One Man Can Make A Difference: A History of Knight Rider
One of the most popular shows of the eighties, Knight Rider was the result of unique combination of a quirk of Glen A. Larson’s contract, and a chance meeting on a plane…
“Knight Rider is the Lone Ranger,” Glen A. Larson once explained in an interview with the Archive of American Television (AAT). “It’s one man comes into town and he has a little bit more going for him than people think — and that’s a great theme! I didn’t make that concept up. That’s just what it is.”
Larson was right to claim that the premise behind one of the eighties’ most iconic shows was not particularly unique. The Lone Ranger concept is older than television itself. Successfully updating that concept and bringing it to screen, however, was a far greater challenge than Larson admits.
That it was Larson’s challenge at all was largely down to a quirk of timing. The original idea for a series about a crime-fighting supercar sprung from the mind of Brandon Tartikoff, NBC’s legendary Head of Entertainment. He believed that there was mileage in a show with a simple hero partnered with some modern technology so NBC approached Universal and asked them to make a pilot in 1981. Universal agreed, but immediately hit the…
