Television Reviews : ‘Midnight Caller,’ ‘Mission: Impossible’ Make Debuts

Tonight’s premiere of the NBC series “Midnight Caller” has trouble on the line when it comes to the plot, but it is so sleekly produced that the hour passes swiftly and interestingly.

Airing at 10 p.m. on Channels 4, 36 and 39, “Midnight Caller” is about a crack San Francisco police detective who changes careers and becomes the host of a late-night radio call-in show after accidentally killing his partner in a shoot-out.

Now the city’s hottest radio personality, straight-talking Jack Killian (Gary Cole) uses his new position to track down a deranged serial murderer named Angel (Jenny Wright) who poses as a prostitute in order to gun down her male victims and even manages to terrorize station owner Devon King (Wendy Kilbourne).

Creator/producer Richard DiLello’s opening story is somewhat less than electrifying, and for those yearning for scary stuff about radio guys threatened by female psychopaths, the home video of Clint Eastwood’s “Play Misty for Me” is a better bet.

However, Cole is convincing as the brooding, chain-smoking Killian, who will now fight crime through his radio show. And Thomas Carter directs with high style, filling the screen with the dark, mysterious shadings of urban night, creating such intriguing moods and rhythms that you almost forget that nothing much else is happening.

“Mission: Impossible” is Mission: Improbable, based on Sunday night’s premiere of this short-run ABC entry that retools scripts from the classic series that ran from 1966-73.

Returning with the scripts are Lalo Schifrin’s pulsating theme and Peter Graves as stony IMF team leader Jim Phelps, who never met a mission he didn’t like. The man turns down nothing.

Only this time, he gets his assignments from a little video disc. And the new IMFers are drama professor Nicholas Black (ThaaoPenghlis), electronics whiz Grant Collier (Phil Morris, son of original cast member Greg Morris), strongman Max Harte (Tony Hamilton) and fashion designer and former model Casey Randall (Terry Markwell).

Sunday’s episode found the IMFers relying on their usual incredible luck and talent for deception to foil a super assassin and his boss, who caused the death of Jim’s best friend.

It was all rather preposterous, but probably no more so than the original “Mission: Impossible.” Far worse, the hour moved slowly and, well, the magic appears to have vanished along with Barbara Bain, Martin Landau, Greg Morris, Peter Lupus, Leonard Nimoy and their successors on the earlier series.

Said Jim on Sunday: “I wonder if I’ve been away from this too long.” Perhaps not long enough.