'Forever Knight'
By: Miles Beller
A year has come and gone since CBS inaugurated "Crime Time After Prime Time" programming, a slew of series broadcast to an apres-the-news audience.
In general, the hallmark of these programs has been much skin, sin and violence, all played to insistent soundtracks and dressed in saturated colors. Throughout, CBS has been tinkering and adjusting this late-night slate, terminating some shows and inserting others, looking for a mix that consistently will pull in viewers.
"Forever Knight" is the newest addition to the network's crimetime, a weekly offering very much in the mold of the flashy, high-concept product currently slotted for this hour.
Starring Geriant Win Davies as Nick Knight, a crackerjack homicide detective, the action-adventure program is predicated on a shadowy secret involving an alternative lifestyle -- that is, Knight is a vampire fighting to regain his humanity, a situation that forces him into unusual circumstances as he goes about using his demonic powers to combat crime.
As might be imagined, Knight's way of "living" creates some odd problems, difficulties he must continually confront.
In fact, in the series' launch (a two-parter that opened Tuesday) we see Knight as a newly transformed vampire in 13th-century France, and get hooked into a modern-day vampire mystery where a clutch of dead bodies are turned up, all marked by the draining of blood. Quite so, the cops are confounded by the killings and the city is thrown in a panic by the strange slayings.
For Knight, the case engenders strong memories about a past he is struggling to shake.
As his new partner, Detective Schanke (John Kapelos), tracks down leads in the realm of flesh-and-blood, Knight takes to the trail of the supernatural, in the process having to confront the murderer-demon who turned him into a vampire more than 700 years ago.
Along with Davies and Kapelos, key "Knight"-ers include Gary Farmer as the crusty police captain and Catherine Disher as a comely medical examiner who is aware of Knight's ghoulish bloodlines and is trying to get him to kick such regrettable habits as swilling down corpuscle cocktails.
While "Forever Knight" doesn't purport to be more than a brash video comic book about the horror genre by way of crime and punishment, this vampy new series seems less than the sum of its boldly outlined parts -- characters and circumstance a parody of a parody, action playing more as unwitting satire than as wry, camp commentary.