Night Gallery

For those old enough to remember, Night Gallery was creator-host Rod Serling's follow-up to The Twilight Zone. Set in a shadowy museum of the outré, Serling unveiled a dark and disturbing collection of canvases as preface to a highly diverse anthology of tales in the fantasy, horror, and science fiction vein.


Bolstering Serling's thoughtful original dramas were adaptations of classic genre material—short stories by such dark-fantasy luminaries as H. P. Lovecraft, Fritz Leiber, A. E. van Vogt, Algernon Blackwood, Conrad Aiken, Richard Matheson, August Derleth, and Christianna Brand. Variety of material brought with it a variety of tone, from the deadly serious to the tongue-in-cheek, stretching the television anthology concept to its very limits. But conflicts over the series' direction arose between Serling and producer Jack Laird. The disgruntled host found himself excluded from the producer's circle. Despite the tensions, Serling continued his dramatic contributions and ultimately scripted over a third of the segments.

Rod Serling's Night Gallery (the series' full title) was broadcast on NBC-TV on Wednesday evenings at 10:00 p.m. Gallery had only six hour-long episodes in its first season (1970–71), rotating with three other series (The Psychiatrist, McCloud, and San Francisco International Airport) as part of Four in One, NBC's experimental programming wheel. In its second year (1971–72), Gallery was promoted to a full-season offering with 22 hour-long episodes, which included many of its best and most memorable stories.

Sadly, the show seems to have been cursed: For the third season (1972–73), short-sighted executives at the network cut Gallery's third-season time slot to a half-hour and moved the show to Sunday evenings—despite good ratings and a growing cult following on college campuses. It lasted only 15 episodes before it was canceled. In an ironic twist, Night Gallery won the best ratings of its broadcast run as its final season played out, regularly beating its competition.

The Gallery curse continued: To make a viable syndication package, Universal Studios (the company that produced the series for NBC) cut the first 28 hour-long episodes down to 30 minutes. Since the show had numerous stories of various lengths per hour, many of the shorter segments had to be expanded in the re-editing with superfluous, meaningless footage, serving only to confound the narrative. Conversely, many segments longer than the half-hour time slot were severely trimmed of key scenes, making them even more perplexing than their shorter counterparts. Some segments were missing half their original length in syndication.


To confuse the issue further, 25 episodes of an entirely different series, the ESP snooze-fest The Sixth Sense, were grafted onto the syndication package with the addition of new Gallery-type introductions by a well-paid Serling.

Never quite achieving the classic status it so desperately strives for, Night Gallery is a tired take on horror, with only a few glimmers of gold within its Gothic game plan. The main issue with the series is its incredibly inconsistent writing. As stated before, though Serling's name appears on a great many of the manuscripts here, you can tell when producer Laird has laid his hokey hands on something. Suddenly the poetic insights so crucial to Rod's literary skill become hackneyed and obvious.  Another palpable problem is its over-reliance on delivering a trick ending, O. Henry style, with each and every episode. When one looks back at the truly successful stories in Season One ("Tim Riley's Bar," "The Little Black Bag," "The Doll"), they don't really contain a certified twist, that Sixth Sense variety revelation that reconfigures everything we've seen before. But scattered throughout the rest of the stories are far too many segments seemingly crafted from the perplexing ploy backwards. It's clear that the writers thought that all the audience really wanted was a good final jaw-dropper, a piece of legitimate literary legerdemain, forget how the plot even got them there. The result is a feeling of complete incongruous; the strident stench of product making two incomplete and divergent passes through the formulaic typewriter.

But when compared to the vast majority of horror/sci-fi follies that shuttled across TV screens in the '60s and '70s, Night Gallery has a certain undeniable pedigree that keeps it afloat. The "Pilot" material aside, many of the installments here lack the impact of really memorable entertainment and it's hard to envision anyone thinking that the half-baked "boo's" tossed in as being any better or more memorable than the "it was all a dream" dynamic from the Bobby Ewing/Dallas disaster. Someone approaching Night Gallery as a curiosity or as a completist will perhaps fall in love with the little things—the early '70s style, the calm and deliberate pace, the attention to detail—that help the show survive. And there are several stories that indeed sweep you away on waves of imagination and/or suspense (even if they fail to pay off when the credits roll).

"The Caterpillar," directed by Jeannot Szwarc aired in March of 1972 and is based on the famous short story by Oscar Cook (1888-1952), a former civil servant who actually served in Borneo from 1911-1919. Cook's story is set in Borneo, but the old wives tale about earwigs burrowing inside human ears has been chronicled as early in history as 1000 AD. The story follows the arrival in Borneo of one extremely prickly British civil servant, Stephen Macy (Laurence Harvey). This cruel, nasty, arrogant man moves into the home of sixty-sixty year-old Mr. Warwick (Tom Helmore) and his gorgeous young wife ("an absolute knock-out"), Rhona (Joanna Pettet). As you might suspect, Macy soon makes trouble. He is disturbed by the incessant rain in the tropical location, and -- battling cabin-fever -- turns his obsessive eyes towards Rhona. Macy's attentions are unwanted, but that hardly stops him from making lewd remarks and undressing the married woman with his eyes. He is convinced that Rhona should be with him rather than the kindly old man, and meets with a local rogue, Tommy Robinson (Don Knight), in a bar. Robinson suggests not an assassination, but rather an "act of destiny." For a price, Tommy will send one of his native friends to deposit an earwig on Mr. Warwick's pillow.  However, Robinson's thug makes a fatal mistake that very night...and puts the earwig on Macy's pillow instead of Mr. Warwick's. I won't spoil the ending here, but suffice it to say that "The Caterpillar" boasts one of the nastiest and most macabre twists ever featured on Night Gallery (and likely network television, for that matter.) There's no real gore in "The Caterpillar," and the titular insect is never glimpsed, even for a second. Instead, we simply see what the bloody thing does, a torture painted on Harvey's expressive, gaunt face. And we listen as a physician (John Williams), Robinson, and a survivor describe the pain experienced...and the pain yet to come. Despite a lack of horrific visuals, the episode proves utterly harrowing.

In 1934, writer Conrad Aiken penned a short story of a most unusual variety: one concerning a seemingly normal pre-adolescent boy named Paul who succumbs to a voice "inside" his head; the voice of immaculate, glittering, and unending...snow. The boy uses his mental "snow" as a barrier "between himself and the world."
"Silent Snow, Secret Snow" was dramatized on radio in the 1950s and also very memorably on Rod Serling's Night Gallery in 1971 (now available on DVD). It's one of my all-time favorite installments of Night Gallery, actually. It's very, very disturbing, but also discomfortingly beautiful. Whether you view this Night Gallery tale and young Paul's plight as a metaphor for autism or for schizophrenia, it's a terrifying journey. Orson Welles narrates this distinctive segment of Night Gallery, and his mellifluous voice captures some strange, artistic quality about this story. As scary as Paul's turn "inward" remains, the narration reads like fine, lyrical poetry; and the visuals are dynamic, glorious and well-chosen. I don't want to say something corny or cheap about an elegant, scary show like this, but "Silent Snow, Secret Snow" is truly and inescapably...chilling. The pristine, cold beauty of this most singular Night Gallery episode will make your blood run cold. 

In this deeply-moving work of "paint, pigment and desperation,""They're Tearing Down Tim Riley's Bar",  a man named Randolph Lane (played by William Windom) copes with the inevitable march of time. Although he was a heroic paratrooper in World War II (as was Serling himself...) Lane has spent the 25 years since his service selling plastics and not feeling particularly special. His company doesn't value him, he has to fight every young upstart on the way up, ("with assistants like that, who needs assassins," he quips), and also there's the guilt. The terrible, haunting guilt. His beloved wife Katie died years ago of pneumonia. He wasn't there to help her, to take her to the hospital. Nope, he was "working," making a name for himself. And now, 25 years to the day that he began employment with Pritkin's Plastic Products, he gets fired without so much as a gold watch for compensation. Worse, a demolition company is getting ready to destroy his favorite drinking spot, Tim Riley's Bar. This is the very place where Randy's homecoming from Europe was celebrated in 1945. The very place where his Dad sang "It's a Long Way to Tipperary" to him. Where Katie and he used to go together and gaze into each other's eyes. Where Lane experienced what he now considers "the best years of his life."  Randy just can't let go of Tim Riley's bar. It's part of his very existence, and the past beckons to him there in a way that the empty present simply never can. He peers in at the bar's interior through dusty window panes and sees his dead father, his dead wife...his past inside. He sees 1945 laid out before him. Ghosts. But that wrecking ball is still coming, threatening to destroy the very past that he loves, all in the name of "progress." Soon a 20-floor banking establishment (replete with underground parking garage) will occupy the space where his memories live... "They're Tearing Down Tim Riley's Bar" is not your typical Night Gallery episode. It isn't overtly horrific. There aren't big "scares" in it anywhere. There's almost no touch at all of the supernatural. The only horror is, indeed, the melancholy passage of time and the inevitable sense of aging too quickly. It is about, as Serling states so eloquently in his opening narration, "the quiet desperation of men over 40 who keep hearing heavy footsteps behind them and are torn between a fear and compulsion to look over their shoulders." 

"The Doll" This short film is among the most profoundly frightening ever made. In spite of its brevity and small budget, it is infinitely better than the many junk-horror programmers that have exploited the theme in subsequent decades. Its story and screenplay are soundly constructed, sets and costumes meet the modest standard of 1970s American commercial television, color and lighting inject considerable atmosphere and the score's frissons of autoharp are well timed. All these, however, are only adequate support for the film's incredible potency -- which, of course, emanates from the . . . the DOLL, itself. For the doll is alive, dear reader . . . and she has teeth.  One technical note: the original airing of The Doll opened with a brief but singularly horrifying scene, largely without dialogue, showing the chaos of battle in Victorian India. This slight bit of footage ends with a slow pan to . . . the DOLL. Apparently the hateful object had been discarded in the dirt by some unfortunate child amid the tumult of evacuation. Then, just as the camera takes notice of the thing -- it SITS UP. This scene was edited out of later broadcasts.

This was compiled from John Kenneth Muir, DVD Verdict, IMDB, and Nightgallery.net