Night Gallery

Follow up series to the Twilight Zone

Night Gallery was the follow-up series to The Twilight Zone and aired on NBC from 1970 to 1973.

Rod Serling functioned both as the on-air host of Night Gallery and as a major contributor of scripts, although he did not have the same control of content and tone as he did on Twilight Zone. At the beginning of each episode Serling appeared in an art gallery setting and introduced the macabre tales that made up each episode by unveiling paintings depicting the stories. The paintings were by artist Tom Wright.

Night Gallery regularly presented adaptations of classic fantasy tales by authors such as H. P. Lovecraft as well as original works, many by Serling himself.

The series pilot was aired as a TV movie on November 8, 1969, and featured the debut as director of Steven Spielberg and one of the last acting performances by Joan Crawford. Unlike the series, where the paintings merely accompanied an introduction to the upcoming story, the paintings themselves actually appeared in the three segments.

Night Gallery was nominated for an Emmy Award for its first-season episode "They're Tearing Down Tim Riley's Bar" as the Outstanding Single Program on U.S. television in 1971. In 1972, the series received another nomination (Outstanding Achievement in Makeup) for the second season episode "Pickman's Model." Unfortunately there was no happy ending, by the final season, Serling, stung by unfair criticism and ignored by the show's executives, all but disowned the series.