Whewwww-whewwww, Whewwww-whewwww

Magnet #258 - Knight Rider

I watch Knight Rider.

There. I said it.

Hell, I even have a magnet for it. This magnet was part of a series of buttons that NBC Uni put out earlier this year, to help push their shows for Emmy *snerk* consideration.

I remember watching the original, but to my friends' consternation, not well enough to remember KARR...or Goliath, for that matter.

I'm not gonna lie. Knight Rider's not the best show on the air right now - I'm convinced it's still on only because NBC can't afford to dump anything right now. I also full-on admit (again) that I'm watching it, simply because there's a hot boy and a hot car. And, I suppose I should also admit that my head bops when I hear the souped-up version of the original opening theme.

The hot boy is played by Justin Bruening, who used to be on the soap All My Children, where oddly, his character Jamie is the son of Tad, played by Michael E. Knight, who in real life used to be married to Catherine Hickland, who used to be married to David Hasselhoff who played the original Michael Knight on Knight Rider. How's that for weird degrees of separation?

The new KITT is a product-placed Ford Mustang which morphs into a couple of other Ford vehicles as necessary, which is silly, but I actually kinda like the effects when he goes into his attack mode. Though, I could do without the Val Kilmer as the voice of KITT. Sorry, Val.

The writer/producers are the same guys who worked on Las Vegas, which I also watched (again, for the hot boys, who just happened to have hot cars). So automatically, we're guaranteed gratuitous T&A, silly, almost nonexistent plots, cheesy writing and acting, and sometimes superslick (and sometimes not) special effects, graphics, and camera work.

I don't care. I'm watching, and I like it. Because every so often, the show surprises me. Last night was one of those nights.

It was their Halloween episode, and they had dressed up a couple of the secondary characters in costume and the running gag of the first ten minutes of the show, was that the guy was dressed as Captain Jack Harkness. He sashayed around, expecting people to know who he was. And thus ensued at least three different interchanges discussing Captain Jack Harkness, the "time-traveling bisexual" ("or omnisexual, if you prefer") guy from Torchwood and Doctor Who.

I gotta admit, the kid really did resemble Jack - all he was missing was the hat.

While it totally tickled my funny bone and my BritShow fangurl sensibilities, I spent the next several minutes on pause, while my sister and I discussed if a BBC show reference to DW/TW was completely accessible on such a mainstream U.S. show. (We watch a ton of BBC shows, and the U.S. references are always apparent in them, so it's odd to see the reverse here.)

Our guess is that the showrunners have enough charismatic geek (/TM Rovan) credibility to be sending out a rather well-done shout-out to the DW/TW universe, and the audience has just enough charismatic geek credibility to get it. And those that don't, are hopefully curious enough to check out both shows on BBC-A.*

Loved it. Well played, boys.

*Commercial: If you don't know, the fourth season of Doctor Who starts on BBC-A this weekend. Yes, you've already watched it on SciFi. Yes, you already know what happens at the end. Who cares? Watch it.