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Night Stalker producer Frank Spotnitz
By Daniel Robert Epstein
May 25, 2006
Frank Spotnitz is best known for his seven year run as a producer/writer on The X-Files. Last TV season Spotnitz was given a chance to resurrect Night Stalker which was a direct influence on The X-Files but was quickly cancelled after a couple of months. Night Stalker starred Stuart Townsend as Carl Kolchak, a reporter for the Los Angeles Beacon who ends up investigating paranormal related stories. Now all of the episodes are being released on DVD including four episodes that never made it air.
Buy Night Stalker
Daniel Robert Epstein: So give me the lowdown on what happened with Night Stalker getting cancelled. Was it just a ratings thing or were there crazy behind the scenes antics?
Frank Spotnitz: I think it was the ratings. The show itself was really difficult to do because the design of the show was really hard. We decided to shoot it almost entirely on location. Even our standing set, the newsroom, was in a real office building in downtown Los Angeles. So every day our crew was moving all over the city so physically it was a really challenging show but we had a really great time doing it. There were a lot of people at the network and at the studio who were really passionate about the show and really fought for it up until the last day. But we were given a pretty brutal time slot, Thursdays at nine against CSI and The Apprentice with no promotion whatsoever. Not a dime of paid advertising. It was not a formula for success.
DRE:
Why was the decision made to not promote the show?
FS:
The networks these days seem to pick two dramas every fall that they’re going to pour all their money into. So the two dramas that they decided to promote like crazy were Invasion and Commander in Chief.
DRE:
Look how well that turned out [both Invasion and Commander in Chief have been cancelled].
FS:
What they said to us was, “Don’t worry about it because even though you’re not getting promoted and you’re in this terrible time slot you really don’t have to do very well. Just do this certain number and you’ll be on forever.” Well, it turned out that our lead in, Alias, was not compatible and Alias did very disappointingly this year. Actually some weeks we were doing better than Alias even though we were in a worse time slot. So we didn’t get the numbers that they wanted most weeks so we were arguing passionately to give us another time slot or to give us a repeat after Lost one week or on a Saturday night. Something to draw more viewers to the show to let people know we existed but we just didn’t win that battle.
DRE:
Were expectations too high for a show that was a remake of a show that wasn’t on very long, 30 years ago?
FS:
I continue to believe the show would have been very successful if it had been given more time. The X-Files’ audience in the first season was pretty small. I think it’s always a tough sell on network television to get people to watch this genre. Most of what you watch on network television is cops, lawyers, doctors, soaps so a lot of people have a prejudice against genre storytelling. They think it’s freaky because they think it’s for geeks or nerds or whatever. You have to get the buzz and the word of mouth going. That takes patience and I really hoped the network was going to have the patience to stick with us. But it’s a very competitive atmosphere out there and they made the call to pull us from the air.
DRE:
Do you look at the show as a miniseries now?
FS:
I do and in some ways I think it is better for DVD because it is pretty intense. Some of these episodes are very scary and I think DVD buyers tend to have a greater appetite for really hardcore scary than a lot of people who watch network television. The good thing is that there’s four episodes on the DVD that were never on network TV so I think there’s a lot of new material to motivate people to check it out.
DRE:
How does this bode for horror TV series now?
FS:
Not well. There were many supernatural shows this season and I think the only ones that are still around, to my knowledge, are Ghost Whisperer on CBS and Supernatural on WB soon to be CW. All the other network interests in this genre did not stick around so I think it’s going to be a little while before networks give that many slots to supernatural themed shows. But these things are cyclical and there’ll be other ideas that come back.
DRE:
Like you said, Fox let X-Files build and the reasons for that was because the show was doing ok and they didn’t have as many programs on the air.
FS:
That’s right.
DRE:
Do people forget that these shows take so long to build and that even X-Files itself took so long to get rolling?
FS:
That argument was being made very explicitly to the people at ABC. I was having meetings and telling them what we were going to be doing in the next few episodes and that those things would build our audience and why they should stick with us. The one thing I can take comfort from is that I really did do everything I could possibly do to fight for the show. But as you said, the X-Files got lucky. It was a certain point in the history of the Fox network when they could afford to keep it on the air. That’s not where the ABC network is right now. ABC is building on some huge hits and is very hungry to grow. So much of this business is that you got to be lucky.
DRE:
Do you think Stuart Townsend is now burned on TV?
FS:
[laughs] I don’t think he’s in a hurry to get back into television. He really felt the burden of the workload and so much was on him. But I think as painful as it was for him, especially in the beginning, he really did settle into it and was really having a good time a lot of the time toward the end. I think he had a really good time on two of the episodes on the DVD that didn’t air on ABC called What's the Frequency, Kolchak and The Sea. What's the Frequency, Kolchak ended up being the last episode of the series.
DRE:
Ten years from now when the cycle comes around again for Night Stalker itself. I’m not saying that it would be this incarnation or that Stuart would be involved, but if there was a Night Stalker movie or even TV movies would you be interested in working on them?
FS:
I would because I feel like there was so much to this version of Night Stalker that we never got a chance to do. It was designed to go on for several years and I’m still interested in where that story was going. One thing I did on the DVD that I think people might find interesting is that in the commentaries I talk a lot about where the mythology was going and answer a lot of the questions that were unanswered during the run of the series. That’s like somebody telling you early on in the run of the X-Files where it was going. So there’s a lot more mileage to be gotten out of these characters and the idea of the series so I would jump at the chance to pursue it.
DRE:
Could Night Stalker be done on a lower budget at the Sci-Fi Channel or Spike?
FS:
I’m not sure. The look of this show on ABC was really rich and cinematic and it was designed, as I said, for locations. Also we used these amazing high definition cameras which is another reason to watch it on DVD. It looks better than it ever looked on broadcast TV, the definition is much sharper. It would be a different show if you tried to do it for less money. I think it’s probably pretty remote that we’ll revive Night Stalker at all in any way shape or form. But if we were to do it as either a theatrical film or a direct to DVD or television film of some kind.
DRE:
What’s Chris Carter doing if you don’t mind my asking you?
FS:
Right now he’s surfing out of the country somewhere. But the two of us just finished the first draft of a script that we’ve both planned on for some time. It would be a feature film for Paramount. It’s based on a novel called Philosophical Investigation by Phillip Kerr and we’re hoping to go forward with that. Chris would direct that.
DRE:
There’s also a book called Philosophical Investigation by [ground-breaking Austrian philosopher] Ludwig Wittgenstein.
FS:
In Kerr’s novel that’s very deliberate. He uses the name Wittgenstein in the novel. We’ve gone a little ways away from what he wrote in the novel but yeah it’s no accident.
DRE:
You’re a show runner as well as a writer, right?
FS:
Yeah that’s what they call people like me because you’re not only a writer but you produce. Except for the Michael Mann show I did briefly [Robbery Homicide Division]; I’ve never gone into a show that I didn’t have a hand in devising.
DRE:
As a showrunner you have to balance the idea of making commercial art and also deal with the executives. When did those two things come together for you?
FS:
I was allowed to grow into that job by Chris Carter doing the X-Files because he gave me more and more responsibility as the show went on. It was a very unique opportunity to be trained in how you not only write but produce all aspects of a television show. It’s an incredibly difficult and challenging job with a huge amount of hours because you’re producing a new show every eight days. But it’s enormously satisfying to look back at the shows and no two days are the same because you have a different set of problems every day. It’s very exciting.
The X-Files was my first job in television and early in the run, like season three, I knew this would never happen again. This is a one time deal. You don’t expect that kind of success in your career because the X-Files is still a huge international phenomenon. I go all over the world and people know the show. It felt like you were riding this incredible wave and to have it happen again is like expecting to be struck by lightning more than once in your career. That’s not even my ambition. My ambition is to do really good, quality shows that I can be proud of. To that extent I feel like I’ve succeeded splendidly post X-Files.
DRE:
How about when executives come to you and say “Give us the new X-Files.”
FS:
Well they never actually say, “Give us the X-Files.” Most of them don’t come out from that cynical a point of view. They look at you as somebody who they can count on to do quality work because they’ve seen the work you’ve done before. They’re a little on the ledge, just like you are, hoping that you will have some measure of success and they’d be thrilled if it were the level of the X-Files success, but I don’t think they expect that necessarily either.
DRE:
What are you working on?
FS:
There are two things. One is this pilot called Amped that I wrote with Vince Gilligan that has been bought by Spike TV and we’re supposed to start filming this summer. That’s a very hardcore scary show set in a police station. What’s happened is that a certain percentage of the population has begun mutating in all different ways and so the cops in this precinct never know what they’re going to encounter. The world looks exactly like our world looks today. Nothing has changed except for the fact that a certain percentage of the population is turning into monsters. It is scary and funny and it has a lot of allegorical storytelling because you can really compare the way people are treating monsters in this show to the way we fear terrorists and race and all kinds of other issues. Then the other thing is that Touchstone Television, which produced Night Stalker, signed me to a two year development deal with no strings attached. They just said “come up with what you are interested in doing.” So in the next few months here I’ll start talking to them about what I’d like to do next. I have a lot of ideas and some of them are in this genre and some aren’t,
DRE:
What non-genre show are you interested in doing?
FS:
One of the ideas I expect I’m going to develop in the coming year and I haven’t even pitched it to the studio so I can’t really talk about it yet, is not a genre idea at all. But I can tell you that it’s a one hour drama.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
Frank Spotnitz is best known for his seven year run as a producer/writer on The X-Files. Last TV season Spotnitz was given a chance to resurrect Night Stalker which was a direct influence on The X-Files but was quickly cancelled after a couple of months. Night Stalker starred Stuart Townsend as Carl Kolchak, a reporter for the Los Angeles Beacon who ends up investigating paranormal related stories. Now all of the episodes are being released on DVD including four episodes that never made it air.
Buy Night Stalker
Daniel Robert Epstein: So give me the lowdown on what happened with Night Stalker getting cancelled. Was it just a ratings thing or were there crazy behind the scenes antics?
Frank Spotnitz: I think it was the ratings. The show itself was really difficult to do because the design of the show was really hard. We decided to shoot it almost entirely on location. Even our standing set, the newsroom, was in a real office building in downtown Los Angeles. So every day our crew was moving all over the city so physically it was a really challenging show but we had a really great time doing it. There were a lot of people at the network and at the studio who were really passionate about the show and really fought for it up until the last day. But we were given a pretty brutal time slot, Thursdays at nine against CSI and The Apprentice with no promotion whatsoever. Not a dime of paid advertising. It was not a formula for success.
DRE:
Why was the decision made to not promote the show?
FS:
The networks these days seem to pick two dramas every fall that they’re going to pour all their money into. So the two dramas that they decided to promote like crazy were Invasion and Commander in Chief.
DRE:
Look how well that turned out [both Invasion and Commander in Chief have been cancelled].
FS:
What they said to us was, “Don’t worry about it because even though you’re not getting promoted and you’re in this terrible time slot you really don’t have to do very well. Just do this certain number and you’ll be on forever.” Well, it turned out that our lead in, Alias, was not compatible and Alias did very disappointingly this year. Actually some weeks we were doing better than Alias even though we were in a worse time slot. So we didn’t get the numbers that they wanted most weeks so we were arguing passionately to give us another time slot or to give us a repeat after Lost one week or on a Saturday night. Something to draw more viewers to the show to let people know we existed but we just didn’t win that battle.
DRE:
Were expectations too high for a show that was a remake of a show that wasn’t on very long, 30 years ago?
FS:
I continue to believe the show would have been very successful if it had been given more time. The X-Files’ audience in the first season was pretty small. I think it’s always a tough sell on network television to get people to watch this genre. Most of what you watch on network television is cops, lawyers, doctors, soaps so a lot of people have a prejudice against genre storytelling. They think it’s freaky because they think it’s for geeks or nerds or whatever. You have to get the buzz and the word of mouth going. That takes patience and I really hoped the network was going to have the patience to stick with us. But it’s a very competitive atmosphere out there and they made the call to pull us from the air.
DRE:
Do you look at the show as a miniseries now?
FS:
I do and in some ways I think it is better for DVD because it is pretty intense. Some of these episodes are very scary and I think DVD buyers tend to have a greater appetite for really hardcore scary than a lot of people who watch network television. The good thing is that there’s four episodes on the DVD that were never on network TV so I think there’s a lot of new material to motivate people to check it out.
DRE:
How does this bode for horror TV series now?
FS:
Not well. There were many supernatural shows this season and I think the only ones that are still around, to my knowledge, are Ghost Whisperer on CBS and Supernatural on WB soon to be CW. All the other network interests in this genre did not stick around so I think it’s going to be a little while before networks give that many slots to supernatural themed shows. But these things are cyclical and there’ll be other ideas that come back.
DRE:
Like you said, Fox let X-Files build and the reasons for that was because the show was doing ok and they didn’t have as many programs on the air.
FS:
That’s right.
DRE:
Do people forget that these shows take so long to build and that even X-Files itself took so long to get rolling?
FS:
That argument was being made very explicitly to the people at ABC. I was having meetings and telling them what we were going to be doing in the next few episodes and that those things would build our audience and why they should stick with us. The one thing I can take comfort from is that I really did do everything I could possibly do to fight for the show. But as you said, the X-Files got lucky. It was a certain point in the history of the Fox network when they could afford to keep it on the air. That’s not where the ABC network is right now. ABC is building on some huge hits and is very hungry to grow. So much of this business is that you got to be lucky.
DRE:
Do you think Stuart Townsend is now burned on TV?
FS:
[laughs] I don’t think he’s in a hurry to get back into television. He really felt the burden of the workload and so much was on him. But I think as painful as it was for him, especially in the beginning, he really did settle into it and was really having a good time a lot of the time toward the end. I think he had a really good time on two of the episodes on the DVD that didn’t air on ABC called What's the Frequency, Kolchak and The Sea. What's the Frequency, Kolchak ended up being the last episode of the series.
DRE:
Ten years from now when the cycle comes around again for Night Stalker itself. I’m not saying that it would be this incarnation or that Stuart would be involved, but if there was a Night Stalker movie or even TV movies would you be interested in working on them?
FS:
I would because I feel like there was so much to this version of Night Stalker that we never got a chance to do. It was designed to go on for several years and I’m still interested in where that story was going. One thing I did on the DVD that I think people might find interesting is that in the commentaries I talk a lot about where the mythology was going and answer a lot of the questions that were unanswered during the run of the series. That’s like somebody telling you early on in the run of the X-Files where it was going. So there’s a lot more mileage to be gotten out of these characters and the idea of the series so I would jump at the chance to pursue it.
DRE:
Could Night Stalker be done on a lower budget at the Sci-Fi Channel or Spike?
FS:
I’m not sure. The look of this show on ABC was really rich and cinematic and it was designed, as I said, for locations. Also we used these amazing high definition cameras which is another reason to watch it on DVD. It looks better than it ever looked on broadcast TV, the definition is much sharper. It would be a different show if you tried to do it for less money. I think it’s probably pretty remote that we’ll revive Night Stalker at all in any way shape or form. But if we were to do it as either a theatrical film or a direct to DVD or television film of some kind.
DRE:
What’s Chris Carter doing if you don’t mind my asking you?
FS:
Right now he’s surfing out of the country somewhere. But the two of us just finished the first draft of a script that we’ve both planned on for some time. It would be a feature film for Paramount. It’s based on a novel called Philosophical Investigation by Phillip Kerr and we’re hoping to go forward with that. Chris would direct that.
DRE:
There’s also a book called Philosophical Investigation by [ground-breaking Austrian philosopher] Ludwig Wittgenstein.
FS:
In Kerr’s novel that’s very deliberate. He uses the name Wittgenstein in the novel. We’ve gone a little ways away from what he wrote in the novel but yeah it’s no accident.
DRE:
You’re a show runner as well as a writer, right?
FS:
Yeah that’s what they call people like me because you’re not only a writer but you produce. Except for the Michael Mann show I did briefly [Robbery Homicide Division]; I’ve never gone into a show that I didn’t have a hand in devising.
DRE:
As a showrunner you have to balance the idea of making commercial art and also deal with the executives. When did those two things come together for you?
FS:
I was allowed to grow into that job by Chris Carter doing the X-Files because he gave me more and more responsibility as the show went on. It was a very unique opportunity to be trained in how you not only write but produce all aspects of a television show. It’s an incredibly difficult and challenging job with a huge amount of hours because you’re producing a new show every eight days. But it’s enormously satisfying to look back at the shows and no two days are the same because you have a different set of problems every day. It’s very exciting.
The X-Files was my first job in television and early in the run, like season three, I knew this would never happen again. This is a one time deal. You don’t expect that kind of success in your career because the X-Files is still a huge international phenomenon. I go all over the world and people know the show. It felt like you were riding this incredible wave and to have it happen again is like expecting to be struck by lightning more than once in your career. That’s not even my ambition. My ambition is to do really good, quality shows that I can be proud of. To that extent I feel like I’ve succeeded splendidly post X-Files.
The X-Files was my first job in television and early in the run, like season three, I knew this would never happen again. This is a one time deal. You don’t expect that kind of success in your career because the X-Files is still a huge international phenomenon. I go all over the world and people know the show. It felt like you were riding this incredible wave and to have it happen again is like expecting to be struck by lightning more than once in your career. That’s not even my ambition. My ambition is to do really good, quality shows that I can be proud of. To that extent I feel like I’ve succeeded splendidly post X-Files.
DRE:
How about when executives come to you and say “Give us the new X-Files.”
FS:
Well they never actually say, “Give us the X-Files.” Most of them don’t come out from that cynical a point of view. They look at you as somebody who they can count on to do quality work because they’ve seen the work you’ve done before. They’re a little on the ledge, just like you are, hoping that you will have some measure of success and they’d be thrilled if it were the level of the X-Files success, but I don’t think they expect that necessarily either.
DRE:
What are you working on?
FS:
There are two things. One is this pilot called Amped that I wrote with Vince Gilligan that has been bought by Spike TV and we’re supposed to start filming this summer. That’s a very hardcore scary show set in a police station. What’s happened is that a certain percentage of the population has begun mutating in all different ways and so the cops in this precinct never know what they’re going to encounter. The world looks exactly like our world looks today. Nothing has changed except for the fact that a certain percentage of the population is turning into monsters. It is scary and funny and it has a lot of allegorical storytelling because you can really compare the way people are treating monsters in this show to the way we fear terrorists and race and all kinds of other issues. Then the other thing is that Touchstone Television, which produced Night Stalker, signed me to a two year development deal with no strings attached. They just said “come up with what you are interested in doing.” So in the next few months here I’ll start talking to them about what I’d like to do next. I have a lot of ideas and some of them are in this genre and some aren’t,
DRE:
What non-genre show are you interested in doing?
FS:
One of the ideas I expect I’m going to develop in the coming year and I haven’t even pitched it to the studio so I can’t really talk about it yet, is not a genre idea at all. But I can tell you that it’s a one hour drama.
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
by Daniel Robert Epstein
SG Username: AndersWolleck
