Variety's 1982 review of Knight Rider
Posted: Sat Sep 22, 2012 8:34 pm
Variety reviewed the new shows of the fall 1982 season and were pretty harsh with Knight Rider. Granted, the show was never exactly high drama but it still seems to me that the reviewer completely missed the point of the show. And how seriously can you take a review that contains the word “flapdoodle”?
Variety
Wednesday September 29, 1982
Reviews Of New Television Shows
Knight Rider
The gleaming black car on “Knight Rider” is long, low, sleek. The dashboard contains an instrument panel (including two tv monitors, no less) that wouldn’t look out of place on a commercial jetliner.
The latest in microprocessor technology allows the car not only to be run by remote control when necessary but to have what amounts to a mind of its own - when a pair of bumbling car thieves gain access to it and and drive it off, the computer-activated “voice” of the car (spoken by William Daniels in his prissiest, most cultivated persona) orders them to get out; when they don’t obey it takes over the steering, drives them to a police station and ejects them through the retractable top and into the arms of the cops.
Like those gadget-crammed vehicles that keep turning up in the James Bond movies, the car is fun. Unfortunately, the car has more personality than any of the human characters that take up most of the time in “Knight Rider.” David Hasselhoff, as, in the words of the script, “a lone crusader in a dangerous world,” is a nondescript good guy straight out of a boy’s adventure serial. Edward Mulhare walks through the tired role of father-figure confidant whose function seems to be to try to rein in the young hero from charging off after the bad guys without weighing any of the risks.
The two-hour pilot of “Knight Rider” was a flapdoodle about industrial espionage within a micro-chip-computer company in Silicon Valley plausibly named Comtron. The plot skipped from one incredible situation to another, like a Sunday-supplement comic strip. The writer Glen Larson’s attempts to instill humor in the script (Hasselhoff’s shock and disbelief when he first hears the car speaking in the plummy tones of William Daniels) are strained and predictable.
And one loses count of the cliches. “I don’t want to take responsibility for anybody’s life but my own,” says Hasselhoff to Richard Basehart, guest-starring as the billionaire who built the car because the purloiners of industrial secrets “are only the tip of the iceberg” of a nationwide criminal conspiracy. “One man can make a difference,” Basehart tells our hero on his (Basehart’s) deathbead. “And you are going to be that man.”
Hasselhoff at first resists the summons to become a super crime-fighter, but at the end of the two-hour episode he comes to realize that the mandate “is a loner’s dream, handed to me on a silver platter.” Mulhare, cool as a cucumber, agrees.
In jig time, “Knight Rider is going to be dead as a doornail.
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That same issue of Variety also had an article predicting the success and failures in the new network lineups:
Primetime Race Is Sure To Be Tighter
Buyers handicap the season
“Six rookie series on NBC fall into the borderline category of mid-to-high-20’s shares, according to the agency consensus - “Family Ties,” “St. Elsewhere,” “Cheers,” “Gavilan,” “Remington Steele” and “Silver Spoons.” NBC’s four other newcomers - “The Devlin Connection,” “Knight Rider” “Powers of Matther Star” and “Voyagers” - are given little chance of surviving beyond the 1982-83 season.”
Ha.
Variety
Wednesday September 29, 1982
Reviews Of New Television Shows
Knight Rider
The gleaming black car on “Knight Rider” is long, low, sleek. The dashboard contains an instrument panel (including two tv monitors, no less) that wouldn’t look out of place on a commercial jetliner.
The latest in microprocessor technology allows the car not only to be run by remote control when necessary but to have what amounts to a mind of its own - when a pair of bumbling car thieves gain access to it and and drive it off, the computer-activated “voice” of the car (spoken by William Daniels in his prissiest, most cultivated persona) orders them to get out; when they don’t obey it takes over the steering, drives them to a police station and ejects them through the retractable top and into the arms of the cops.
Like those gadget-crammed vehicles that keep turning up in the James Bond movies, the car is fun. Unfortunately, the car has more personality than any of the human characters that take up most of the time in “Knight Rider.” David Hasselhoff, as, in the words of the script, “a lone crusader in a dangerous world,” is a nondescript good guy straight out of a boy’s adventure serial. Edward Mulhare walks through the tired role of father-figure confidant whose function seems to be to try to rein in the young hero from charging off after the bad guys without weighing any of the risks.
The two-hour pilot of “Knight Rider” was a flapdoodle about industrial espionage within a micro-chip-computer company in Silicon Valley plausibly named Comtron. The plot skipped from one incredible situation to another, like a Sunday-supplement comic strip. The writer Glen Larson’s attempts to instill humor in the script (Hasselhoff’s shock and disbelief when he first hears the car speaking in the plummy tones of William Daniels) are strained and predictable.
And one loses count of the cliches. “I don’t want to take responsibility for anybody’s life but my own,” says Hasselhoff to Richard Basehart, guest-starring as the billionaire who built the car because the purloiners of industrial secrets “are only the tip of the iceberg” of a nationwide criminal conspiracy. “One man can make a difference,” Basehart tells our hero on his (Basehart’s) deathbead. “And you are going to be that man.”
Hasselhoff at first resists the summons to become a super crime-fighter, but at the end of the two-hour episode he comes to realize that the mandate “is a loner’s dream, handed to me on a silver platter.” Mulhare, cool as a cucumber, agrees.
In jig time, “Knight Rider is going to be dead as a doornail.
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
That same issue of Variety also had an article predicting the success and failures in the new network lineups:
Primetime Race Is Sure To Be Tighter
Buyers handicap the season
“Six rookie series on NBC fall into the borderline category of mid-to-high-20’s shares, according to the agency consensus - “Family Ties,” “St. Elsewhere,” “Cheers,” “Gavilan,” “Remington Steele” and “Silver Spoons.” NBC’s four other newcomers - “The Devlin Connection,” “Knight Rider” “Powers of Matther Star” and “Voyagers” - are given little chance of surviving beyond the 1982-83 season.”
Ha.