The original Kolchak, played by Darrin McGavin, was a reporter in Chicago who tracked down stories about supernatural creatures like werewolves and vampires, while also contending with a skeptical editor. He never did convince his editor that any of this stuff was real, did he?

Well, in these post-X-FILES times, skepticism isn’t limited to newspaper editors, it’s also the stock in trade of your average TV viewer. Which must be why ABC decided that a reporter just tracking down your basic chupacabra story wouldn’t be enough; no, this version of Kochalka, played with more cool but less panache (that’ll make sense once you’ve seen the show) by Stuart Townshend (Dorian Gray in the execrable LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN flick) has to have a personal connection to the otherworldly cases he investigates.

Carl Kolchak has relocated from Las Vegas to Los Angeles. His first case, which turns out to be the latest part of an ongoing investigation, is to explore the mauling death of a pregnant woman. The woman, who was roughly dragged from her home after her husband left for work, had her baby roughly ripped from her uterus. Large animal-like paw prints were seen at the scene. So obviously the lead suspect would be the husband, right? As far as police are concerned, yep. But not our Kolchak, who’s just been hired on at an LA-area paper.

Kolchak, in fact, steps on his new co-worker Perri Reed (Gabrielle Union) in trying to investigate this story—she works the crime beat, don’tcha know. Soon, the two are working together, as Kolchak doles out snippets of information from his unnamed “source,” but is obviously hiding something from her.

She does some digging, and finds that Kolchak was a murder suspect in Vegas—his wife was murdered with him in the car. Their window was shattered, from the outside, by… something… and she was killed, while Kolchak was only maimed. So obviously the lead suspect would be Kolchak, right? He could easily break his car window from the outside, while seated inside, and drag off his wife and kill her brutally while never actually exiting the car itself.

Right away, a show that bases its entire premise—Kolchak searches for clues to the murders of his wife and others while dealing with a skeptical Fed who follows him around—loses me a bit when that premise is just so far-fetched. Perri finds that Kolchak was never forced to stand trial for his wife’s murder due to lack of evidence… yeah, no kidding. But without that skeptical agent to follow him around, we’d have no show, so the idiot logic pervades. Ah, well.

As Perri and Kolchak look closer at the murders, they stop by Kolchak’s house, an architectural wonder that overlooks Los Angeles and would make a movie producer jealous. Kolchak, the beat reporter. Lives in this fantastic house. Meanwhile, real reporters scrape to pay rent on their studio apartment. I’m all for FRIENDS-style suspension of belief when it comes to TV living arrangements, but… come on.

Anyway, one room in this fantastic, sprawling manse is devoted to pics of murder victims, Kolchak’s wife and others. They all have similarities—large, claw-like gashes that no police officer on the show ever thought could have come from anything but a man-made knife. Many of them also have… something… on their wrists. Some sort of squiggly red line that links the murders in Kolchak’s mind.

This is making no sense, right? (If it is, I’ve done a better job than the show’s writers.) Kolchak, Perri and their intrepid Jimmy Olsen-esque cub photog go explore a murder, and Perri is almost killed by some sort of animal. Luckily, Kolchak runs it down in his new Ford Mustang, killing it. Now, stay with me here, because things get wonky, plot-wise, again:

The three of them stand over this dead creature as we fade to black. Pick up later at the coroner, where Skeptical Fed and the coroner (vet?) are telling Kolchak that the animal was a basic coyote, nothing more. Kolchak doesn’t believe this at all, and asks to see the animal. Nope, says the vet-coroner, it’s been cremated and sent out. The implication here is that the vet-coroner is hiding something under the auspices of the Skeptical Fed, who knows more than he’s letting on.

Kolchak and Perri are confounded. If only they had a chance to look over this animal/creature!

Um… wait. They did have a chance. A good, long chance. See, Kolchak ran the thing down and killed it, and he, Perri and the Cub Photog stood over it as we faded to what will soon be a Ford commercial. No one else was around. They hadn’t called the authorities. It was only them, and the dead animal-creature. Kolchak has been stalking these animal-creatures since Vegas, and now he had one, dead, at his feet. He could explore it all night, probing it and discovering its secrets. Hell, with no one else around, the three of them could dice it up, stick it on an unbent hanger and make animal-creatore ‘smores over a fire pit if they wanted to. So… why didn’t they even glance at it before it was cremated hours later?

Supernatural shows only work if the logic of the world around the supernatural event makes sense. It’s that introduction of the fantastic into the mundane that really makes a show resonate. This one… didn’t resonate. The show’s been planned for a while. So how come these sorts of gaps in logic weren’t worked out before? It used to be that I’d think that I was just pressing too hard, looking for flaws in shows. But now, I just get insulted, because I figure that the folks producing the show don’t respect the audience enough to care if the show makes sense or not.

Kolchak and his team end up tracking down the animal-creature to some cave that is perfectly paved enough to allow his new Ford Mustang easy entry into it. There, they save a kidnapped girl, run afoul of these creatures, whose aversion to bright lights mark them as either werewolves or Mogwai, and escape with only one small piece of a sure-to-be season-long puzzle. These were-creatures obviously killed Kolchak’s wife, and he’d keep looking until he found out why (if we didn’t assume this already, Perri comes out and tells him this fact).

The show has potential to be fun on the one-off shows where Kolchak (I just like that name) checks out, say, chupacabra. Townsend makes a fine cipher for these kinds of cases. But ultimately, it feels like X-FILES light, and the larger mystery of what these things are and why they’re killing people, is just pretty dull. And if you expect people to tune in every week and talk about the show like they do LOST, well, you need to set your sights a bit higher than “dull.”

Next Time: CBS's THE GHOST WHISPERER