Review - Knight Rider

A few weeks ago, in the heart of the writers' strike, NBC started running promos for Knight Rider. Now, the peacock wasn't so desperate that they would start running shows from my youth (one could only hope). They though, however, that people would want to watch an entirely new Knight Rider, with a whole new cast and, gulp, a whole new K.I.T.T.

Listen, this was a two-hour commercial for Ford, which was the first problem in a litany of negatives for this doomed series. KITT (I'm not spending the time to put the periods in anymore) was a Trans Am. It was a Pontiac, which is a GM brand. Heading in to the show, I was furious that the producers of the show seemed to go out and find the car manufacturer who would pay the most money. Five minutes in, when "Mike" wasn't shot like his predecessor Michael was to start the original series, viewers were left to realize that this isn't a remake, but rather a new show with a new storyline. And boy, WHAT a storyline.

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We open the show at the sprawling mansion of Charles Graiman. The power was out in Mr. Graiman's house and two men come to the door to fix said power. Mr. Graiman seems skeptical and asks for ID. The lead man flashes a small badge and the two are allowed in. Less than a minute later, the men reveal themselves in the worst acting in the history of network television that they are, in fact, evil villains out for Mr. Graiman's research, encrypted on several hard drives.

Seriously, this may have been the worst opening scene in the history of television. They wanted us to know that Mr. Graiman is paranoid. But they don't go to the lengths a truly paranoid person would go to, like, say, checking the ID of both men! And perhaps he'd have actually looked at the badge to make sure it wasn't a fake? He ultimately let the men in when they threatened to come back in the morning, but then revealed that he has back up generators. Why not just wait until the morning then, when you already seem skeptical?

Regardless, the men got in the house, revealed their fiendish plan to steal Mr. Graiman's research (always a brilliant move by criminals) and threatened to kill his daughter if he didn't cooperate. Of course, on cue, Mr. Graiman dies in the arms of his attackers. Heart attack. We should all be so lucky at this point, and we're only about five minutes in.

That said, you KNOW he's not really dead. Why? Because he's the only actor anyone's heard of. The first rule of network TV is that the most famous actor is always more involved than they lead us to believe. Watch any Law & Order show and you'll learn this very quickly. But for now, Mr. Graiman is dead, the men scour the house for research we get a pan and scan of all the gadgets the now "dead" scientist is working on.

The henchmen eventually get to the garage and we get our first look at KITT, a Shelby Cobra Mustang. A great car, but they should have stayed in the GM family at least. The writing is so poor on this show, we're subjected at this point to terrible actors reading lines like, "whoa, you can't get this at the dealership." I was half waiting for an actor to pop on to the screen to tell me that – in fact – you CAN get this at the dealership...just log on to ford.com to find a dealer nearest you...before getting gunned down.

Mercifully, KITT got out of there, but not before getting shot at, where we, the viewer, learn that KITT can repel bullets, thus ending the worst opening scene in television history. I can't do justice how terrible the combination of bad writing, bad acting and camera angles that make us feel like we're in a nightmare did just that – this show has been a nightmare so far.

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The next three scenes are almost as bad, as we meet Mr. Graiman's daughter who is a professor at Stanford. She reveals that she hasn't talked to her dad in a while, then gets a strange call from someone telling her that he was sent from her father. "Wow, you know, I was totally just talking to someone earlier about how I haven't talked to my dad in, like, three years and then out of nowhere I get a call from someone on behalf of my dad. I mean, like, what are the chances of that?"

Or something along those lines. Sarah is eventually apprehended by the same goons who were at her dads house and we're treated to great interplay like, "how do you know my father?" "I watched him DIE."

Thankfully, KITT comes to save us from this award-winning cross talk and we get our first glimpse at the car in daylight. Pretty cool. Of course, the gunmen decide to slow the car down by shooting at it, ON A COLLEGE CAMPUS. Now, I know that this show was filmed way before the NIU shootings, but I'll stake my house on the fact that it wasn't done before the Virginia Tech shootings. Or any of the famous high school shootings. Did they really need a gunman on a college campus while people are running around in terror to illustrate how bad these bad guys were? That's the most irresponsible thing I could imagine, and should have been edited out this week in the wake of recent events.

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Let's gloss over the rest, because it can't get much worse. When we meet "Mike," his roommate wakes him up and he's got a hot girl in his bed. Then another hot girl walks in from the bathroom. You see...this guy slept with TWO hot girls last night. That's how cool he is. Nice wingman too, as it seems he slept with two chicks while his friend spent the night with his ear against the wall and his hands in his....we'll leave it at that.

Mike is in trouble, and owes some goons 90 grand by tomorrow or his friend dies. So what's he do? He goes to the casinos to play cards against Phil Laak (aka the Unibomber). Good logic. Especially when Sarah shows up after he bluffed a big pot and asks for his help. When he finally decides, he LEAVES HIS CHIPS AT THE TABLE. This is a guy who was just looking for cash in the cushions of a sofa and leaves thousands of dollars in chips at a casino table without even looking back once. The gunmen are back AGAIN and Mike and Sarah elude them and head out on high speed chase. That was pretty cool, but lost a lot of it's luster when you realize that there's no way KITT won't get out of there. Human error is always the reason for suspense in high speed chases. You know, when a guy checks his blind spot and looks back around to see a baby carriage or a pile of manure in front of him.

Anyway, KITT eludes the villains who in fact don't die, when almost going head first into a big rig. Why? Because they were driving a Ford. Once you saw the Ford logo in the front you knew there wasn't going to be an accident. See, the old Knight Rider would have had that car flipped over six times. But not this new and improved show. We don't wreck the hand that feeds us. The one cool part of the show was when KITT morphed into a silver Mustang right on the road to elude a helicopter. That was neat. But the helicopter was chasing a black Mustang going 120 MPH, lost it, and flies over a silver Mustang on the same road going 120 MPH. I guess the bad guys never saw Cannonball Run.

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The rest of the show is equally as terrible, as evidenced by the first three scenes featuring FBI agent Carrie Rivai, played by Sydney Poitier's daugther. First, we see her on the beach, surfing, to which my wife opined that they were trying to incorporate all of Hasselhoff's roles into one show. Then, we see her in an outdoor shower, getting the sand off. Wow, sexy. Only, she's not. She walks into her beachfront property to reveal a young woman in her bed. Wait, wait, wait, you mean she's hot, she surfs and she's a lesbian. This can't get any better (as sarcasm drips all over my keyboard.) Rivai gets called into work – for the FBI (they are obviously paying pretty well these days by the looks of her house) – and she offers the bed-dweller free reign of the house while she's gone. "Are you going to trust someone you just met last night" the now-revealed one-night-stand questions. Rivai pulls out her gun, cocks it and asks "why not?" or something like that. The wording doesn't matter. The point is, she's hot (not really), she's a lesbian (who cares), she sleeps around (how is this making me watch the show) and she's an idiot. She has no clue who this girl is, and by the time she gets back home, the entire place could be ransacked and the girl 100 miles away. More on this in a minute.

Scene two of Rivai's ever-growing character arc is at the FBI field office where she gets hit on by a clueless agent before heading off to do some work while he does nothing because he's incompetent. Dude, she's a surfer lesbian whore...you'd think you would know that.

Next, she goes to the house of Mr. Graiman because, as we found out, she knew him from years before. The sheriff asks her to ID the body, and gasp, it's NOT actually Mr. Graiman. It's his body double. He was so paranoid he'd been using a body double for years, but never taught the double how to check proper ID. So the double is dead, and Graiman is on the loose. The sheriff immediately picks up the phone to obviously call out an APB, right? Right? In the craziest twist yet, he calls....wait for it....the henchmen. You mean, they paid off a small-town sheriff? Who would have thunk it? Obviously not Ravai, as she continues to give him information, which he leaks to the henchmen in order to capture Graiman. Great FBI work.

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Oh yeah, there's a plot. There's this Prometheus project the Pentagon is working on that can control AI. Not Allen Iverson, or American Idol, but Artificial Intelligence, of course. Graiman is working on this, and only he and his daughter know the codes to the hard drives. Oh, yeah, and KITT because Graiman told the car everything for some reason. So the henchmen need Graiman, his daughter, or the car. When Graiman escaped, he went to a shack in the woods. Turns out, the woman in the shack is Mike's mom, and they too are estranged. Oh, and she used to sleep with Michael Knight, and Mike is their kid. So not only is he an ex-army, drag racing, womanizing bum, he's also the son of the original Knight Rider.

Mike only learns this minutes before his mom is killed, and Graiman is captured. KITT is getting infiltrated by the henchman who used to be on one of those cell phone commercials (he's the smart one) so they have to drive the car manually and MIke ends up beating KITT up pretty bad by slamming him into the bad guys' SUV. Oh, when KITT is turned on, the car is invincible, which comes in to play when he's turned on seconds before the bad guys' SUV (noticeably NOT a Ford this time) t-bones KITT and goes boom. Everyone dies, it seems, except Graiman, who is safe. Poor small-town sheriff. He was probably just looking out for his family and got pulled into the wrong crowd. That was my favorite moment of the show, when they revealed that it actually was a corrupt sheriff and not another member of their crew who killed the original sheriff and stole his identity. Can't trust anyone these days, can you? Anyway, all the bad guys die, Graiman has one cut on his head and KITT, and Mike and Sarah come out unscathed. Oh, and Ravai and a random cop come to the scene (from the wrong direction – way to keep the theme of not caring about continuity going) to help clean up the mess.

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On the way to Mike's mom's funeral, they decide to get the band back together, restart the foundation and have Mike drive KITT. They need a guy whose not too close to the FBI (because of all the impending bar fights, I assume) and someone with no family. Since he's going to his mom's funeral, they figured they'd strike while the iron is hot. At the gravesite, we get the payoff for the whole darn two hour debacle. Hasselhoff shows up to pay his respects. He introduces himself to his son, gives three words of wisdom and shakes his hand. AND LEAVES. This is your son. Where the hell have you been all these years? Your mission was over like twenty years ago? What have you been doing? Seriously? And on top of all of that, you shake the kids hand and just leave? His mom just died. How about offering him a cup of coffee or something? My Lord. We just waited two hours to find out that one of America's heros from the 1980s is a deadbeat dad. Great. So you replace the Trans Am with a Mustang, and now you make Michael Knight a bum.

Thanks for ruining everything. Oh, and Mike decided to follow in his dad's footsteps and take on the roll of chauffeur to find out who was behind this plot, and avenge the death of his mom. But not before he gets a kiss from Sarah. You can just throw that 'no family to speak of' thing out the window.

The show ends with Mike at the wheel of KITT with the same old joke they used to use about "So I assume you are going to want do drive." They are once again in the back of an 18-wheeler, driving the streets looking for crime. You'd think in 20 years they'd have figured out a less expensive mode of transport.

Oh, and the best part of the whole show...KITT is voiced by Val Kilmer. I should have picked that up when he started quoting Jim Morrison on that long trip from Vegas to California. Nice career move, Val.

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I don't know if this show was so bad it's good, or just so bad it's unwatchable. I'm leaning toward the latter. Maybe I just wanted the show to be good. Now, I think I just want it to go away, so I'm not drawn to the layers of hilarity it will obviously produce each week.