Night Stalker is a television series that ran for six weeks in the Fall of 2005 on ABC. The series starred Stuart Townsend as Carl Kolchak, an investigative reporter whose wife was murdered. Kolchak spends his time investigating other strange murders, believing they are linked in some way to his wife's murder. He is helped along the way by fellow crime reporter Perri Reed (Gabrielle Union), photographer Jain McManus (Eric Jungmann) and editor Anthony Vincenzo (Cotter Smith).

Night Stalker was a remake of the 1974 series Kolchak: The Night Stalker. ABC owned the rights to the original TV movies, but not the Universal TV series, and were limited only to using characters that had appeared in those movies.

Its premiere episode aired on September 29 on Thursday nights at 9 P.M. against CSI: Crime Scene Investigation on CBS, The Apprentice on NBC and the 2005 MLB Playoffs on FOX. Night Stalker was cancelled after six episodes due to low ratings. However, the Sci-Fi Channel, which frequently airs canceled network genre shows, showed all ten filmed episodes during the summer of 2006. The ratings were extremely poor on SciFi Channel as well, but as of 2007 the show continues to air in rotation on the network's weekday series marathons.

The last episode that was aired was the first of a multi-part episode, so viewers never saw the end of the sixth story. However, some time after the cancellation, the seventh episode appeared on Apple's iTunes Music Store for download. On February 7, 2006, the final three episodes were released on iTunes.

Night Stalker is currently being re-run on "Chiller" (channel 257 - DirecTV) and (as of December 2007/January 2008) Bravo in the UK (channel 121 on Sky Digital).

In a newsroom scene in the pilot, the image of Darren McGavin (the original Kolchak from the 1970s movies and TV series) can be seen standing at one of the desks, dressed as the 1970s Kolchak, chatting with one of the reporters. This image was digitally sampled from an episode of "Kolchak: The Night Stalker" (1974) (qv) and placed into the scene.

Kolchak's license plate is 197DMG2. This is another homage/in-joke to the original movie - 197_2 (1972) is the year the original Night Stalker movie premiered. And DMG stands for Darren McGavin.

Kolchak's wife is named "Irene." This is another homage - in the original series, Darren McGavin's wife Kathie Browne played a police captain named Irene.

A hat similar to the one used in the original series was used as a prop for one of the scenes in the pilot.

Bernard Fain, the FBI agent who harasses Kolchak, has the same first name as the agent (Bernie Jenks) who was friendly with Kolchak in the original 1972 movie.

Canceled after 6 episodes aired. The show got picked up by Sci-Fi Channel which aired the episodes that ABC didn't air.