TVSquad

It looks like NBC's new Knight Rider is on its last turbo boost, and the show's executive producer claims NBC has no one to blame but themselves.

Mediaweek's Alan Frutkin sat down with the show's executive producer Gary Scott Thompson to talk about the show's already troubled times before it hits the air again on Wednesday.

Thompson said the show has undergone some usual first season changes like differences in creative direction and story outlines, but the changes the network handed down cut far deeper to the bone.

Battlestar Galactica has spoiled us all.

I say that because, since the excellent "re-imagining" of the craptastic '70s scifi series hit the air, we expect the remakes of our favorite shows to be darker, more layered, and more complicated than the originals. But sometimes, going darker doesn't always work: take a look at the failure pile that passed for the Bionic Woman remake as the best example of that. So, when a "25 years later" return of Knight Rider was announced, I half wondered if they were going to go the BSG route and make it all serious. But I equally wondered if they would go the other way and make it a modern camp classic, sort of the way the original, Hoff-injected series was.

Turns out, the answer was "none of the above." Mostly the movie / backdoor pilot that aired last night was dull, with a few fleeting moments of camp thrown in. But it never made me clamor for the show to return as a series.

I know, you woke up in the middle of the night last night in a cold sweat and wondered, why is the new Knight Rider car a Mustang?

Davis Bartis, who is the executive producer on the new NBC remake of the 80s show, says that there is no Trans Am available like the original, so they went with the Ford Mustang, which he thinks is "the coolest car out there." So now, not only will K.I.T.T. have a new voice (Arrested Development's Will Arnett, taking over for William Daniels), the car itself will be completely new.

It's that time of the year again. Car collectors from around the world have descended on Scottsdale, Arizona, for the annual Barrett-Jackson auction. A mind numbing array of hot-rods, resto-mods, classics, and other automotive oddities have been selected for the catalog and everything must go.

If you have any interest at all in cars, this is great TV. An endless parade of amazing cars will roll across the auction block all weekend, including Alice Cooper's 1939 Lincoln Zephyr Custom (pictured). The Speed channel is in the middle of fourty hours of coverage of the auction with eight hours coming today, ten tomorrow, and seven more on Sunday.

It's the kind of programming that can suck all the time right out of your day. You pause to see what that Yenko Camaro will go for. But after that is a Shelby Mustang. And then there is a convertible GTO. Before you know it, it's getting dark. The whole day is shot and you didn't get anything done, but at least you now know how much the option to upgrade to the big block motor on a 1968 Corvette was, which is something.