Midnight Caller

- Season 1

(1988)

Jack Killian retires from the San Francisco Police Department after accidentally shooting his partner, Rusty, in a crossfire situation. He's drawn back to the world of the living by an offer to be a late night talk radio host. A serial killer begins calling Jack, explaining the assassinations and Jack's inadvertently pulled back into the crime fighting world.

Jack spends most of his radio show talking with a homicidal/suicidal 'spurned lover' - the man is waiting to kill his girlfriend and then himself. It's a race against time for the police to track down the location of the woman's home.

Jack's old girlfriend, Tina, arrives in town. She informs him she has contracted AIDS and will die. Unable to handle the hopelessness of the situation, Jack sets out to find the man responsible. Jack is shocked to see that the message of safe sex is still being ignored, despite the obvious consequences. He uses his show as a forum on AIDS awareness as well as a means of tracking down the man who infected Tina.

A female friend of Jack's from the police force is wounded in the line of duty and her partner killed. They seek comfort in each other's arms to grieve the deaths of their partners. Jack finds himself in the crossfire of the mob hit man trying to silence the only witness to the crime.

As Jack's luck would have it, he goes into a bank to cash a cheque and finds himself a hostage in a bank robbery. The media and the police wait out the negotiations, all with a personal interest in Jack's well-being.

A man who's on Death Row, asks Jack to do his show just before he's about to be executed.

Jack is approached by a newspaper publisher to write for his paper. Later the man's son is brought in by the police as person of interest in the death of a girl he was seen with. The man uses all of his influence to get his son released. Later Jack goes on the air saying that is it fair that his son is not even questioned. The publisher goes out and prints stories that makes it seem like the girl was at fault for her death because of her lifestyle and he tries to get Jack off the air. Later when he gives Jack a witness that proves his son innocence, whom Jack puts on ...

When Jack insults another radio man, he retaliates by insinuating that Jack's shooting of his partner was not an accident. He gets someone is the police department to provide him with ammo he can use against Jack. Jack tries to take care of him. At the same time a known mobster is paying attention to what he says.

A young runaway, forced into prostitution, turns to Jack via his radio show for assistance in breaking away from her pimp who is involved in the white slavery market.

A man claiming to be Jack's father shows up and Jack is not exactly warming up to him. And Devon finally has it out with her father which doesn't end well.

Jack meets a night club singer, dates her and falls hard for her. She warns him of her ex-husband who's not willing to let her go. The man even attacks Jack with a knife in a bar. Later the man is killed and Jack is the prime suspect.

Jack gets involved with a retired cop's search for the man who killed his partner years ago. And it seems that Devon's father was a person of interest.

Jack is drawn back to the neighborhood he worked in as a patrolman in response to a mother's plea to help her drug-addicted son.

Jack continues to be haunted by the night of Rusty's death. This time he has to help out Rusty's son, Ethan, who has run away from home and calls Jack to tell him so.

Assisting an injured woman on the street, a young doctor is faced with every mother's nightmare when her infant daughter is abducted by a young woman whose grasp on reality is failing. Jack uses the show as a forum to track down the kidnapped child, who, on top of everything, is desperately ill and will die without her medication.

One of Jack's regular callers 'witnesses' a murder in her apartment building while talking to Jack on the phone. She isn't believed by the authorities because she is blind and there is no evidence that a crime has been committed.

When the owner of a convenience store who's a friend of Jack's is constantly the victim of robbery decides to do something. So he gets a gun. When a black man comes into his store and is holding a tire iron, he reacts and kills him. Later he learns that the man had a flat tire was trying to get someone to the hospital and was just looking for a phone. After the D.A. declines to charge him, a lawyer decides to file a wrongful death suit against him.