This morning I attended the Knight Rider Panel at Comic-Con 2008 in San Diego. The members of the panel showed up slowly throughout the scheduled hour, by no fault of their own. They had left L.A, with time to get here, but a big rig crashed in Oceanside, flipping over and bursting into flames.  The traffic backup was measured at 13 miles of bumper to bumper patience testing, so I was amazed anyone got there at all, and by the end of the panel everyonehad arrived.

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Today I’m chatting about Supernatural, Virtuality, Heroes, Knight Rider, and Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. Kind of like a grab bag!

The creator and executive producer of The CW’s show Supernatural, Eric Kripke, just signed an exclusive two year deal with Warner Brothers Television. In that deal, he will continue to run Supernatural and will be developing other projects under the contract for them.

After the movie pilot for Knight Rider came and went, Vic gave it a “Not Awesome” rating, which actually meant it didn’t completely suck. Some saw it as a great extension of the original show, while others thought it reminded them more of an older show that tried its hand at the super car genre, called Viper. (I really like Vipers, BTW)

I liked seeing the K.I.T.T. with new technology in a new car, even if we never heard what happened to the old one, but it just felt empty to me. Fun to watch, but I wasn’t compelled by any character.

The pilot had sufficient ratings to be granted a shot at a series slot on NBC, and eerily, in an earlier post, Vic said “One can only hope they get some new writers once this thing goes weekly.” It freaks me out and I put on my tin foil helmet to protect my mind from probing brain waves because it seems that NBC listened or Vic sensed something…

When the remake of The Bionic Woman bailed on ratings, it supposedly left some lessons in it’s wake that NBC hopes to apply to the upcoming remake of the 1980’s series: Knight Rider.

Rushing The Bionic Woman into production after the pilot aired hurt NBC creatively, and obviously the quality level of the show also took a hit. What is it my mom used to say? Haste makes waste? After the first episode, the ratings plummeted like swirling water in a tub. No, faster. Tub water swirls, slowing the decrease of water in the tub.

Ben Silverman, co-chairman of NBC Entertainment and Universal Media Studios, said that this time around with Knight Rider, they are taking their time in putting the new, weekly series on the air.

According to Variety, NBC has decided to go ahead and approve Knight Rider as an ongoing TV series for next Fall.

It seems that the pilot had decent enough ratings to convince the powers that be to go ahead and approve the concept for a weekly series. While I didn’t exactly skewer the recent Knight Rider pilot, I didn’t exactly give it a glowing review, either. As a matter of fact, most commenters on my review said I went too easy on the two hour pilot.

Let’s get just get straight to the punch line: NBC’s Knight Rider TV movie (or pilot, depending on what you’d rather call it) was not nearly as awful as I had anticipated.

Now that that’s out of the way, please don’t mistake “not as awful” for “awesome.”

I will say that one of the things I reminded myself of as I watched this with the intention of writing a review was that the original series was not exactly Citizen Kane.

Overall I would describe it as a typical mediocre TV movie punctuated with moments of awfulness.

BTW, there will be spoilers in this Knight Rider review, so you have been warned.

Oh boy… I justed watched five clips from the Knight Rider TV movie/pilot that will be airing this Sunday.

How many synonyms are there for the word awful?

Ok… let me back up and maybe try to be a bit more fair. The only scenes that were excrutiatingly painful to watch were the ones containing the fellow on the left, Justin Bruening, who plays Mike Knight, son of Michael Knight.

Holy cow is this guy awful in the role. I’m talking cringe-inducing.

Now this is pretty damned funny.

NBC’s Knight Rider “re-imagining” is only a couple of weeks away from airing, and at the 11th hour the production has had to bring him in to completely replace the voice-over work of Will Arnett.

Arnett was to be the voice of the famous crime fighting car K.I.T.T., but apparently the combined forces of K.I.T.T. and Mike Knight were not enough to beat the supervillain known as…

General Motors.

There’s a very short teaser for the new Knight Rider TV movie that NBC is floating this February, no doubt to see if the ratings are strong enough to justify an ongoing TV series. Above you’re looking at the new K.I.T.T. which we’ve talked about before. I still don’t like that they’re not using a Pontiac Firebird for this. Especially since I’m absolutely sure there’s a brand new version coming out as the sister vehicle to the new Camaro that premiered in the Transformers movie.

Anyway, the teaser is below and it’s quite short at only 15 seconds:

You’re looking at the new K.I.T.T. from the upcoming made-for-TV Knight Rider movie. No, your eyes do not deceive you: It’s a Ford Mustang. A Mustang GR500KR to be precise.

Normally I’d rag on GM for not taking advantage of this and getting a new version of their Pontiac Firebird in there. After all, in the original series the car was a Firebird, which at the time was a pretty cool looking car. However I’ll give them a pass for two reasons: