« Buddhism and the cartoon controversy | Main | Biscuit Retrospective »

Darren McGavin

Sad to hear that Darren McGavin died. I was a fan as far back as 1956 – my parents bought our first television set around that time, and Mike Hammer, which starred McGavin, was one of the first shows we watched regularly. If you look at his page on IMDB,, you'll see that he was all over television for years, and I caught a lot of those appearances. But I'll always think of him as Carl Kolchak, the Night Stalker (1974-75), one of my all-time favorite shows. Night Stalker featured a new monster every week, as well as a bunch of cameo appearances by great character actors from the fifties and sixties. Night Stalker inspired The X Files, and it's fitting that his final appearances were on a couple of episodes of that show. IMDB shows his last appearance as a "reporter standing at a desk," but I think that was an image transferred from the old Kolchak series. Unfortunately the recent version of Night Stalker had zero charm, and died on the vine. It needed a Darren McGavin.

jon posted this at 12:11 PM
Share on Facebook| email to a friend

 Subscribe to RSS feed for Weblogsky