User Reviews

As a viewer of the original series, I was initially glad when NBC announced that Knight Rider was coming back to the small screen. But the 2-hour pilot movie was poorly paced - like a stretched-out 1-hour episode. It tried to connect with the original series by including David Hasselhoff in a very brief cameo at the very end. (SPOILER - Mike Traceur/Knight is the son of the original Michael Knight.) The new series tried to reinvent the original series while making references to the original. But in trying to please everyone, they pleased very few.

Many fans wanted another Trans-Am KITT, but since that model has been out-of-production for years, that just was not possible. I suppose using the new Chevy Camaro would have been one possibility, but since that model was heavily linked to the Transformers movie, it would have been a poor choice as well. I didn't mind using a Mustang as the new KITT and have grown to accept it. In retrospect, maybe using the Chevy Volt concept car as the new KITT could have been a possibility.

Since the producers have a deal with Ford, the new KITT now morphs into various other Ford vehicles, transformer-style. Not only is this distracting, it is such an obvious product placement as to make the show less entertaining. Some fans like this, but many have voiced their dislike of this new feature for KITT.

Acting and special effects in the first half of the season were simply awful. Student films exhibited more skill. Both acting and effects have improved somewhat but there is still room for improvement. The show's executive producer is more versed in car action movies (see "The Fast & the Furious") than he is in one-hour scripted drama.

The new show expanded the original concept into a covert government agency. Many viewers objected to this, so that storyline was changed and 3 principal cast members were written out (including, arguably, the best and most experienced actor on the show). But the show still failed to bridge the connection with the old series. There were numerous references to KARR, but when the big showdown came, it was over in 1 to 2 minutes. The "mysterious past" of the new Michael Knight - which could have been an interesting subplot - was referenced numerous times early on, then quickly explained away with little resolution.

There are fans of the new show, but far too few to justify the expense of this one-hour show's continued production. NBC ranks fourth overall of the Big 4 broadcast networks. Times are so tough for NBC Universal that they announced a $750 million budget cut in December 2008, laid off nearly 1,000 people, and have since announced a reduction in primetime scripted dramas by 5 hours each week (to be replaced with a new Jay Leno talk show at 10 PM Eastern).

In the end, the success or failure of the new Knight Rider must be based on its own merits and shortcomings, not in comparison to the original series. The new Knight Rider appeals to some, but seems to be a poorly conceived action/drama that fails to create characters we can care about. (Make no mistake, the original series was pretty cheesy, but somehow we accepted it and the characters.)

Hopefully, another more skilled production team will take Knight Rider and give it the care and attention it deserves. Maybe this would fare better on a cable channel such as SciFi (also owned by NBC Universal) if the appropriate budget and care could be devoted to it.

I'm not going to lie about it. There are a lot, and I mean a lot, of things wrong with the 2008 "Knight Rider" series. Thankfully, a few of these problems were rectified by writing the characters portrayed by Bruce Davison, Yancy Arias, and Sydney Poitier off the show. I have nothing against the actors, and they've done good work in the past, but their roles were unnecessary. However, consolidating the cast was more of a drop in the bucket than a silver bullet.

The stories, while greatly improved from the beginning and still improving, aren't yet where they need to be. The acting is still too heavily steeped in cheese to be taken seriously. Worse, the saving grace of the show, the F/X devoted to KITT, are, in general, weak sauce. Regardless, in its own way, the series can be highly entertaining—if you know where to look.

The writing team could teach a doctoral level course in the art of comedic set ups and follow throughs, both intentional and unintended. Deanna Russo and Smith Cho are both attractive women and have a respectable grasp of of comic timing. Paul Campbell is also pretty funny as the perennial, squeaky voiced geek/brain. Justin Breuning is such a cookie cutter, pretty boy face smasher that it's pretty hard not to laugh—in a Johnny Bravo kid of way. Lastly is Val Kilmer as the voice of KITT. While originally, the car felt like some kind of leering, trench coat wearing perv that fixated on pheromone levels, it has been revamped into a more engaging character. But all of this doesn't come close to fixing the real problem at the heart of Knight Rider.

This show is simply not suited for a prime-time spot on a major network. While greatly improved, it still doesn't have the polish of pretty much every other show that comes on Sunday—Saturday, between 8:00 p.m. and 11:00 p.m. But if Knight Rider's time slot was late at night on the weekends, it would probably fare much better. I mean, back in the day, I used to love "Highlander". However, I knew that show could only exist on late nights during the weekends. Well, this show is pretty much in the same boat. The deficiencies which are so glaringly obvious in its current time slot would not be so, were it to come on much later, Friday through Sunday. As an added bonus, it could probably get into some darker territory, like slaving and drug addiction, and take a more realistic approach to the danger this show's character's frequently find themselves in.

So, once its eighteen episodes have finished airing, this show doesn't have to stop and it shouldn't. Oh yes, it has to be dropped by NBC and expunged from prime-time. But this doesn't have to mean hasta la vista. NBC should free the production studio behind Knight Rider to take the program and sell it off as a syndicated action show—much like the "Legend of the Seeker" currently is. I, for one, would definitely have no problem watching the further adventures of KITT and company when I was seriously winding down after a long day and didn't want to have to think too much. Matter of fact, I don't think a couple million people would mind. But eight o'clock, on Wednesday, is just too early in the day or in the week to shut my brain off enough for me to truly and fully appreciate this show for what it is...a guilty pleasure.

This is horrific. The actors feel like characters from a bad video game. The action is cheap and predictable. The target for this show seems to be the 5 - 10 year old audience.

KITT is now a Ford Mustang. There are so many options for a great car these days. But since the car had to be American, I guess they had to go with this. Although when it transformed it looks a hell of a lot like a Nissan Skyline GTR.

Worst part of all this is KITT is voiced by Val Kilmer! The intro from the original series is much more entertaining than the whole season of this new series. I don't know why these networks keep canceling great original idea TV shows (Firefly, Kings) and destroying good old shows by recreating previous great shows on such a cheap and bad scale.

I hope this gets canceled or they bring in some new actors and writers for the next season.

OK, I got enough of people insulting the new show and rating it low in comparison with the original. First of all: the ridiculously stupid and random twists and subplots of shows like Lost and Heroes aren't examples of good writing. By the way, the few good ideas behind Heroes are a total rip-off from X-Men. Then: the original show was fun, I loved it as a kid, I sincerely enjoy it today. But it was just that. The scripts were campy to say the least, with holes and non-sense everywhere. The characters were... a talking car. Nothing else, Michael Knight was just optional. The new show, also, is just fun. A talking car, a funny character for Michael Knight, punch lines and that's all we need. This new show delivers some good action, not too much, funny lines and even some acceptable (and advanced) visual effects. I like it just like i liked the old one. And by the way: KITT has to be a cool car that you can expect to see everyday, like it was the Trand Am, like it is the new Mustang. Great choice

New Knight Rider is no worse than old Knight Rider - but it could have been BETTER. Having got rid of Bruce Davison, the HQ feels EMPTY. And while I approve of losing Big Brother, the new, sleek, downsized team seems a bit lost.

The premise is ludicrous of course - an operation like KITT would cost serious money - and full of holes - what is the PURPOSE of the giant hanger? (Presumably it's an old airship hanger - it LOOKS great, but we haven't seen it USED in ANY way).

But the MAIN failing is the WRITING. ALL TV shows that want to truly entertain, need WRITING - even lightweight "fun" dramas. America has produced PLENTY of shows where the premise was absurd, but the attention was drawn by superior DIALOGUE. Even low-brow series can entertain if the WORDS are there.

And there IS still POTENTIAL here. Val Kilmer hits the right note, Smith Cho is Gorgeous and even the guys have their moments. The SFX is superior and while the product placement is a little invasive, it PAYS for the damn thing - deal with it!

So get NEW WRITERS - and have them write BRUCE back in. I know he's dead, but if Bobby can wake up in the shower...

Honestly, the new series felt like TKR in so many aspects, but the writers didn't do their homework, and like TKR it also was an unsuccessful spin-off. That wasn't even a big shocker really.

The first half of the series was horrid and seamed like a crossbreed between the original series 100 words or less plot summary and the "Transformers" live action movie it was inspired on. Seriously. The transformers were a cool brand name and many people paid to see the movie once. But there is a difference of success in profit, and success in making something we would watch again. The first halve of the series had too many subplots, adult teasing in every episode and one big fiction no sense conspiracy. Its literally "writers gone wild".

The original KITT was a simple car with an integrated super PC and extra features, all covered in an invisible armor jell or something like that. The new KITT was anything but simple. Many features seamed too appear out of nowhere and were never seen again when needed. Is the new transforming shell liquid like in the film, or plate? Sometimes the system couldn't do simple things like visually track planes through a satellite, but the next time it seamed like they could hack pentagon. That got really annoying really fast.

When the viewers got fed up of this (insert your emotion response here) and made it clear to stop watching an insult to the original series, the writers realized they were so close to getting fired, they finally started to take it seriously and went to what we were expecting. The cast went down to 4 main human characters and became more about a regular detective show. Some of the episodes after the KARR battle were good to watch, but it was too late and had the writers done so in the first place, the series might have lived for another season or two.

In TKR I really liked not only the new cars (more than one) special abilities, personalities (yeah, they could simulate emotions), but mostly the vertical flight super plane. The practical idea of the original knight semi was something we all wanted to do at least once in our lives. Here we were given almost no practical effects, just plane effect. Explain to me how spinning KITT helps scanning the exterior? Explain to me what happened to the pilot who wanted to bail out of the carrier plane and why did the carrier plane explode in the first place? You cant without using the words "writer", "looks cool" and "developer".

Worst of all the series had some of the original development crew form the original series. I kept asking myself, what happened to these people? Why did they make this so different from the original that we can't recognize it? Did they stood up and tried to make a change before the verdict on the show was made? So many questions.

Maybe it's me, but it seams like there is a failure curse on all the Knight Rider spin-offs. Hell, they even didn't beat TKRs 22 episode marker. Really sad.

OK in a recent review, the original show had cheesiness but also it had the heart and soul. And did not take itself so seriously like the new show seemed to. Or better yet, tried way to hard to.

As you can never replace the Hoff as Justin Bruening not the best actor but he has wit like David Hasselhoff, who's Michael Knight is Bruenings TV father.

Bruening is OK. Val Kilmer has the hard task to replace witty William Daniels as the voice of the new Kitt, this time instead of a Pontiac Black Top, it is a Chevy Mustang.

Even though they made cast changes in the middle of their only season and trying to get to where they needed to be. Still, there could be only one Knight Rider!

This show started so well; they initiated a story based on the same inventor creating a new KITT and then recruiting Michael Knight's son as well as surrounding the lead with supporting characters that could also have their own backstories, it really had a great foundation (no pun intended). And KITT was really cool, he morphed into a battle mode that was plausible via nanites. Alas, they couldn't get a good story established so half way through the season they wrote out many characters and turned KITT into a Transformer (a cargo van?! What?). Then they brought back KARR in a weak effort to put some excitement into the season to avoid cancellation. It didn't work. Hoping something can be done in the future.

So, when this first came out, there was a hope for a good show. Unfortunately several things let it down. 1. A very poor cast and terrible acting. 2. The show tried to incorporate too many characters and had poor scripts trying to fit them all in on each episode. In addition, the show went from One Man helping people to grand stories involving governments and end-of-the-world stories. 3. Terrible CGI and instead of using the nano skin concept from the pilot they went down the Transformers route. Any way for Ford to get as many of their models into the show, same thing happened in Team Knight Rider.

The show did get better towards the end of it's run once they killed off a lot of the cast and got back to the premise of one man and one car with a small group of supporting cast. Had the show ran it's full episode amount for the first season, it may have got more viewers and made it to a second season. A lot of interesting story lines were started, but some where left unfinished, others rushed to conclusion. They did miss out on, what could have been a great 2 part episode, when the introduced K.A.R.R. Unfortunately making it a robot, aka a Transformer, and having probably the worst CGI I have seen outside of a B-Movie Sci-Fi special, created a major let down. Had this episode been up to the expectations of the fans, it may have saved the show as it was the jump off point where the show got back to the story lines of the original.

Only 2 things were good in this show. Val Kilmer as K.I.T.T and the Mustang.

Next time, leave Ford and the writers of this incarnation, out of the equation and we could have a good show.

I Was on the internet eating potato chips after seeing knight rider, my stomach was feeling a little queasy, the feeling worsen as the KITT 3000 Mustang drove in the road and went turbo boost, but talk about an adventure show without a talking car, knight rider, the fifth in a series of knight rider television franchises is dead in the water, the original Knight rider created by glen l. Larson remains a classic tale, the shows pacing, morose techno music score and performances by the cast are forever ingrained in show lore, the others a spinoff called code of vengence (1985-1986), knight rider 2000 (1991), knight rider 2010 (1994) and team knight rider (1997) need not be discussed.

Keep in mind that in each show, the car was dispatched in some new and some spectaular method, so you'd think that by 2008, supposed a quater century since michael long was killed and revived by the ordeal himself as michael knight, the bullet nose big guy would leave kitt in peace, not pieces.

Come on.

Now the son of knight takes over for his daddy and goes on a new adventure, too bad the acting is bad and the talents (davison and kilmer) are wasted and the car also looks terrible, in the original knight rider, the car was sleek and beautiful, this new version (by the way I Love ford mustangs) may look sleek and beautiful, but it's awful, except the attack mode front bumper which was hot), even the CGI Effects are horrible and the ending of this premiere is the worst in recent TV history, Michael knight gets shot down by the FBI, Moments later, he is revived.

This show should be dumped for good.

It's hard to believe that this decade of TV has not been good at all and this should add to this.

This is just plain trash.