Ronnie: Hi. Normally you’d be reading about the latest in a long slog towards completing analysis of the four year series Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. But this might surprise you: Chris and I completed it. We’re done! Finished! Finito. We even put a bow atop everything with a postmortem article. So instead we’re diving head first into our successor project in which we apply the same intellectual rigor/Seinfeld references to another unsung 1990s superhero TV adaptation. We’re talking Night Man, folks, and he does not fight the Day Man, nor does he have any relationship whatsoever with him, let’s get that out of the way now. I doubt It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s writers knew this show existed when they made that episode, so at best it’s a coincidence. Night Man is a 1997-1999 syndicated TV series based on the Malibu Comics hero of same name. Who created him? What is Malibu? Don’t worry, we’ll answer all that and more in due time. This column will be covering and critiquing the two part pilot episode, titled either “Pilot” or “World Premiere”. There’s plenty to talk about so let’s get going.
First things first: the opening credit sequence is awesome. Watch it for yourself here. You’ll notice the amazing choices they make with this, such as a superhero show first showing the hero in his civilian guise driving around in his car and then using a device to create a saxophone playing hologram of himself. Only after those things do we see him as an actual superhero. The opening titles make you realize you’re not only watching prime 90s cheese, you’re watching something special, as the pilot bears out. The dramatic pilot can be an excellent thesis statement for a drama or it can be a mixed bag that has to serve too many masters (setting up characters, a plot and a formula for the show to use, including something exciting enough to get people to tune in in the first place). Night Man circumvents the established options and goes instead for insane nonsense.
Before Hologram 2Pac was even a twinkle in someone’s eye…
Nominally, “World Premiere” does succeed at introducing Night Man, who he is, what his powers consist of, and who his supporting cast is. It does so in such a weird way, such that you would not be wrong to think professional writers were not involved. But they were, is the thing. The series was created and the pilot written by Glen A. Larson, prolific 80s TV creator. He created Battlestar Galactica, Knight Rider, The Fall Guy and most importantly Manimal. We have plenty of time to dissect his role in these proceedings so let’s get down to it. Johnny Domino (Matt McColm) is a jazz saxophonist in Bay City/San Francisco (they’re inconsistent on the name, but you better believe the Golden Gate Bridge is a frequent sight) who is bestowed superpowers when he’s hit by lightning while in a cable car. Those powers? He doesn’t have to sleep anymore and he can hear evil thoughts. That’s it. His other abilities come from a military supersuit designed in part by Raleigh (Derek Webster), his African-American heterosexual lifemate with whom he becomes entangled over the course of this pilot.
I’m going to turn this over to Chris now because while I’ve seen the pilot multiple times, he’s only seen it the once so I’m interested in his gut reaction to the myriad happenings. Take it away, buddy.
Chris: So you know how if you go to school for long enough you end up with a copy of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man? Maybe you were assigned it for an intro lit class at college, or it could have been for a high school AP English class. If you’re really unlucky you get your copy from one of your uncles on your fourteenth birthday even though you made it abundantly clear that what you really wanted was a VHS copy of Batman Returns or R.E.M.’s Automatic For the People. In my dad’s case it was the summer between high school and college when someone threw a package with his name on it through a window in the living room of his parents’ house. When he opened it he found a copy of Portrait, along with Mrs. Dalloway, Heart of Darkness and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. Also a half dozen tootsie rolls that he ended up sharing with his family.
You also know how if you actually end up having to read the thing (my apologies) someone inevitably pops up to inform you, unprompted, that if you really want to get your head spun around by Joyce you should give Ulysses a try, but then a second person appears to remind the first person that Finnegan’s Wake makes Ulysses look like Green Eggs and Ham which I guess makes Portrait like one of those heavy cardboard books that only have captionless pictures of bunnies and were designed more to be gummed then actually looked at? You know how that happens? I’m bringing all this up to say that Night Man is to Lois & Clark as Finnegan’s Wake is to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It’s a mind-bending, sanity testing, extended freak out presumingly intended only for people who are tripping or criminally insane. I don’t know if it’s actually possible to critique or summarize it in any conventional way; I tried a couple of times and kept getting nose bleeds and passing out. So what I’ve done is to lock myself in a dark room with the windows blacked out and dictated my thoughts into my phone for as long as I can before the darkness seeps into my brain through my eyes, ears and mouth and I tumble into the abyss once more.
Street car jazz is the best kind of jazz.
Anyway. Like Ronnie said, Night Man is about how professional white guy saxophoner and unwilling performer of cunnilingus John Germaine gets struck by lightning and supercharges his brain Lucy style so that he can hear the bad things other people are thinking. He then hooks up with a nerd on the run from the government because they want to use the Iron Man style suit of armor he designed as a weapon and the nerd can’t have that on his conscience. They meet when John (or Johnny) karate kicks a fed through the passenger side window of a car and incapacitates him thus gaining the nerd’s undying loyalty. Or maybe it was a mob guy he kicked, or a triad member, or Yakuza or Murder Inc or Hezbollah. There are a lot of folks after the suit is what I’m saying. There’s the C.I.A. because The X-Files, and then all the ethnically diverse non-American bad guys who spend most of their time in their mountain lair sitting around a table not unlike the one at the beginning of Naked Gun,squabbling with one another and sending goons on errands.
Also, Johnny is able to kick that window because he’s a world class karate person and his dad wishes he would go back to teaching that instead of following his life-long dream of being a white guy saxaphoner in an all-white jazz band that plays at jazz clubs catering to exclusively white audiences. But a black woman runs the club behind the scenes people, thus giving the black nerd someone to flirt with in the time honored “hey look, we’re the only two sexually compatible non-white people on this show so we may as well do this” plot that’s been enriching African-American culture on television and in movies for decades.Look, I just, it’s all too much, you know? Too much! this could be a book.
Ronnie: Night Man and the pilot especially are difficult to write about for the simple reason that there’s so much to discuss. Like, I had legitimate anxiety during the creation of this article because I feared we weren’t going to be comprehensive enough in documenting the insanity that occurs over the course of these 90 minutes. I still have it a bit. That said, I’ll try my best. The pilot tries to accomplish two goals: provide an origin story for Night Man and tell a story about arms dealing. It does do both but the quality is questionable.
First things first: Johnny Domino, whose real last name is “Dominus” (he changed it because of pervasive anti-Greek sentiment), is the house saxophone man at the House of Soul. Jessica owns the place, and you might recognize the actress Felecia Bell as Sisko’s wife on Deep Space 9. She rarely is given much to do in the plots of these things and her character was eliminated entirely come Season 2. (More on that another time.) Frank Dominus, Johnny’s father, is a busybody ex-cop who always manages to find his way into crime scenes, often helping Lt. Charlie Dann (Michael Woods, Private Eye) out. Dann’s main characterization beyond some surface level cop gruffness is the frequency with which he says the name “Frank”. It’s to the point that it became a drinking game amongst my ne’er do well friends and I. You’ll get shitfaced; over 90 minutes I counted at least 13 “Frank”s.
“Look, just be happy we didn’t mold nipples onto this thing. We’re well into the Schumacher Batman era of things, after all.”
The scene where lightning bestows Johnny with his powers is pretty great. He sort of does a full body dry heave while purple lighting shoots through him and he immediately demonstrates his gift. At first he uses “deductive reasoning” to determine a bag left unattended on the cable car is suspicious. Once lightning’d, however, he’s able to see an incriminating flashback confirming that the bag is indeed a bomb. That these two events–the lightning and the bomb–are unrelated but happen to happen within minutes of each other is why Glen A. Larson made the big bucks. It’s like if Peter Parker was bitten by the spider while failing to stop the burglar. Patrick Macnee of Avengers fame lends some credibility to the production as Johnny’s psychiatrist, who thusly explains: “your brain has developed the capacity to perceive and process thought patterns, much as a radio receives frequencies of sounds.” “Uh huh, except what I’m hearing is all bad.” “Yes, Johnny, exactly. You’re in-tuned to the frequency of evil.” If you don’t catch it the first time, don’t worry: it’s in about half of the first season’s opening title sequence. Stunningly stupid explanation that requires use of the 10% of the brain canard that has been discredited since forever but is common in fiction (see Deathstroke or Lucy from Lucy). If you’re wondering how a cable car lightning storm bequeaths this ability to an ordinary jazz musician, know that there are indeed “lore” episodes of this show.
Glen A. Larson considered piping in audience applause just for Hasselhoff’s reveal but then decided it’d be “confusing” and “disorienting”.
As for the defense contractor shit, well, the Night Man costume is some nerds coming up with military applications for their research. Chris’ Naked Gun comparison is pretty apt; the most striking buyer besides Babu Bhatt from Seinfeld is Ric Young as “Chang”, a Chinese man with some sort of diplomatic immunity. Young plays Chang like a Republic serial villain; all he’s missing is a Fu Manchu or actually being Fu Manchu. The one weapon for sale that Night Man does not add to his repertoire is the neutron gun, which upon zapping people Raptures them, leaving only their clothing. Note that Night Man has no moral objection to it, because he does use the gun on two of Chang’s goons. This superhero killed people before it was in vogue to do so. Raleigh seemingly gets a mixing job at the House of Soul–he has a line about working at the college radio station?–and that’s how he joins the supporting cast. Presumably subsequent episodes will have Johnny alternate between jazz musicianing and fighting crime with Raleigh as his Lucius Fox. I initially said Alfred but I don’t think he’s doing Johnny’s laundry or anything. Even in the late 90s that’d be a bad look.
Our hero, ladies and gentlemen!
Now that we’ve recapped the plot more or less, what do you think of the show’s level of craft, Chris? Feel free to compare it to Lois & Clark, which ended right when Night Man was starting up.
Chris: So there was this tiny little pocket of time in the mid 90’s that stretched into the very early 00’s where video game companies would put out these CD Rom computer games that incorporated an extensive amount of live action footage into the game play. So like, you could play a Wing Commander game where you were Mark Hammill and your best buddy was Biff from Back to the Future and your nemesis was Malcolm McDowell and you’re in a love triangle between adult film legend Ginger Lynn Allen and Jennifer MacDonald, a woman who doesn’t have a wikipedia entry but who IMDB informs me was on an episode of The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. where she played a woman named Tina. So she’s got that going for her. These games were called “Interactive Movies” and were a lot of fun. There’d be little dialogue scenes where someone would say something and you’d pick how Hammill would respond which would lead to different reactions and different outcomes and then you’d fly around having space-ship fights and at the end you get to do a genocide on an entire race of cat-man aliens, one of whom was your best friend.
The bad guys reside in a castle because why not.
I bring this up, Ronald, because you asked me about Night Man’s level of craft and I’d have to put it just below “Interactive CD-Rom Sci-Fi Movie Video Game”. Now, this isn’t necessarily a terrible thing, Wing Commander III cost somewhere between three and four million dollars to produce, which is probably more than was spent on the Night Man pilot (eyeballing it I’d guess Village Road Show sank upwards of eight or even nine hundred dollars into this bad boy), and I personally have a nostalgic fondness for that era of cheap-o syndicated television. But man, this show, uh, it makes some choices. There was almost an abstract Brechtian quality to some of the scenes, or something you’d see in black box theater. Like, Night Man would be standing on a bridge talking to some guy, but with nothing behind them but a pitch back curtain and the “bridge” would consist of a red railing that ran parallel across the screen about where a guardrail might be. And in other scenes, they’d be on the bridge, and it was the phoniest baloniest CG green screen bridge you ever did see. I don’t even understand why most of those scenes were on bridges, if I’m being honest. If they needed somewhere high-up they could have gone to some building on a back lot somewhere. If they needed water go to a beach or river, there must be some of those nearby, and if you absolutely have to do your scene on a bridge, just make it a smaller bridge that you can actually afford to close down and shoot for an afternoon. It makes no sense.
And as for the acting. Look. Maybe I was a little hard on Dean Cain.
Ronnie: It should be said Matt McColm (Johnny Domino) is an accomplished stuntman, working on John Wick, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Problem Child, but actor he is not. Every time he’s in a scene that doesn’t end in him roundhouse kicking something he struggles. Given I’ve seen most of the series before, if not all of it, I can say with some certainty this isn’t a learning curve situation where he comes out competent the other end. Clearly Glen A. Larson prioritized somebody who could fill out the suit and manage the stunt load, with acting a distant second or third consideration. The other actors aren’t much better. Derek Webster’s Raleigh is probably the best of them, but he’s still pretty green, this being pretty early on in his career. (One of his prior roles? A guest spot on, you guessed it, M.A.N.T.I.S.) The rest of the supporting cast, whatever. We’ll have more time to talk about them as this column goes on. I just wanna say that the guy who plays Lt. Charlie Dann, Michael Woods, has two modes: gruff and gruffer. Makes sense his last gig before this one was as a period piece private investigator; that series also starred Josh Brolin. But look, this isn’t about acting. This show is about ideas, like how it’d be a fun idea for Johnny to fail to get laid because his love interest finds a woman’s dead body in his loft. I’m serious, that’s how the pilot ends. Johnny and love interest go to his place for a nightcap, only to find the evil VP of EvilTech or whatever sprawled on his furniture, having been killed by the venomous robot spider displayed earlier in the hour. I like to think the cops are used to jazz musicians winding up with women who pass under mysterious circumstances. “Yeah, we got another 342–D.B. in jazz musician’s home…”
I’d like to say the flying gets less stupid looking, but that’d be a lie.
We hope you enjoyed our first crack at Night Man. We’ve got, uh, 42 more episodes and 21 more of these columns to go, so expect by the end of it for us to have expended more digital ink on this series than anyone else in human history. That’s exciting, isn’t it, Chris, going where no man has gone before. Who gives a shit about being another William Shakespeare expert when you could be the foremost/only Night Man scholar?
Odds & Ends
-There’s quite a bit of interesting casting here. Originally I said stunt casting but that’s not quite right. David Hasselhoff, of Knight Rider fame, is clearly Glen A. Larson cashing in a favor. (Night Man says “life’s a hassle, isn’t it?” after throwing him out a window, a quip even McBain would reject for being too on the nose.) Daniel Dae Kim plays one of Raleigh’s collaborators on the supersuit. You’ve got the aforementioned Brian George (Babu Bhatt) as an arms buyer and singer Taylor Dayne as Johnny’s love interest sing Carla Day. She really stretched her acting muscles with this one, eh?
-Night Man fighting and killing David Hasselhoff has a subtext to it: Knight Rider is over, now it’s time for a Night MAN. That is, if you believe Glen A. Larson knows what subtext is…
-I didn’t keep count of this but the amount of times Johnny is referred to as a “musician” in a derogatory fashion is staggering. Further episodes may bear this out that this version of America is a caste society in which musicians are akin to the untouchables. In any event it leads to funny lines like “I cannot place my life in the hands of a… saxophone player!”
-“Raleigh, this could be the start of a beautiful friendship” says Frank to Raleigh. Fuck you, you’re not allowed to do Casablanca. Especially not as the line of dialogue that precedes an act break.
-It should be noted Night Man does not actually choose his superhero name; the VP of the evil weapons company suggests it to him.
-The anti-gravity belt is said to “unshackle man from the laws of gravity”, but it makes them fly. The show doesn’t seem to know the difference or care about it if they do know.
NEXT: Little Richard guest stars in “Whole Lotta Shakin’…” and Johnny is at risk of having his heart stolen–literally–by an aging gangster in “I Left My Heart”.
Night Man Nights: “World Premiere, Part 1 and 2″
Ronnie: Hi. Normally you’d be reading about the latest in a long slog towards completing analysis of the four year series Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman. But this might surprise you: Chris and I completed it. We’re done! Finished! Finito. We even put a bow atop everything with a postmortem article. So instead we’re diving head first into our successor project in which we apply the same intellectual rigor/Seinfeld references to another unsung 1990s superhero TV adaptation. We’re talking Night Man, folks, and he does not fight the Day Man, nor does he have any relationship whatsoever with him, let’s get that out of the way now. I doubt It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia’s writers knew this show existed when they made that episode, so at best it’s a coincidence. Night Man is a 1997-1999 syndicated TV series based on the Malibu Comics hero of same name. Who created him? What is Malibu? Don’t worry, we’ll answer all that and more in due time. This column will be covering and critiquing the two part pilot episode, titled either “Pilot” or “World Premiere”. There’s plenty to talk about so let’s get going.
First things first: the opening credit sequence is awesome. Watch it for yourself here. You’ll notice the amazing choices they make with this, such as a superhero show first showing the hero in his civilian guise driving around in his car and then using a device to create a saxophone playing hologram of himself. Only after those things do we see him as an actual superhero. The opening titles make you realize you’re not only watching prime 90s cheese, you’re watching something special, as the pilot bears out. The dramatic pilot can be an excellent thesis statement for a drama or it can be a mixed bag that has to serve too many masters (setting up characters, a plot and a formula for the show to use, including something exciting enough to get people to tune in in the first place). Night Man circumvents the established options and goes instead for insane nonsense.
Before Hologram 2Pac was even a twinkle in someone’s eye…
Nominally, “World Premiere” does succeed at introducing Night Man, who he is, what his powers consist of, and who his supporting cast is. It does so in such a weird way, such that you would not be wrong to think professional writers were not involved. But they were, is the thing. The series was created and the pilot written by Glen A. Larson, prolific 80s TV creator. He created Battlestar Galactica, Knight Rider, The Fall Guy and most importantly Manimal. We have plenty of time to dissect his role in these proceedings so let’s get down to it. Johnny Domino (Matt McColm) is a jazz saxophonist in Bay City/San Francisco (they’re inconsistent on the name, but you better believe the Golden Gate Bridge is a frequent sight) who is bestowed superpowers when he’s hit by lightning while in a cable car. Those powers? He doesn’t have to sleep anymore and he can hear evil thoughts. That’s it. His other abilities come from a military supersuit designed in part by Raleigh (Derek Webster), his African-American heterosexual lifemate with whom he becomes entangled over the course of this pilot.
I’m going to turn this over to Chris now because while I’ve seen the pilot multiple times, he’s only seen it the once so I’m interested in his gut reaction to the myriad happenings. Take it away, buddy.
Chris: So you know how if you go to school for long enough you end up with a copy of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man? Maybe you were assigned it for an intro lit class at college, or it could have been for a high school AP English class. If you’re really unlucky you get your copy from one of your uncles on your fourteenth birthday even though you made it abundantly clear that what you really wanted was a VHS copy of Batman Returns or R.E.M.’s Automatic For the People. In my dad’s case it was the summer between high school and college when someone threw a package with his name on it through a window in the living room of his parents’ house. When he opened it he found a copy of Portrait, along with Mrs. Dalloway, Heart of Darkness and Neil Postman’s Amusing Ourselves to Death. Also a half dozen tootsie rolls that he ended up sharing with his family.
You also know how if you actually end up having to read the thing (my apologies) someone inevitably pops up to inform you, unprompted, that if you really want to get your head spun around by Joyce you should give Ulysses a try, but then a second person appears to remind the first person that Finnegan’s Wake makes Ulysses look like Green Eggs and Ham which I guess makes Portrait like one of those heavy cardboard books that only have captionless pictures of bunnies and were designed more to be gummed then actually looked at? You know how that happens? I’m bringing all this up to say that Night Man is to Lois & Clark as Finnegan’s Wake is to Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. It’s a mind-bending, sanity testing, extended freak out presumingly intended only for people who are tripping or criminally insane. I don’t know if it’s actually possible to critique or summarize it in any conventional way; I tried a couple of times and kept getting nose bleeds and passing out. So what I’ve done is to lock myself in a dark room with the windows blacked out and dictated my thoughts into my phone for as long as I can before the darkness seeps into my brain through my eyes, ears and mouth and I tumble into the abyss once more.
Street car jazz is the best kind of jazz.
Anyway. Like Ronnie said, Night Man is about how professional white guy saxophoner and unwilling performer of cunnilingus John Germaine gets struck by lightning and supercharges his brain Lucy style so that he can hear the bad things other people are thinking. He then hooks up with a nerd on the run from the government because they want to use the Iron Man style suit of armor he designed as a weapon and the nerd can’t have that on his conscience. They meet when John (or Johnny) karate kicks a fed through the passenger side window of a car and incapacitates him thus gaining the nerd’s undying loyalty. Or maybe it was a mob guy he kicked, or a triad member, or Yakuza or Murder Inc or Hezbollah. There are a lot of folks after the suit is what I’m saying. There’s the C.I.A. because The X-Files, and then all the ethnically diverse non-American bad guys who spend most of their time in their mountain lair sitting around a table not unlike the one at the beginning of Naked Gun,squabbling with one another and sending goons on errands.
Also, Johnny is able to kick that window because he’s a world class karate person and his dad wishes he would go back to teaching that instead of following his life-long dream of being a white guy saxaphoner in an all-white jazz band that plays at jazz clubs catering to exclusively white audiences. But a black woman runs the club behind the scenes people, thus giving the black nerd someone to flirt with in the time honored “hey look, we’re the only two sexually compatible non-white people on this show so we may as well do this” plot that’s been enriching African-American culture on television and in movies for decades.Look, I just, it’s all too much, you know? Too much! this could be a book.
Ronnie: Night Man and the pilot especially are difficult to write about for the simple reason that there’s so much to discuss. Like, I had legitimate anxiety during the creation of this article because I feared we weren’t going to be comprehensive enough in documenting the insanity that occurs over the course of these 90 minutes. I still have it a bit. That said, I’ll try my best. The pilot tries to accomplish two goals: provide an origin story for Night Man and tell a story about arms dealing. It does do both but the quality is questionable.
First things first: Johnny Domino, whose real last name is “Dominus” (he changed it because of pervasive anti-Greek sentiment), is the house saxophone man at the House of Soul. Jessica owns the place, and you might recognize the actress Felecia Bell as Sisko’s wife on Deep Space 9. She rarely is given much to do in the plots of these things and her character was eliminated entirely come Season 2. (More on that another time.) Frank Dominus, Johnny’s father, is a busybody ex-cop who always manages to find his way into crime scenes, often helping Lt. Charlie Dann (Michael Woods, Private Eye) out. Dann’s main characterization beyond some surface level cop gruffness is the frequency with which he says the name “Frank”. It’s to the point that it became a drinking game amongst my ne’er do well friends and I. You’ll get shitfaced; over 90 minutes I counted at least 13 “Frank”s.
“Look, just be happy we didn’t mold nipples onto this thing. We’re well into the Schumacher Batman era of things, after all.”
The scene where lightning bestows Johnny with his powers is pretty great. He sort of does a full body dry heave while purple lighting shoots through him and he immediately demonstrates his gift. At first he uses “deductive reasoning” to determine a bag left unattended on the cable car is suspicious. Once lightning’d, however, he’s able to see an incriminating flashback confirming that the bag is indeed a bomb. That these two events–the lightning and the bomb–are unrelated but happen to happen within minutes of each other is why Glen A. Larson made the big bucks. It’s like if Peter Parker was bitten by the spider while failing to stop the burglar. Patrick Macnee of Avengers fame lends some credibility to the production as Johnny’s psychiatrist, who thusly explains: “your brain has developed the capacity to perceive and process thought patterns, much as a radio receives frequencies of sounds.” “Uh huh, except what I’m hearing is all bad.” “Yes, Johnny, exactly. You’re in-tuned to the frequency of evil.” If you don’t catch it the first time, don’t worry: it’s in about half of the first season’s opening title sequence. Stunningly stupid explanation that requires use of the 10% of the brain canard that has been discredited since forever but is common in fiction (see Deathstroke or Lucy from Lucy). If you’re wondering how a cable car lightning storm bequeaths this ability to an ordinary jazz musician, know that there are indeed “lore” episodes of this show.
Glen A. Larson considered piping in audience applause just for Hasselhoff’s reveal but then decided it’d be “confusing” and “disorienting”.
As for the defense contractor shit, well, the Night Man costume is some nerds coming up with military applications for their research. Chris’ Naked Gun comparison is pretty apt; the most striking buyer besides Babu Bhatt from Seinfeld is Ric Young as “Chang”, a Chinese man with some sort of diplomatic immunity. Young plays Chang like a Republic serial villain; all he’s missing is a Fu Manchu or actually being Fu Manchu. The one weapon for sale that Night Man does not add to his repertoire is the neutron gun, which upon zapping people Raptures them, leaving only their clothing. Note that Night Man has no moral objection to it, because he does use the gun on two of Chang’s goons. This superhero killed people before it was in vogue to do so. Raleigh seemingly gets a mixing job at the House of Soul–he has a line about working at the college radio station?–and that’s how he joins the supporting cast. Presumably subsequent episodes will have Johnny alternate between jazz musicianing and fighting crime with Raleigh as his Lucius Fox. I initially said Alfred but I don’t think he’s doing Johnny’s laundry or anything. Even in the late 90s that’d be a bad look.
Our hero, ladies and gentlemen!
Now that we’ve recapped the plot more or less, what do you think of the show’s level of craft, Chris? Feel free to compare it to Lois & Clark, which ended right when Night Man was starting up.
Chris: So there was this tiny little pocket of time in the mid 90’s that stretched into the very early 00’s where video game companies would put out these CD Rom computer games that incorporated an extensive amount of live action footage into the game play. So like, you could play a Wing Commander game where you were Mark Hammill and your best buddy was Biff from Back to the Future and your nemesis was Malcolm McDowell and you’re in a love triangle between adult film legend Ginger Lynn Allen and Jennifer MacDonald, a woman who doesn’t have a wikipedia entry but who IMDB informs me was on an episode of The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. where she played a woman named Tina. So she’s got that going for her. These games were called “Interactive Movies” and were a lot of fun. There’d be little dialogue scenes where someone would say something and you’d pick how Hammill would respond which would lead to different reactions and different outcomes and then you’d fly around having space-ship fights and at the end you get to do a genocide on an entire race of cat-man aliens, one of whom was your best friend.
The bad guys reside in a castle because why not.
I bring this up, Ronald, because you asked me about Night Man’s level of craft and I’d have to put it just below “Interactive CD-Rom Sci-Fi Movie Video Game”. Now, this isn’t necessarily a terrible thing, Wing Commander III cost somewhere between three and four million dollars to produce, which is probably more than was spent on the Night Man pilot (eyeballing it I’d guess Village Road Show sank upwards of eight or even nine hundred dollars into this bad boy), and I personally have a nostalgic fondness for that era of cheap-o syndicated television. But man, this show, uh, it makes some choices. There was almost an abstract Brechtian quality to some of the scenes, or something you’d see in black box theater. Like, Night Man would be standing on a bridge talking to some guy, but with nothing behind them but a pitch back curtain and the “bridge” would consist of a red railing that ran parallel across the screen about where a guardrail might be. And in other scenes, they’d be on the bridge, and it was the phoniest baloniest CG green screen bridge you ever did see. I don’t even understand why most of those scenes were on bridges, if I’m being honest. If they needed somewhere high-up they could have gone to some building on a back lot somewhere. If they needed water go to a beach or river, there must be some of those nearby, and if you absolutely have to do your scene on a bridge, just make it a smaller bridge that you can actually afford to close down and shoot for an afternoon. It makes no sense.
And as for the acting. Look. Maybe I was a little hard on Dean Cain.
Ronnie: It should be said Matt McColm (Johnny Domino) is an accomplished stuntman, working on John Wick, Terminator 2: Judgment Day and Problem Child, but actor he is not. Every time he’s in a scene that doesn’t end in him roundhouse kicking something he struggles. Given I’ve seen most of the series before, if not all of it, I can say with some certainty this isn’t a learning curve situation where he comes out competent the other end. Clearly Glen A. Larson prioritized somebody who could fill out the suit and manage the stunt load, with acting a distant second or third consideration. The other actors aren’t much better. Derek Webster’s Raleigh is probably the best of them, but he’s still pretty green, this being pretty early on in his career. (One of his prior roles? A guest spot on, you guessed it, M.A.N.T.I.S.) The rest of the supporting cast, whatever. We’ll have more time to talk about them as this column goes on. I just wanna say that the guy who plays Lt. Charlie Dann, Michael Woods, has two modes: gruff and gruffer. Makes sense his last gig before this one was as a period piece private investigator; that series also starred Josh Brolin. But look, this isn’t about acting. This show is about ideas, like how it’d be a fun idea for Johnny to fail to get laid because his love interest finds a woman’s dead body in his loft. I’m serious, that’s how the pilot ends. Johnny and love interest go to his place for a nightcap, only to find the evil VP of EvilTech or whatever sprawled on his furniture, having been killed by the venomous robot spider displayed earlier in the hour. I like to think the cops are used to jazz musicians winding up with women who pass under mysterious circumstances. “Yeah, we got another 342–D.B. in jazz musician’s home…”
I’d like to say the flying gets less stupid looking, but that’d be a lie.
We hope you enjoyed our first crack at Night Man. We’ve got, uh, 42 more episodes and 21 more of these columns to go, so expect by the end of it for us to have expended more digital ink on this series than anyone else in human history. That’s exciting, isn’t it, Chris, going where no man has gone before. Who gives a shit about being another William Shakespeare expert when you could be the foremost/only Night Man scholar?
Odds & Ends
-There’s quite a bit of interesting casting here. Originally I said stunt casting but that’s not quite right. David Hasselhoff, of Knight Rider fame, is clearly Glen A. Larson cashing in a favor. (Night Man says “life’s a hassle, isn’t it?” after throwing him out a window, a quip even McBain would reject for being too on the nose.) Daniel Dae Kim plays one of Raleigh’s collaborators on the supersuit. You’ve got the aforementioned Brian George (Babu Bhatt) as an arms buyer and singer Taylor Dayne as Johnny’s love interest sing Carla Day. She really stretched her acting muscles with this one, eh?
-Night Man fighting and killing David Hasselhoff has a subtext to it: Knight Rider is over, now it’s time for a Night MAN. That is, if you believe Glen A. Larson knows what subtext is…
-I didn’t keep count of this but the amount of times Johnny is referred to as a “musician” in a derogatory fashion is staggering. Further episodes may bear this out that this version of America is a caste society in which musicians are akin to the untouchables. In any event it leads to funny lines like “I cannot place my life in the hands of a… saxophone player!”
-“Raleigh, this could be the start of a beautiful friendship” says Frank to Raleigh. Fuck you, you’re not allowed to do Casablanca. Especially not as the line of dialogue that precedes an act break.
-It should be noted Night Man does not actually choose his superhero name; the VP of the evil weapons company suggests it to him.
-The anti-gravity belt is said to “unshackle man from the laws of gravity”, but it makes them fly. The show doesn’t seem to know the difference or care about it if they do know.
NEXT: Little Richard guest stars in “Whole Lotta Shakin’…” and Johnny is at risk of having his heart stolen–literally–by an aging gangster in “I Left My Heart”.
Ronnie Gardocki