Why wasn't Kolchak: The Night Stalker a bigger commercial success

[TMC]

Question: Why wasn't the original Kolchak: The Night Stalker television series a bigger commercial success?

Multiple reasons, including:

1. ABC didn’t get behind it - Although the series was surprisingly inexpensive to make (It used older actors, it was able to make Los Angeles appear to be Chicago, it didn’t have any big name stars, etc.) ABC kept it in a time slot (10pm EST Fridays) that at the time wasn’t when many people watched television. ABC simply didn’t have faith in the program and that led to it coming to an end.
   
2. Darren McGavin wasn’t enthused about it - While he enjoyed the career boost that the two pilot films (The Night Stalker and The Night Strangler) brought him, he was never a fan of episodic television, having always been a stage and screen actor. Since he was also acting as an executive producer for the series and punching up scripts (and not being compensated for either additional role) he decided to end his involvement in the series after 20 episodes.
   
3. The ratings were low - Whether it was due to the time slot, the lack of a solid lead-in series, or simply because people at the time were not fans of the program, it was never a rating grabber and its cancellation was always a likelihood.
   
4. It lacked cheesecake/beefcake - There weren’t any sexy female or male regular cast members to make the viewers want to tune in. For some reason the decision was made to cast actors who looked like “regular people”, instead of casting any who were appealing enough to attract viewers on a weekly basis.
   
5. There wasn’t any consistency to the program - While some episodes are legendary (The Zombie, The Vampire, The Spanish Moss Murders, etc.) some are just terrible (Mr. R.I.N.G., The Sentry, Firefall, etc.). The series went from horror to science fiction to broad comedy and it didn’t always do it well.

While it’s clear that it was an influential program (Both The X-Files and Supernatural owe it a great debt) it really never got off the ground when it was made. Even the execrable reboot in 2005 was only saved due to the presence of the lovely actor Gabrielle Union; nothing else about it was memorable.