MickeyForever Knight
Everybody knows the story: A vampire trying to reclaim his lost humanity, using his vampire superpowers to help those in need in an attempt to atone for centuries of feeding upon helpless innocents. Most people will immediately think of Angel/Angelus of Buffy fame... and to a lesser degree Spike, who tried the same thing once Angel got spun off into his own show. However, Nicholas Knight (Geraint Wyn Davies) was there before them.
Forever Knight (1992-1996) followed a vampire who's conscience finally rebelled against him. Knight worked as a cop (night shift, of course) trying to do good and protect people, fighting criminals and less-idealistic vamps as well as his own instincts and hungers. He had switched to living on cow's blood even as his undead friends mocked his attempts to become human again.
The vampires on Forever Knight tended to be more interesting as characters than most of the bloodsuckers on Buffy. The Buffy version, a person who becomes a vampire dies, and their soul goes on to wherever while a demon inhabits their dead corpse. Unless they're actually listed in the opening credits they have no soul, no sense of right and wrong- merely Grrr-Aaargh monsters blindly feeding to satisfy their instincts.
On Forever Knight, a vampire didn't lose his soul, his moral sense. They still knew right from wrong... but they also were prey to a terrible overwhelming need to feed on human blood. It took an extreme power of will for any of them to subsist on animal blood like Knight. These vampires still had a conscience, they were people and not mere soulless predators.
The Toronto medical examiner (Natalie Lambert, played by Catherine Disher) knew Knight's secret, but he always took pains to prevent his partners from finding out (An old survival instinct; in modern times if a cop had gone to a superior claiming Knight to be a Creature of the Night, it wouldn't be Knight who would be taken in for intense examination). His partners did tend to suspect something was up (Unlike most TV shows, the cops on Forever Knight weren't comically incompetent morons), and even when Knight's explanations were a little thin they were still more plausible than the actual truth.
Knight could relax and talk candidly with his vamp friends- but they always took the opportunity to pour their disdain on his quest to regain his humanity. LaCroix (Nigel Bennett) especially tormented Knight over his desire to emerge from the endless night- but in a fatherly way. LaCroix was the vampire who made Knight one ("Brought him across"), and for all the antagonism between them they were also friends of almost a millennia.
Like Highlander, our protagonist is centuries old, and many of the flashbacks involved different historical periods. Vampires and Immortals may not be exactly human- but in the important things they were: They need, they love, they laugh, they mourn... and while they can live for centuries or even millennia, they can die. Forever Knight had realistic characters, flawed but still mostly striving to live up to their higher ideals. Some were evil, some were misguided or duped, some were cunning or outright manipulative... and some from all these groups just happened to be vampires.
Knight was a classic antihero played as a hero: Doomed to forever walk the darkness but still determined to regain the light, driven by his inhuman hunger but struggling to restrain it, to be a good man, not a killing monster any more. As one of his vamp friends phrased it: "Poor Nicholas... tortured by a soul he hasn't got."
Forever Knight (1992-1996) followed a vampire who's conscience finally rebelled against him. Knight worked as a cop (night shift, of course) trying to do good and protect people, fighting criminals and less-idealistic vamps as well as his own instincts and hungers. He had switched to living on cow's blood even as his undead friends mocked his attempts to become human again.
The vampires on Forever Knight tended to be more interesting as characters than most of the bloodsuckers on Buffy. The Buffy version, a person who becomes a vampire dies, and their soul goes on to wherever while a demon inhabits their dead corpse. Unless they're actually listed in the opening credits they have no soul, no sense of right and wrong- merely Grrr-Aaargh monsters blindly feeding to satisfy their instincts.
On Forever Knight, a vampire didn't lose his soul, his moral sense. They still knew right from wrong... but they also were prey to a terrible overwhelming need to feed on human blood. It took an extreme power of will for any of them to subsist on animal blood like Knight. These vampires still had a conscience, they were people and not mere soulless predators.
The Toronto medical examiner (Natalie Lambert, played by Catherine Disher) knew Knight's secret, but he always took pains to prevent his partners from finding out (An old survival instinct; in modern times if a cop had gone to a superior claiming Knight to be a Creature of the Night, it wouldn't be Knight who would be taken in for intense examination). His partners did tend to suspect something was up (Unlike most TV shows, the cops on Forever Knight weren't comically incompetent morons), and even when Knight's explanations were a little thin they were still more plausible than the actual truth.
Knight could relax and talk candidly with his vamp friends- but they always took the opportunity to pour their disdain on his quest to regain his humanity. LaCroix (Nigel Bennett) especially tormented Knight over his desire to emerge from the endless night- but in a fatherly way. LaCroix was the vampire who made Knight one ("Brought him across"), and for all the antagonism between them they were also friends of almost a millennia.
Like Highlander, our protagonist is centuries old, and many of the flashbacks involved different historical periods. Vampires and Immortals may not be exactly human- but in the important things they were: They need, they love, they laugh, they mourn... and while they can live for centuries or even millennia, they can die. Forever Knight had realistic characters, flawed but still mostly striving to live up to their higher ideals. Some were evil, some were misguided or duped, some were cunning or outright manipulative... and some from all these groups just happened to be vampires.
Knight was a classic antihero played as a hero: Doomed to forever walk the darkness but still determined to regain the light, driven by his inhuman hunger but struggling to restrain it, to be a good man, not a killing monster any more. As one of his vamp friends phrased it: "Poor Nicholas... tortured by a soul he hasn't got."
