The two best episodes of "Kolchak: The Night Stalker" are this one, and "The Ripper", about THE Jack the Ripper.
Some of the other episodes in the series weren't very good, like the one where aliens are sucking the bone marrow out of animals.
If you rent the first DVD in the series, it has "The Ripper " and "The Vampire" on it. You can rent the other DVD's, but none of them will be as good as the first.
I'm not sure why the episodes went down hill as the show went on, but they definitely did.
Kolchak was a real smart aleck, and it's easy to see why people in positions of authority would despise him. He was arrogant and abrasive, a real know-it-all. He would have been fired after every episode, if somebody in real life did the kind of things he did.
But he had an uncanny knack for cutting through the bull crap and figuring out what was REALLY going on. And that's the main reason why the police and other authorities didn't like him---he would poke holes in their phony explanations, and rub their nose in it. He intensely enjoyed showing them up.
But they always had it coming to them. The cops were always trying to cover their behinds, or protect some secret. But Kolchak tried to tell the truth, for the greater good of society.