this seems somewhat mundane for my 1500th entry, but there it is

In the midst of the mourning for Don Knotts comes the news of the death of Darren McGavin, aka Kolchak, the Night Stalker.

I didn’t watch huge amounts of TV as a kid. Never watched the Brady Bunch (everything I know about the Bradys comes from people making fun of the Bradys in the years since), for instance, and I don’t have fond memories of a lot of anything else on TV. (Well, OK, Bruins hockey. But I mean, c’mon — Orr, Esposito, Sanderson, Cashman, Westfall, Johnston, Cheevers…)

But I LOVED me some Night Stalker. I religiously watched the travails of the rumpled, porkpie-hat wearing reporter as he battled various beasties from the Dark Side of the human subconscious (my all time favorite was the Pas-Mal Fait (sp?), the swamp critter from the Lousiana bayous that somehow made it to Los Angeles). The show had a dank, seedy feel to it, and a lot of that came from McGavin’s portrayal of the battered truth seeker dealing with the disbelief of the folks who lived solely in the world of Light.

Years later, of course, the same territory was mined more deeply and intricately in the X-Files (or so I hear, as I’ve seen maybe 5 episodes in my life), but Mulder owes a direct debt to Kolchak, who was there before him.