Midnight Caller

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Midnight Caller was a dramatic NBC television series which ran from 1988 to 1991. It was one of the first television series to address the dramatic possibilities of the then-growing phenomenon of talk radio.

Midnight Caller starred Gary Cole as Jack Killian, a former San Francisco police detective who had quit the force after accidentally shooting his partner to death in a confrontation with armed criminals. After lapsing into alcoholism, Killian receives an offer from Devon King (Wendy Kilbourne), the beautiful and wealthy owner-operator of KJCM-FM, to become "The Nighthawk", host of an overnight talk show, taking calls from listeners and acting as a detective solving their problems during the day.

Killian's adventures took him frequently back into the realm of police work, where several of his former colleagues were less than happy to see him again. He faced a myriad of problems, both personal and professional, and was at various points required to come to grips with the nature of his relationship with both his absentee father and his troubled siblings. What he never seemed to come to grips with, however, was his relationship, or lack of one, with Devon; there seemed to be a lot of unconsumated sexual tension between the pair, especially early in the show's run. Devon eventually became pregnant in a relationship with another man and sold the station (Kilbourne was undergoing a simultaneous real-life pregnancy) and the show never seemed to recover from her absence. Despite hard-hitting topical episodes dealing with AIDS, capital punishment, and child abuse, among other topics, it lost its audience and was soon cancelled.

[edit] "After it Happened" controversy

In an episode entitled "After it Happened" (1988) a bisexual man is depicted as an AIDS carrier who deliberately infects straight women. As originally conceived, the bisexual man is gunned down in a vigilante murder by one of the women he infects, and a medical team in full Hazmat suits comes to take his body away as hero Jack Killian comforts the distraught shooter. In the broadcast version, the victim is stopped before she can kill the carrier.

Coming in the early years of the AIDS epidemic in the US, at a time when public understanding of the disease was quite low[1], the proposed episode was immediately criticized as sensationalistic, biphobic and scientifically inaccurate. Protests were launched by GLAAD, BiNet USA and BiPAC among others. Additionally ACT-UP pickets disrupted the show's filming.[2]

Eventually, the tone of the episode was softened to one of tolerance for all people who are ill and a heightened awareness of the need for safe sex practices by all.[3] However, it was still considered controversial among AIDS activists and the bisexual community.