Is anybody else as excited as I am at the announcement that Knight Rider might be returning to the airwaves as a series?

Probably not.

But last week, NBC aired a made-for-TV Knight Rider movie as a test to see if the popularity was still there for the talking car. Apparently, it is. The network aired it again less than a week later and attracted an impressive number of viewers. I was one of the millions. Were you?

David Hasselhoff is still cool and hip, but he’s getting a little too old to do the moves that Michael Knight needs to do. But the driver isn’t the only new element of the 2008 Knight Rider.   There’s also a new car named KITT, a Shelby Mustang selected from a variety of other Ford vehicles to be the co-star of the new movie. Hopefully, NBC will keep the model for the TV series, because it made a huge splash on the screen.

Here are some statistics to give you an idea of how popular Knight Rider was during its first airing last week:

• It got a 5.0 rating and a 12 share in adults from the ages of 18-49. That means that of all the people in that demographic watching TV at the time, 12 percent of them were watching Knight Rider.
• It got the highest rating for this demographic of all other TV movies in nearly three years.
• The movie garnered the network’s biggest overall viewership for this time slot (except for sports) since the 2006 Emmy Awards.
• More than 12 million viewers tuned in to see the return.

Look for an official announcement in April that NBC will add the TV series to its fall lineup. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.