‘The Night Gallery’ was a excellent programme that only ran for a relatively short time. Exactly why this was is a little bit of a mystery…

Rod Serling was a very talented man and when he created, ‘The Twilight Zone’ it had been hugely successful all around the world. Five seasons of the show were made, comprising of an impressive 156 episodes and 92 of these were actually written by Serling himself. When ‘The Twilight Zone’ was finally cancelled in 1964 it had being going for a period of 5 years.

In 1970, Rod Serling announced his plans to make a new show in a similar style. It was very welcome news for a lot of television fans. Since ‘The Twilight Zone’ had been axed 6 years before there had been nothing else to take its place; it had left a void in programme schedules that had never been successfully filled.

It seemed, however, that ‘The Night Gallery’ was doomed pretty much from the start. Serling decided to play a far smaller part in the creative control of the show and it began to wander in directions he did not like… There were a lot of unfair remarks made by critics and after a run of only 43 shows the series ground to a halt. It had only lasted for 3 years.

So what exactly was it that went so wrong with the show? Rod Serling certainly had the necessary skill and imagination to carry it all off and the stories were always very good. Perhaps it just did not work out the way that he had planned. After the massive success of ‘The Twilight Zone’ it had been very difficult to follow it up with anything else of the same calibre. Maybe Serling had simply set himself too high a goal to achieve.