Midnight Caller
| Midnight Caller | |
|---|---|
| Genre | Drama |
| Created by | Richard DiLello |
| Starring |
Gary Cole Wendy Kilbourne Dennis Dun Arthur Taxier Mykelti Williamson |
| Composer(s) |
Ross Levinson Brad Fiedel |
| Country of origin | United States |
| Original language(s) | English |
| No. of seasons | 3 |
| No. of episodes | 61 |
| Production | |
| Executive producer(s) | Robert Singer |
| Running time | 60 minutes |
| Production company(s) | December 3rd Productions Gangbuster Films Inc.(season 1) Lorimar Television |
| Release | |
| Original network | NBC |
| Original release | October 25, 1988 – May 17, 1991 |
Midnight Caller is a dramatic NBC television series created by Richard DiLello, which ran from 1988 to 1991. It was one of the first television series to address the dramatic possibilities of the then-growing phenomenon of talk radio.
Midnight Caller starred Gary Cole as Jack Killian, a former San Francisco police detective who had quit the force after he accidentally shot his partner to death in a confrontation with armed criminals. After lapsing into alcoholism, Killian receives an offer from Devon King (Wendy Kilbourne), the beautiful and wealthy owner-operator of KJCM-FM, to become "The Nighthawk", host of an overnight talk show, taking calls from listeners and acting as a detective solving their problems during the day (The title of Killian's show would later be adopted in real life by talk-show host George Noory on KTRS in St. Louis from 1996 until 2003, when Noory took over from the retiring Art Bell as host of the nationally syndicated Coast to Coast AM).
Killian's adventures took him frequently back into the realm of police work, where several of his former colleagues were less than happy to see him again. He faced myriad problems, both personal and professional, and was at various points required to come to grips with the nature of his relationship with both his absentee father and his troubled siblings. What he never seemed to come to grip with, however, was his relationship, or lack of one, with Devon. Devon eventually became pregnant in a relationship with another man and sold the station (Kilbourne was undergoing a simultaneous real-life pregnancy). Despite hard-hitting topical episodes dealing with AIDS, capital punishment, and child abuse, among other topics, the show lost its audience and was cancelled after three seasons.
In an episode entitled "After It Happened" (1988), a bisexual man is depicted as an AIDS carrier who deliberately infects straight women. As originally conceived, the man is gunned down in a vigilante murder by one of the women he infects, and a medical team in full Hazmat suits comes to take his body away as hero Jack Killian comforts the distraught shooter. In the broadcast version, the victim is stopped before she can kill the carrier.
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