predates the events of the show. They saved his life at some point in the past and that seems to have earned them a measure of respect in the gangster’s eyes. So when they find out the dope is spiked they ask him to get it off the streets, appealing to his humanity as opposed to grimly resolving to arrest or execute him or whatever. You can go ahead and correct me if I’m wrong, but I feel like it’s the first time the show has approached anything resembling moral ambiguity. Like, he’s heinous enough to unload super heroin on San FranCitygo’s most vulnerable citizens but also seems genuinely distraught when he recognizes just how lethal it is. And he resolved to help dispose of it, right? That’s how that resolves? Either way, that was the relationship I would have liked to see continue. A retired cop and grieving mafia don who are on opposite sides of the law but have some kind of low level mutual understanding that borders on affection. But of course we never see him again.
The other, more hilarious, lived in plotline involves the scientist who was importing the ooze that ended up contaminating the heroin. He’s an old coot who runs a lab with his sexy scientist daughter and her horny irresponsible boyfriend who is also a scientist and the old coots assistant/right hand man? I think I have that right? Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure that the world is filled with young, white-coated scientists who want nothing more than to play grab ass the minute old-man-project-leader turns his back, but the trademarked Night Man shoddy workmanship gives the whole thing the patina of your cheaper internet pornography. Because the characters serve a purpose. Not only do they import the ooze that fucks everything up, they’re also the lab that the cops bring the dirty H to in order to test and develop an eventual antidote. And there’s a simple logic to that, right? It’s his ooze, who would know more about it than him? But there only appear to be three people working in the lab (is it a mom and pop lab?), one of whom has a constant hard-on that one of the others is constantly pushing away and that the third seems completely unaware of. The whole thing plays out like farmers daughter joke except it ends with the boyfriend trying to spike his girlfriends meal with the tainted heroin, unaware that his harmless plan to drug and rape her would have ended with her death.
“Remember; Night Man says only take what you can handle, and always know your dealer.”
I’m glad you liked the DA plotline, but it was my least favorite of the three. It didn’t have the moral shade of the gangster plot or the cheapo lunacy of the scientist plot. It was mildly amusing insofar as I think this is the third blond ice-queen type the show has introduced to spar and flirt with Johnny, the first two being those reporters that were trying to unmask him or whatever. This time they tried to switch things up by making her an officer of the court, but it’s the same basic routine. The pretty, intellectual blond lady thinks she’s smarter than our Johnny, but Johnny has the last laugh. Been there, done that. And I guess the show felt the same way because she’s another one and done. I do wonder what other sexy blond authority figure type they’ll introduce and throw away over the course of an episode. A sexy lady cop seems too obvious. But maybe there will be an episode where Johnny and the gang have to do a bunch of research at the library and the sexy librarian will keep shushing them. Or, is he too old to have a babysitter? Maybe his dad has a hot date and wants to make sure Johnny doesn’t show up and ruin it so he hires a pretty lady to distract and mind him. There are thirty odd episodes left, would you really be surprised if that happened?
I like how arresting Johnny is the Bay City equivalent of, like, OJ Simpson.
Ronnie: I like how Frank is forcibly injected with heroin and left for dead and it’s just a plot complication that allows Johnny to revise his bail agreement and get out in the world, so he can visit dad in the hospital. It doesn’t really intensify anything because you don’t get the feeling that Frank’s situation is giving Johnny even MORE of an impetus to solve the drug problem. He already has to clear his name in an overdose death. Frank hospitalized should be a running gag, like how everybody would end up concussed on Smallville. Every episode, Frank tries to resolve the situation on his own and almost dies, thus teaching the audience the lesson that you shouldn’t try to stop crime if you’re an old ex-cop with no official authority anymore. Night Man is irrelevant; jazzmen can do what they want and society has to live with the ramifications of their choices. Frank is just being a vigilante getting up into everyone’s business, so that ought to be discouraged. Night Man needs more life lessons, even if they’re confused, contradictory or downright stupid. Like, the show isn’t good, so why would it be teaching good lessons? You get it.
Odds & Ends
-“You and Bobby almost had the night of your lives. The last night.” Night Man would make a great anti-drug PSA mascot.
-Why would the police lieutenant be allowed to be the primary in an overdose that took place in his best friend’s son’s dressing room? I’m not actually asking, because I know the answer is because everything associated with Night Man is stupid and nonsensical.
-So much of Matt McColm’s acting is shuddering while getting shot at. A good superhero might, you know, try to dodge the bullets instead of just soaking them up. Then again, if he were a good superhero it wouldn’t be Night Man, would it?
-ADA Howarth seems to think breaking house arrest is a violation of Johnny’s “parole”. Look, you can’t expect people on Night Man to know what words mean.
1X12: “CONSTANT CRAVING”
Chris: My friend, it appears that you may have fished your wish because in “Constant Craving” Frank once again sticks his fucking beak where it doesn’t belong and nearly dies. Except this time he isn’t deliberately given a hot shot of bad H for his trouble, this time he’s nearly drained of his precious life’s blood by a dracula. Because Bay City is lousy with draculas (draculi?) all of a sudden, or there are two of them, anyway. And that might not seem like a lot but there are something like eleven people total in the entire metropolitan area so the odds that our hero, or more specifically our hero’s dad, would end up on the business end of a fang are pretty high. Because, see, there’s a new sexy blonde lady in town, and she isn’t a KGB assassin, or an old timey bank robber or a sassy reporter or a slightly different sassy reporter or even a crusading DA. No, this time she’s an Eastern European scientist who’s moving to Bay City and hires Frank’s, um, I think it’s a security company (is this new information?) to protect her shit as it’s shipped in from overseas in big storage containers. Or something.
I mean, my expectations weren’t high but holy shit.
Whatever. The point is, a customs agent disappears along with Johnny’s drummer, which obviously upsets him because good drummers are hard to find, so he goes to the docks where the sexy lady’s containers are being held and sure enough, one of the crates sets off the old evil detector and it’s off to the races. We the audience already know the lady is a dracula because we saw the date with the drummer and we saw her feeding on him, but the twist is that she didn’t actually kill him. She is a dracula, and she did eat the drummer, but she didn’t even eat enough to kill him or even turn him. She’s actually trying to cure her draculism, which is a thing a person can do in the Night Man world, and while she still needed to feed she wanted to be, you know, ethical about it. Kudos to her, I say. Unfortunately, leaving draculaing behind is easier said than done, and her shitty ex/sire Count SomethingIDon’tRemember has followed her to America in an attempt to reclaim her and has no concern about how many bodies he leaves in his wake.
“Constant Craving”, from that perspective, has basically the same plot engine as “Bad Moon Rising.” Both are stories about recovering junkies trying to get away from their dirtbag ex-boyfriends and nearly get Frank killed in doing so. If Night Man were a better show I would suggest it was working on some kind of theme. But I don’t know if I even think enough of it to ascribe the similarities to a lazy formula. We might just be solidly in the land of the Thousand Monkeys Banging Away At a Thousand Typewriters and sometimes shit gets weird. I can’t say that “Constant Craving” made much of an impression on me at all; it wasn’t foundationally berserk like “That Old Gang of Mine” or narratively cracked like “Chrome”. Instead “Craving” is another tired X-Files ripoff in the vein of when he fought the inter dimensional demon dog in “Still of the Night”. That dog monster had werewolf properties, yeah. So has he fought an Invisible Man, Frankenstein, or Creature From the Black Lagoon yet? If not, they’re probably right around the corner.
This is actually what 90s computing looked like, kids.
Ronnie: If they’re going to do a vampire episode and the one right before it is titled “Bad Moon Rising”, how can that not be about werewolves? It’s a slam dunk, so it makes sense Night Man wouldn’t do it. I like how the big moment that Johnny realizes something is amiss occurs when the Countess picks up the drummer and not Johnny himself. “Look, if a woman doesn’t want to fuck me, there’s clearly something wrong with her, be it she’s mentally ill or some sort of boogerman”.”I should point out that the actress, Lysette Anthony, has experience portraying vampires in embarrassing projects, having played Lucy in the (s)hit film Dracula: Dead and Loving It. Man, 90s Mel Brooks vs. Night Man is almost nearly a fair fight. The show having the production values of Cinemax softcore pornography actually aids it for “Costant Craving”, because vampires and softcore pornography mesh well together. They both involve a lot of candles. Johnny’s drummer friend Keith winds up dead after leaving with the Countess and nobody knows the woman’s whereabouts. Johnny protests “parking at a place like that wasn’t Keith’s style” and also claims to have been the best man at the guy’s wedding. He was even there when Keith’s wife died. Holy backstory, Batman! A better show might, like, give members of the band “characterization” before killing one off for emotional resonance. But hey, what do you expect from crappy 90s syndicated television anyway? Compared to the television of today they were bashing stones together in the hope of creating fire.
If you’re wondering how long it takes “Constant Craving” to get to the fireworks factory, and by “fireworks factory” I mean “vampires”, rest assured that we’re only 10 minutes in before Night Man uses his evil FM radio to realize that shipping container his dad helped secure contains a goddamn coffin. Not an ambiguous one either, it’s a full on Dracula coffin. In the coffin they find a missing customs guy, putting Frank in hot water for the second time in as many episodes. It doesn’t really result in anything because in his next scene he’s fielding a security job offer from the Count, aka the true villain of his piece. Behind every woman is a man who wants to ruin her life with his controlling behavior. The Countess doesn’t appreciate Frank hiring himself out to other clients, despite him reminding her “a security company can’t exist on one client”. I don’t think previous episodes have even established Frank has a security company he operates, because most of his entrances into the episode’s plot consist of him interceding in Johnny’s business, like in “Bad Moon Rising”. Again, though, if you’re looking for that kind of shit you’ve got the wrong show.
I get less “vampire” from him and more “ill-advised Deep Space Nine villain”.
You’ve got the right show if you want to see a man lasering a vampire’s coffin, causing said vampire to lose his shit. I was pretty stoned when I watched this, so I may not have all the details right, but the Countess is siphoning blood so she can be cured, and she needs some Keith blood and some Frank blood to do so. All the actual killings are the responsibility of the Count, played by some French guy. Yadda yadda yadda, Night Man defeats the Count and the Countess is cured of her affliction. Since she fed on Night Man and not Frank and got cured anyway she concludes Night Man must be Johnny. I’ll admit, I’ve never seen someone determine a superhero identity based on a blood match. She agrees to keep his secret, and knowing this show it will never, ever come up again. What the fuck does a newly human again vampire do with their life anyway? Guess she better pick up the want ads because being human costs money.
Chris: So I watched this episode with my sister, because she is a good sibling and I am a bad one. And she pointed out what a singularly weird idea that whole holographic jazzman was. Jazz is kinda known for being unstructured and improvisational. Two features that don’t traditionally mesh well with prerecorded material. Because that’s what it would be, right? Johnny records or digitizes a performance whenever he finds a moment, and then plays it back at the appropriate time. Something like that might work if you were first chair in an orchestra with a featured solo or something, or maybe if you were in a quartet? I’m not speaking from any kind of experience, but my understanding was that there are styles of performance that are rooted in precision and timing, and styles that are rooted in adaptation and fun. Isn’t jazz in that second category? And here’s another question, what do the other musicians think about how sometimes Johnny is out there horsing off with everyone on the main stage, and sometimes he stands on the side of the stage and disappears behind a curtain whenever he’s not doing a solo? Do they just chalk that up to Jazzman’s Prerogative (heroin)? Or do they think Johnny is a dick? Because the one drummer seemed to like him okay.
Every time Night Man appears in frame with another actor it really compounds how stupid the costume looks.
It can’t be overstated how clumsy this show is on just about every level. Nothing makes any sense. And when it does something insane (which happens frequently) it barely makes an impression. Like, remember in Lois & Clark when Clark was flying feet first facing upwards with his hands behind his head like he was laying down on a couch and he accidentally ran into a herd of ducks? Part of what made that so memorable was how truly awful the effects were, but it was rooted in a visual concept that was kind of clever (even if it was also deeply stupid). You can tell the writers came up with a weird idea that they knew was weird and went ahead and executed it as best they could. There’s an establishing shot in “Bad Moon” where a bunch of cars are parked at the edge of a bluff and the matting is so terrible (because they couldn’t afford to park a half dozen cars by the side of a road, so they had to fake it) that the either cars are enormous or the cliff is six feet high. It’s funny for a second, but only for a second, because it’s not attached to anything thoughtful or memorable. It’s just a rotten establishing shot. I need some kind of something at the heart of this show to bounce off of or I’m gonna run out of things to say.
Ronnie: It feels like Night Man is still at the stage where it’s figuring out what kind of show it wants to be, so each week you either get a down to earth story about drug addiction or point shaving OR you get invisible monsters, vampires, face changers, that sort of thing. Now I imagine the down to earth stuff is a mechanism of the show needing to stay on a budget; I liked “Constant Craving” more than you, perhaps because it reminds of that X-Files episode where Mulder is missing Scully (who’s been abducted) and fucks his way through the vampire community. You also have to admit the final confrontation between Johnny and the Count is hilarious. I used to have an animated gif of him lasering the coffin and the vampire going apeshit, that’s how much I appreciated the scene. I’m in favor of anything that takes the series in a more supernatural direction, like the second season of Baywatch Nights. Maybe we should’ve devoted our valuable time to assessing that show. Can’t change horses midstream though, so we’re stuck with this. It all depends on how charming you find the incompetence. You seem to be more frustrated than delighted by it whereas I’m the opposite. I can promise you at least that Season 2 has a whole ass overarching plot to it. And a new guy playing Raleigh because black people are interchangeable according to Glen A. Larson. But that’s not for a while. Up next is an episode penned by the creator of the character, Steve Englehart. Perhaps having a scriptwriter of any renown will help the series.
Odds & Ends
-This is the first episode that doesn’t follow up the opening title sequence with the origin recap. The one that goes “Johnny Domino was one of Bay City’s hottest young jazz musicians”? I want to know who thought that episode 12 is when to ditch the expository catchup sandwiched between the opening and the actual episode.
-The Countess sees Johnny’s hologram act and quips “and they give Milli Vanilli a hard time”. Take THAT, Milli Vanilli!
-This is also the second Milli Vanilli joke to appear in an episode of Night Man. Someone behind the scenes took that whole deception hard.
-Johnny tells Raleigh that he saw the Countess steal four pints from the blood bank. “Maybe she’s anemic” Raleigh says in response. When was the last time a blood bank got burgled by someone with anemia?
Night Man Nights: “Bad Moon Rising”/”Constant Craving”
1X11: “BAD MOON RISING”
Chris: Here’s a thing. As we reach the quarter mark of this ill-conceived project I find myself thinking about how much time I’ve spent trying to come up with clever openings for the entries that I lead off. I wouldn’t say it was stressful, but it does take up more of my time than I would like. So I was thinking of maybe adopting a standard intro that I could use at the top of each article that would encapsulate the general tenor of what’s to come. To that end, what do you think about this: “Christ, this again.” Or! Or! What about: “I know why I’m here, but what’s your excuse?” Last one: “… sigh.” No capitalization. Think it over. Meanwhile, let’s dive into the latest entry from Night Man, widely recognized as one of the syndicated superhero shows based on a Steve Engleheart character created for the Malibu Comics imprint Ultraverse that aired between 1997 and 1999. Our first episode “Bad Moon Rising” dispenses with the previous two entries Tragic Romance formula by killing off the girl NIght Man wants to fuck before the first commercial break, which I felt was a nice change of pace. Everyone knows what familiarity breeds. This time, it isn’t a Tragically Compromised KGB Assassin or TIme Displaced Lady Bankrobber who wanders into Sax Pro slash Vigilante Killer John Domino’s jazz club and becomes instantly smitten with him, it’s a recovering junkie and domestic abuse victim who just wants to meet her dirtbag ex in a public place so she can get her house key back without him making a scene. Well the joke’s on her because her ex has a little too much self respect to not attempt to insult, threaten and intimidate her into reconciliaiton.
Unfortunately for the dirtbag ex and lovers of ill-advised second chances everywhere, the recovering junkie has a Samantha Mathis thing going and as such catches John’s eye, causing him to intervene on her behalf. This might seem gallant, but no way he steps in if she’s below an 8, right? Maybe he makes an exception for a 7.5 if it’s been a slow week, but those are probably few and far between for ol’ Night Man, AmIRightOrAMIRightorAmIRight? So John sticks his nose in and the dirtbag ex is like aren’t you the entertainment and John smiles and says that’s right, but I also moonlight as the bouncer. And as God is my witness, it was kind of cool. I know I’ve never said anything even remotely positive about the acting chops of Matt McColm but that’s because he’s been terrible every moment he’s been on screen. Until now. Let it never be said that I’m irrationally unfair to actors just because they stink. Matt McColm pulled off being cool and charming and menacing. Good for him. Anyway, John scares the ex off but not before he slips the girl some heroin accidentally laced with bullshit science goop that makes it instantly fatal. The girl is alone in John’s dressing and decides to take one more hit of sweet sweet H to get herself in the mood for what promises to be a world class make-out session and keels over.
“Bad Moon Rising” is, for me, a welcome course correction after the turgid soap opera of “Lady In Red” and the gonzo incoherence of “That Ol’ Gang of Mine.” I appreciate the Go Big Or Go Home ambition of those two episodes, but they were exhaustingly incompetent. “Bad Moon” is a more straightforward revenge story, and, while it’s far from good, it’s good enough for me to enjoy the rough/amateur elements instead of feeling buried by them. I also felt like the casting worked better here too. Remember how “Ol Gang” wasted John Polito as Al Capone? “Bad Moon” introduces character actor Ed O’Ross as drug kingpin Anthony Gionello. I refuse to believe that there’s anyone on Earth, including O’ross’s own mother, who would know who I’m talking about just by his name. But we all remember that scene in Lethal Weapon where Gary Busey holds his arm directly over an open flame for an absurdly long time just to demonstrate how tough he is in order to intimidate a low level gangster who we never see again, right? Well, O’Ross played that intimidated gangster. He was also in Red Heat, Dick Tracy and Universal Soldier 1. He’s that kind of actor, and he’s exactly the kind of vaguely memorable no-name that Night Man should be serving up week after week. Someone whose name you don’t recognize and have no expectations for and yet are oddly happy to see.
“Ah, no time like the present to have some nice, relaxing heroin.”
Ronnie: It’s surprising this hasn’t happened before, a woman dying of a drug overdose in Johnny Domino’s apartment. Then again, didn’t the pilot feature a dead body in his apartment? I recall it fucked up his efforts to get laid. In any event, this situation is fleshed out in more depth, whereas the pilot used it more or less as a punchline. “Bad Moon Rising” is broadly about the impact of heroin on our community, be it Bay City or the larger human endeavor, with a science fiction twist. There’s been some contamination of the supply that causes it to kill instantaneously as opposed to taking a bit longer than that. It’s like the fentanyl that zoots cops up on contact. The mob boss suggests sloughing it off on the ghetto communities, because “it’s not like a street junkie is gonna be looking for a good housekeeping seal, right?”. As for the babe who soon pushes up daisies, it’s your typical meet cute wherein Johnny assaults an abusive boyfriend, the girlfriend ends up at Johnny’s place, but she decides to shoot up at the apartment. It’s weird. The onscreen product seems like it’d be cocaine (white powder ingested through the nasal cavity) but they state it’s heroin. Maybe heroin doesn’t look like heroin on television so they have to use cocaine, such as how on The Simpsons horses are used on film instead of cows. In any event, Johnny is arrested and crosses paths with an assistant DA who seeks to use prosecuting a local jazz musician to boost her chances of being elected DA. It’d sure be nice if this ADA (played by the woman who was irked by Jerry throwing away her thank you card in Seinfeld’s “The Pledge Drive”) was a recurring character whose agenda conflicted with Night Man’s, but it’s not that kind of show. “Planning”? “Forethought”? Come on.
“Bad Moon Rising” tries to show us the audience that heroin can and does kill anyone, be it the person who takes it for recreation to the mob boss son who’s addicted to it. Truly the drug epidemic touches all, except for Johnny, who definitely does not partake even though he is a Bay City jazz musician who lives above a nightclub. It’s as conspicuous as nobody smoking cigarettes in Marvel after Joe Quesada’s edict. I’m not saying Johnny has to be shooting up between sets with Big Time Operator and Marc Bonilla’s Dragonchoir, but it wouldn’t hurt. He gets arrested for being an accessory to doing heroin, so that’s close enough. Poor move on Sarah’s part. Johnny saves her from an abusive man, lets her stay in his apartment, and she thanks him by snorting some heroin right there. It’s the lack of consideration that bothers me.
Haworth, the woman running for district attorney, seems to be the show’s effort at political commentary, because she keeps on going on about the liberal judicial system that enshrines crazy wackadoo rights like “not being executed without a trial”. Political commentary might not the right term, because “Bad Moon Rising” doesn’t really have anything to say about the criminal justice system and its lack of ability to combat drug addiction. Johnny contrasts her bloodthirsty attitude with flattery, saying “now why would I wanna flee from an attractive, tough on crime, sexy prosecutor like you?”. She responds by claiming she’ll arraign him for murder. They fit Johnny with an ankle monitor that tracks his location, and wouldn’t you know it the thing even works when he’s Night Man. This is actually kinda clever: the device registers him flying into the air and shit, all of his Night Man activities, so they assume the thing’s busted. The show doesn’t spend a lot of time establishing Johnny juggling a dual identity so I appreciate it when it remembers that.
His agent did that to him after exhausting all possibilities of Murder She Wrote guest appearances.
Ultimately, Night Man must thwart a boy trying to lace a girl’s food with heroin. You know, to get her in the mood, by which I mean date rape her. The superheroin angle in “Bad Moon Rising” is unnecessary and poorly established, especially because it expects us to believe heroin plus some plant matter will equal ricin (as seen on Breaking Bad). The organized crime angle feels superfluous too. So what does work? I liked the interplay with Johnny and the ADA, him hitting on her while she threatens him with Siberian exile. They have chemistry… well, as much chemistry as a hunk of man like Matt McColm can muster with anything living or dead. That’s why I want her to be a recurring character. Imagine the Charles Lederer-like zippy dialogue between a himbo saxophoner and a fascist officer of the court, this tete-a-tete further complicated by the himbo’s nocturnal identity as the Night Man. The show needs a dynamic bad and a will they won’t they between the two would do the trick.
Chris: One of the things that I liked about “Bad Moon” (possibly genuinely? I’m losing the ability to tell the difference) is how lived in it felt. Like, the drug kingpin had this relationship with Night Man Sr and Lt Dann (BTW, how did they get away with naming a character Lt. Dann so close to Forrest Gump? And how did we take this long to bring it up?) that’s outside of and predates the events of the show. They saved his life at some point in the past and that seems to have earned them a measure of respect in the gangster’s eyes. So when they find out the dope is spiked they ask him to get it off the streets, appealing to his humanity as opposed to grimly resolving to arrest or execute him or whatever. You can go ahead and correct me if I’m wrong, but I feel like it’s the first time the show has approached anything resembling moral ambiguity. Like, he’s heinous enough to unload super heroin on San FranCitygo’s most vulnerable citizens but also seems genuinely distraught when he recognizes just how lethal it is. And he resolved to help dispose of it, right? That’s how that resolves? Either way, that was the relationship I would have liked to see continue. A retired cop and grieving mafia don who are on opposite sides of the law but have some kind of low level mutual understanding that borders on affection. But of course we never see him again.
The other, more hilarious, lived in plotline involves the scientist who was importing the ooze that ended up contaminating the heroin. He’s an old coot who runs a lab with his sexy scientist daughter and her horny irresponsible boyfriend who is also a scientist and the old coots assistant/right hand man? I think I have that right? Don’t get me wrong, I’m sure that the world is filled with young, white-coated scientists who want nothing more than to play grab ass the minute old-man-project-leader turns his back, but the trademarked Night Man shoddy workmanship gives the whole thing the patina of your cheaper internet pornography. Because the characters serve a purpose. Not only do they import the ooze that fucks everything up, they’re also the lab that the cops bring the dirty H to in order to test and develop an eventual antidote. And there’s a simple logic to that, right? It’s his ooze, who would know more about it than him? But there only appear to be three people working in the lab (is it a mom and pop lab?), one of whom has a constant hard-on that one of the others is constantly pushing away and that the third seems completely unaware of. The whole thing plays out like farmers daughter joke except it ends with the boyfriend trying to spike his girlfriends meal with the tainted heroin, unaware that his harmless plan to drug and rape her would have ended with her death.
“Remember; Night Man says only take what you can handle, and always know your dealer.”
I’m glad you liked the DA plotline, but it was my least favorite of the three. It didn’t have the moral shade of the gangster plot or the cheapo lunacy of the scientist plot. It was mildly amusing insofar as I think this is the third blond ice-queen type the show has introduced to spar and flirt with Johnny, the first two being those reporters that were trying to unmask him or whatever. This time they tried to switch things up by making her an officer of the court, but it’s the same basic routine. The pretty, intellectual blond lady thinks she’s smarter than our Johnny, but Johnny has the last laugh. Been there, done that. And I guess the show felt the same way because she’s another one and done. I do wonder what other sexy blond authority figure type they’ll introduce and throw away over the course of an episode. A sexy lady cop seems too obvious. But maybe there will be an episode where Johnny and the gang have to do a bunch of research at the library and the sexy librarian will keep shushing them. Or, is he too old to have a babysitter? Maybe his dad has a hot date and wants to make sure Johnny doesn’t show up and ruin it so he hires a pretty lady to distract and mind him. There are thirty odd episodes left, would you really be surprised if that happened?
I like how arresting Johnny is the Bay City equivalent of, like, OJ Simpson.
Ronnie: I like how Frank is forcibly injected with heroin and left for dead and it’s just a plot complication that allows Johnny to revise his bail agreement and get out in the world, so he can visit dad in the hospital. It doesn’t really intensify anything because you don’t get the feeling that Frank’s situation is giving Johnny even MORE of an impetus to solve the drug problem. He already has to clear his name in an overdose death. Frank hospitalized should be a running gag, like how everybody would end up concussed on Smallville. Every episode, Frank tries to resolve the situation on his own and almost dies, thus teaching the audience the lesson that you shouldn’t try to stop crime if you’re an old ex-cop with no official authority anymore. Night Man is irrelevant; jazzmen can do what they want and society has to live with the ramifications of their choices. Frank is just being a vigilante getting up into everyone’s business, so that ought to be discouraged. Night Man needs more life lessons, even if they’re confused, contradictory or downright stupid. Like, the show isn’t good, so why would it be teaching good lessons? You get it.
Odds & Ends
-“You and Bobby almost had the night of your lives. The last night.” Night Man would make a great anti-drug PSA mascot.
-Why would the police lieutenant be allowed to be the primary in an overdose that took place in his best friend’s son’s dressing room? I’m not actually asking, because I know the answer is because everything associated with Night Man is stupid and nonsensical.
-So much of Matt McColm’s acting is shuddering while getting shot at. A good superhero might, you know, try to dodge the bullets instead of just soaking them up. Then again, if he were a good superhero it wouldn’t be Night Man, would it?
-ADA Howarth seems to think breaking house arrest is a violation of Johnny’s “parole”. Look, you can’t expect people on Night Man to know what words mean.
1X12: “CONSTANT CRAVING”
Chris: My friend, it appears that you may have fished your wish because in “Constant Craving” Frank once again sticks his fucking beak where it doesn’t belong and nearly dies. Except this time he isn’t deliberately given a hot shot of bad H for his trouble, this time he’s nearly drained of his precious life’s blood by a dracula. Because Bay City is lousy with draculas (draculi?) all of a sudden, or there are two of them, anyway. And that might not seem like a lot but there are something like eleven people total in the entire metropolitan area so the odds that our hero, or more specifically our hero’s dad, would end up on the business end of a fang are pretty high. Because, see, there’s a new sexy blonde lady in town, and she isn’t a KGB assassin, or an old timey bank robber or a sassy reporter or a slightly different sassy reporter or even a crusading DA. No, this time she’s an Eastern European scientist who’s moving to Bay City and hires Frank’s, um, I think it’s a security company (is this new information?) to protect her shit as it’s shipped in from overseas in big storage containers. Or something.
I mean, my expectations weren’t high but holy shit.
Whatever. The point is, a customs agent disappears along with Johnny’s drummer, which obviously upsets him because good drummers are hard to find, so he goes to the docks where the sexy lady’s containers are being held and sure enough, one of the crates sets off the old evil detector and it’s off to the races. We the audience already know the lady is a dracula because we saw the date with the drummer and we saw her feeding on him, but the twist is that she didn’t actually kill him. She is a dracula, and she did eat the drummer, but she didn’t even eat enough to kill him or even turn him. She’s actually trying to cure her draculism, which is a thing a person can do in the Night Man world, and while she still needed to feed she wanted to be, you know, ethical about it. Kudos to her, I say. Unfortunately, leaving draculaing behind is easier said than done, and her shitty ex/sire Count SomethingIDon’tRemember has followed her to America in an attempt to reclaim her and has no concern about how many bodies he leaves in his wake.
“Constant Craving”, from that perspective, has basically the same plot engine as “Bad Moon Rising.” Both are stories about recovering junkies trying to get away from their dirtbag ex-boyfriends and nearly get Frank killed in doing so. If Night Man were a better show I would suggest it was working on some kind of theme. But I don’t know if I even think enough of it to ascribe the similarities to a lazy formula. We might just be solidly in the land of the Thousand Monkeys Banging Away At a Thousand Typewriters and sometimes shit gets weird. I can’t say that “Constant Craving” made much of an impression on me at all; it wasn’t foundationally berserk like “That Old Gang of Mine” or narratively cracked like “Chrome”. Instead “Craving” is another tired X-Files ripoff in the vein of when he fought the inter dimensional demon dog in “Still of the Night”. That dog monster had werewolf properties, yeah. So has he fought an Invisible Man, Frankenstein, or Creature From the Black Lagoon yet? If not, they’re probably right around the corner.
This is actually what 90s computing looked like, kids.
Ronnie: If they’re going to do a vampire episode and the one right before it is titled “Bad Moon Rising”, how can that not be about werewolves? It’s a slam dunk, so it makes sense Night Man wouldn’t do it. I like how the big moment that Johnny realizes something is amiss occurs when the Countess picks up the drummer and not Johnny himself. “Look, if a woman doesn’t want to fuck me, there’s clearly something wrong with her, be it she’s mentally ill or some sort of boogerman”.”I should point out that the actress, Lysette Anthony, has experience portraying vampires in embarrassing projects, having played Lucy in the (s)hit film Dracula: Dead and Loving It. Man, 90s Mel Brooks vs. Night Man is almost nearly a fair fight. The show having the production values of Cinemax softcore pornography actually aids it for “Costant Craving”, because vampires and softcore pornography mesh well together. They both involve a lot of candles. Johnny’s drummer friend Keith winds up dead after leaving with the Countess and nobody knows the woman’s whereabouts. Johnny protests “parking at a place like that wasn’t Keith’s style” and also claims to have been the best man at the guy’s wedding. He was even there when Keith’s wife died. Holy backstory, Batman! A better show might, like, give members of the band “characterization” before killing one off for emotional resonance. But hey, what do you expect from crappy 90s syndicated television anyway? Compared to the television of today they were bashing stones together in the hope of creating fire.
If you’re wondering how long it takes “Constant Craving” to get to the fireworks factory, and by “fireworks factory” I mean “vampires”, rest assured that we’re only 10 minutes in before Night Man uses his evil FM radio to realize that shipping container his dad helped secure contains a goddamn coffin. Not an ambiguous one either, it’s a full on Dracula coffin. In the coffin they find a missing customs guy, putting Frank in hot water for the second time in as many episodes. It doesn’t really result in anything because in his next scene he’s fielding a security job offer from the Count, aka the true villain of his piece. Behind every woman is a man who wants to ruin her life with his controlling behavior. The Countess doesn’t appreciate Frank hiring himself out to other clients, despite him reminding her “a security company can’t exist on one client”. I don’t think previous episodes have even established Frank has a security company he operates, because most of his entrances into the episode’s plot consist of him interceding in Johnny’s business, like in “Bad Moon Rising”. Again, though, if you’re looking for that kind of shit you’ve got the wrong show.
I get less “vampire” from him and more “ill-advised Deep Space Nine villain”.
You’ve got the right show if you want to see a man lasering a vampire’s coffin, causing said vampire to lose his shit. I was pretty stoned when I watched this, so I may not have all the details right, but the Countess is siphoning blood so she can be cured, and she needs some Keith blood and some Frank blood to do so. All the actual killings are the responsibility of the Count, played by some French guy. Yadda yadda yadda, Night Man defeats the Count and the Countess is cured of her affliction. Since she fed on Night Man and not Frank and got cured anyway she concludes Night Man must be Johnny. I’ll admit, I’ve never seen someone determine a superhero identity based on a blood match. She agrees to keep his secret, and knowing this show it will never, ever come up again. What the fuck does a newly human again vampire do with their life anyway? Guess she better pick up the want ads because being human costs money.
Chris: So I watched this episode with my sister, because she is a good sibling and I am a bad one. And she pointed out what a singularly weird idea that whole holographic jazzman was. Jazz is kinda known for being unstructured and improvisational. Two features that don’t traditionally mesh well with prerecorded material. Because that’s what it would be, right? Johnny records or digitizes a performance whenever he finds a moment, and then plays it back at the appropriate time. Something like that might work if you were first chair in an orchestra with a featured solo or something, or maybe if you were in a quartet? I’m not speaking from any kind of experience, but my understanding was that there are styles of performance that are rooted in precision and timing, and styles that are rooted in adaptation and fun. Isn’t jazz in that second category? And here’s another question, what do the other musicians think about how sometimes Johnny is out there horsing off with everyone on the main stage, and sometimes he stands on the side of the stage and disappears behind a curtain whenever he’s not doing a solo? Do they just chalk that up to Jazzman’s Prerogative (heroin)? Or do they think Johnny is a dick? Because the one drummer seemed to like him okay.
Every time Night Man appears in frame with another actor it really compounds how stupid the costume looks.
It can’t be overstated how clumsy this show is on just about every level. Nothing makes any sense. And when it does something insane (which happens frequently) it barely makes an impression. Like, remember in Lois & Clark when Clark was flying feet first facing upwards with his hands behind his head like he was laying down on a couch and he accidentally ran into a herd of ducks? Part of what made that so memorable was how truly awful the effects were, but it was rooted in a visual concept that was kind of clever (even if it was also deeply stupid). You can tell the writers came up with a weird idea that they knew was weird and went ahead and executed it as best they could. There’s an establishing shot in “Bad Moon” where a bunch of cars are parked at the edge of a bluff and the matting is so terrible (because they couldn’t afford to park a half dozen cars by the side of a road, so they had to fake it) that the either cars are enormous or the cliff is six feet high. It’s funny for a second, but only for a second, because it’s not attached to anything thoughtful or memorable. It’s just a rotten establishing shot. I need some kind of something at the heart of this show to bounce off of or I’m gonna run out of things to say.
Ronnie: It feels like Night Man is still at the stage where it’s figuring out what kind of show it wants to be, so each week you either get a down to earth story about drug addiction or point shaving OR you get invisible monsters, vampires, face changers, that sort of thing. Now I imagine the down to earth stuff is a mechanism of the show needing to stay on a budget; I liked “Constant Craving” more than you, perhaps because it reminds of that X-Files episode where Mulder is missing Scully (who’s been abducted) and fucks his way through the vampire community. You also have to admit the final confrontation between Johnny and the Count is hilarious. I used to have an animated gif of him lasering the coffin and the vampire going apeshit, that’s how much I appreciated the scene. I’m in favor of anything that takes the series in a more supernatural direction, like the second season of Baywatch Nights. Maybe we should’ve devoted our valuable time to assessing that show. Can’t change horses midstream though, so we’re stuck with this. It all depends on how charming you find the incompetence. You seem to be more frustrated than delighted by it whereas I’m the opposite. I can promise you at least that Season 2 has a whole ass overarching plot to it. And a new guy playing Raleigh because black people are interchangeable according to Glen A. Larson. But that’s not for a while. Up next is an episode penned by the creator of the character, Steve Englehart. Perhaps having a scriptwriter of any renown will help the series.
Odds & Ends
-This is the first episode that doesn’t follow up the opening title sequence with the origin recap. The one that goes “Johnny Domino was one of Bay City’s hottest young jazz musicians”? I want to know who thought that episode 12 is when to ditch the expository catchup sandwiched between the opening and the actual episode.
-The Countess sees Johnny’s hologram act and quips “and they give Milli Vanilli a hard time”. Take THAT, Milli Vanilli!
-This is also the second Milli Vanilli joke to appear in an episode of Night Man. Someone behind the scenes took that whole deception hard.
-Johnny tells Raleigh that he saw the Countess steal four pints from the blood bank. “Maybe she’s anemic” Raleigh says in response. When was the last time a blood bank got burgled by someone with anemia?
Ronnie Gardocki