I’m usually not much of a vampire-show person. Give me Bela Lugosi lurking around a castle and I’m happy, but sprawling vampire mythology has never automatically sent me running for the remote.
Then Forever Knight popped up on Roku.
An 800-year-old vampire working as a homicide detective while trying to redeem himself for centuries of bloodsucking? What the hell. How bad could it be?
Turns out, not bad at all.
Forever Knight has everything I love about early-’90s television. It has a good story, yet can be cheesy at the same time. It’s dark and moody without looking like somebody drained every color out of the picture in post-production. And the version I watched hasn’t been polished into something pretending it was filmed yesterday.
The way it looks isn’t why I liked it, though. It just gives the show character before Nick Knight has even flashed his fangs.
Meet Your Friendly Neighborhood Vampire Detective
“Dark Knight, (Part 1)” introduces Detective Nicholas “Nick” Knight (Geraint Wyn Davies), who has found an unusual way to make amends for several centuries of questionable dietary choices.
He became a cop.
Nick works homicide at night in Toronto, avoids sunlight, prefers working alone and has convinced almost everyone around him that these are merely the eccentricities of a quirky detective. Okay. I’ll go with it.
His latest case involves bodies being found drained of blood, which isn’t particularly convenient when you’re secretly a vampire yourself.
It gets even more complicated when the investigation intersects with Nick’s past and an ancient jade cup that may offer exactly what he’s spent centuries searching for: a way to become mortal again.
There’s plenty of mythology dumped into this first episode, but Forever Knight has the good sense to wrap most of it around an actual murder investigation. It isn’t asking me to sit through an hour of Vampire History 101 before something happens. Instead, Nick is investigating his own kind while trying desperately not to behave like one of them.
A bloodsucker in public service.
As one of the episode’s jokes essentially puts it, Betty Ford probably doesn’t take vampires.
It Knows This Is a Vampire Show
What surprised me most was how much fun Forever Knight is willing to have with its premise. This is not a show embarrassed by vampire tropes.
Nick mesmerizes people. He recoils from garlic. He can hear things humans can’t. He keeps blood in wine bottles in his refrigerator. He’s got the fangs, the flying and the centuries-old memories of beautiful women wandering around in flowing gowns.
At one point, Nick’s captain gets a kick out of pulling out a clove of garlic and breathing on him just to see what happens. Nick recoils and nobody finds that particularly alarming.
Then again, there’s supposedly a vampire killer running around Toronto, Nick is already the weird guy at work, and everyone seems to be enjoying finding new ways to harass him over it. Nick being Nick apparently explains a lot around this police department.
There are jokes about Bela Lugosi and Geraldo Rivera. Nick’s increasingly suspicious new partner, Don Schanke (John Kapelos), sees him do things that shouldn’t be humanly possible, while everyone else basically treats Schanke like he’s losing his mind in the middle of the city’s current vampire hysteria.
It’s goofy. But it’s also a helluva lot of fun.
Forever Knight isn’t accidentally entertaining because it’s an old show with dated effects. It seems perfectly aware that there’s something inherently ridiculous about sticking an ancient vampire inside a police procedural. It just commits to the bit.
Nick Knight Has a Lot of Baggage
The procedural alone probably wouldn’t have been enough to put this on my watch pile. Nick did.
He’s spent centuries killing people, and now he wants to repay society for some of the damage he’s done. Becoming human again isn’t simply about escaping the inconvenience of avoiding daylight. He’s carrying around a hell of a lot of guilt.
Unfortunately, his old life isn’t quite finished with him.
There’s Janette (Deborah Duchene), a vampire from his past who now runs a nightclub called The Raven. She and Nick have history — and enough chemistry to make that obvious long before the episode spells everything out.
There’s Natalie (Catherine Disher), the medical examiner who already knows exactly what Nick is and wants him to stop drinking blood. Their relationship is another interesting wrinkle because she’s one of the few people with whom he doesn’t have to perform the whole eccentric-night-shift-detective routine.
She also has a major crush on him.
Nick knows it, but getting too close to someone when the smell of blood can turn dinner into an entirely different kind of dinner probably isn’t the greatest idea.
And then there’s LaCroix (Nigel Bennett), Nick’s master.
Through flashbacks, we see the world Nick is trying to escape and the people who aren’t particularly thrilled that he’s decided to play human. When LaCroix resurfaces in the present, it gives the episode something bigger than Vampire Detective Solves Murder of the Week.
Nick can change his clothes, his name and his job.
But he can’t escape LaCroix.
Yes, It Gets Cheesy
Nick also wears sunglasses at night (right before dawn), because of course he does. It’s a vampire show, people. If he didn’t have these little quirks, would we even believe the premise?
He drives around Toronto in a gorgeous old car, uses supernatural hearing to locate crimes, mesmerizes witnesses when necessary and, when a gunman has a woman and baby trapped inside an apartment, puts his special vampire talents to work.
There is flying involved.
And it looks exactly as convincing as you’d expect supernatural flying on early-’90s television to look.
I didn’t give a shit.
That’s part of the strange charm here. Forever Knight has this dark, moody atmosphere sitting right next to moments of absolutely ludicrous television cheese, yet they don’t cancel each other out.
Even the murder case gets personal when one of the street kids Nick looks after becomes a victim. Suddenly the detective who’s supposedly trying to control the monster inside him has a very good reason to let that monster out.
That’s more interesting to me than another tortured vampire standing around looking beautiful and miserable for an hour.
Before Nick Knight Was Nick Knight
I also found out this wasn’t actually Nick Knight’s first trip to television.
Three years before Forever Knight, CBS aired a 1989 TV movie called Nick Knight with the same basic concept — except Rick Springfield played Nick.
Yes. That Rick Springfield.
The movie aired August 20, 1989, and was intended as a potential series pilot. CBS didn’t pick it up at the time, but the idea wasn’t dead. When it finally returned in 1992 as Forever Knight, production moved to Canada and Geraint Wyn Davies took over the title role. Almost the entire cast changed with him.
The only one who survived the trip was John Kapelos.
And the timing of Forever Knight is interesting in hindsight. Nick arrived on CBS in May 1992, more than four years before Sarah Michelle Gellar’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer hit television — and even beat Kristy Swanson’s original Buffy movie to the screen by a couple of months.
I’m not saying Forever Knight invented the modern vampire television show. I’m saying this goofy vampire cop was already cruising around Toronto fighting his bloodlust while Buffy hadn’t even made it to the movie theater yet.
And by the way, you know I’ll be hunting for that Rick Springfield movie.
I’m an ’80s girl, after all. Springfield was on my mixtape.
There is absolutely no universe in which I’m learning that Rick Springfield once played Nick Knight and not going looking for it.
Update: Apparently I didn’t have to hunt very hard. Tubi has Nick Knight. So does Fawesome.
The Nightcrawler Is Waiting
By the end of “Dark Knight,” Forever Knight had already done the one thing that matters most around here: it made me want another episode.
Nick gets into his car and turns on the radio. The voice coming through belongs to the Nightcrawler, who talks about searching for a friend he hasn’t been able to find.
And who is this mysterious radio voice? None other than Nick’s old friend, LaCroix.
As expected, Nick is suddenly very uncomfortable because he thought he’d hidden himself well enough that LaCroix would never find him.
Apparently not, and he decides to have just a little more fun with Nick.
LaCroix plays the violin over the air before delivering this very special message:
“The Nightcrawler is waiting for you.”
Okay. That was pretty creepy and pretty awesome, too.
How long is LaCroix going to keep coming after Nick, how long Nick can maintain this human life he’s built, and whether he’s finally tired of running. After centuries of changing names and disappearing, will he finally stay and fight?
I want to see how all that plays out.
There are rough edges all over Forever Knight. It’s dated — no upscaling on the Free TV Frontier like some other older shows have, which might turn off modern audience. It’s occasionally cheesy, especially the flying effects and the glowing yellow eyes. And apparently Toronto in the early ’90s was populated by cops who could hear “I’m allergic to sunlight and therefore can only work nights” without blinking an eye.
But what it does have is character. And lots of it.
But most importantly, it understands that dark and serious doesn’t have to mean dull (in other words, it doesn’t get stuck on the River of Molasses.) There’s a murder investigation, vampire mythology, humor, romance, old grudges, supernatural nonsense and an 800-year-old detective trying very hard not to eat the people he’s supposed to protect.
That’s a hell of a lot more entertaining than I expected when I hit play.
I went into Forever Knight thinking, How bad can it be? I came out thinking, when can I hit play on the next episode?
Yes, I have a hell of a lot of TV to watch. I know. Fringe. 12 Monkeys. The Girlfriend. Knight Rider. The Five Star Weekend. And on and on.
Don’t worry. I’ll get to it all. Eventually.
🔥 Our Verdict: WATCHABLE. Forever Knight is gritty, cheesy, moody and surprisingly fun. An 800-year-old vampire homicide detective seeking redemption shouldn’t work nearly as well as it does — especially considering I’m not a huge TV vampire fan — but I’m definitely coming back for Episode 2.
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