NIGHT GALLERY: Season One (Universal, 1970-71) Kino Lorber
Rod Serling attempted to regain his
toe-hold in the realm of popularized TV anthology storytelling with Night
Gallery (1970-73) another franchise devoted to truncated short stories with
a sense of wonder/terror. Alas, the decade had moved on. Where once Serling’s
brainchild, The Twilight Zone (1959-64) appeared as cutting edge ‘must
see’ programming, in every way, Night Gallery, which Serling always
considered an extension of his trend-setting first series, proved a poor
cousin, despite its bent for featuring Hollywood alumni such as Joan Crawford
and Roddy McDowell, alongside up-and-comers like Larry Hagman and Lindsay
Wagner in its ever-revolving top-tier cast. Unlike Twilight Zone, the focus in Night
Gallery is on horror and the macabre. Regrettably, lost in translation are
all those thought-provoking darker fantasy morality plays that made ‘Zone’
such a creepily brooding and ever-lasting perennial. Also, the switch from B&W
to color for Night Gallery did much to diffuse its spookiness – that,
and Universal, the studio footing the bills to produce Night Gallery for
NBC, relying far too heavily on the stock from their mid-sixties’ dearth in
cheap-jack and brightly lit sets, further to drain these short stories of any
atmospheric/photographic chills. While Twilight Zone’s weekly episodes
played like mini-movies of their time whose stature has only ripened with age, Night
Gallery’s storytelling, with intermittent exceptions, just feels very much
like a time capsule of those made-for-TV rush jobs pumped out en masse in the
mid-70’s. It is pointless to compare The Twilight Zone to Night Gallery,
except to say Gallery isn’t in Zone’s class and not
even the familiarity of seeing Serling each week as the eminence grise of the
franchise, introducing these tales of terror as he had done before, can make up
for what is not here.
Rod Serling intended Night
Gallery to be a walking illustration of our nightmares, infrequently to
return to Twilight Zone-territory for sci-fi-anchored segments. And, so
too, can the argument be made, Serling – a brilliant writer and mind of the
latter 20th century, was clairvoyant here in his predictions of
techno music, GPS, closed-circuit TV, and even, perhaps Skype technologies. The
Syracuse-born Serling, today, would likely have found our present-age a
quagmire of raging politics and repeated sad-eyed desecrations of pop culture
rife for his introspection and commentary. Often, the most brilliant among us are dismissed
as lost causes, and, to be sure, there was nothing in Serling’s youth to forecast
the exceptional legacy awaiting him. But Serling’s bitter discontent with
society was evolved during his military service, seeing hellish action in the Pacific
Theater and Manila as a paratrooper. Awarded the Purple Heart, the Bronze Star and
the Philippine Liberation Medal for his efforts, the experience also left
Serling with a weakened knee (frequently causing him to buckle under his own
weight) and an awful lot to say, putting paper to pen as an outlet for his
pent-up aggressions. Under the G.I. bill's educational benefits, he embraced
theater and broadcasting with a restless wit to endear him to his future wife,
Carol Kramer.
After college, Serling
wrote for WLW – a Cincinnati-based radio station, and found early success in Adventure
Express, a drama about a girl and boy travelling by train with their uncle.
There, he also became acquainted with voice actor, Jay Overholts, later, a
reoccurring beloved on Serling’s Twilight Zone. Serling, however, quickly
became disillusioned by the breakneck commitments of radio and its paltry remuneration
for what he considered hard-won genius, squandered on a medium where quantity trumped
quality every time. “Writing is a demanding profession and a selfish one,”
Serling would later explain in an interview, “…and…because it is compulsive
and exacting, I didn't embrace it. I succumbed to it.” However, if the
verve to write was within his grasp, Serling was just as willing to walk away
from its slavish grind – and did, in 1952, moving to Connecticut to author live
dramatic anthology shows instead. In hindsight, The Twilight Zone was
Serling’s fervent attempt to unearth emotional truths about humanity at large,
commentaries repeatedly denied Serling elsewhere as he toiled to author scripts
of quality, addressing political bents and ethical debates.
In hindsight, the overwhelming
popularity of The Twilight Zone remains the Night Gallery’s
greatest hurdle to overcome. Indeed, in 1969, a lot was expected of Serling’s fledgling.
For Season 1, only 6 episodes were produced, NBC rotating the series
with 3 others on a weekly basis to see which had ‘legs’ and staying power with
an audience. The hour-long anthology was meant to serve Serling at his most ambitious
and provocative. Alas, almost from the outset, Serling encountered opposition
from the censors, serving their sponsor-base rather than his creative bent. For
Night Gallery’s pilot, Serling appeared in a dark abyss, unveiling
macabre paintings propped on easels to introduce 3 separate stories to the
audience. However, when Night Gallery returned, these intros were
redesigned so Serling appeared in a seemingly endless and dimly lit ‘gallery’
of portraits, suspended in mid-air. On producer,
Jack Laird’s insistence, Night Gallery began to feature ‘blackout’
sketches during Season 2, an alteration Serling wholeheartedly abhorred.
But, having stepped away from his executive’s position to concentrate on his
writing, Serling had little to say about the chronic tinkering to afflict and morph
Night Gallery away from his original vision. And while much of Serling’s
scripts remained at the core of Night Gallery throughout the first two
seasons, by Season 3, Serling’s screenplays were either being rejected
outright or forced to endure much revisions and doctoring before finally
reaching the screen.
After a particularly sour skirmish
with NBC, Night Gallery was cancelled mid-way through its 3rd
season, leaving Laird with a problematic situation, as not enough episodes existed
to carry Night Gallery over into syndication. Thus, Laird made an even
more obscure ‘creative’ decision to butcher the hour-long 3-episode structure
of the program into half-hour syndicated episodes for the duration of the show’s
run on network television. Problem: some segments ran too long for the
half-hour format, while others were decidedly not long enough. And thus, the
rescripting, editing and ultimate hacking into Serling’s genius began, to leave
Night Gallery an oddly assembled franchise of remnants and new material,
cobbled together to conform to these new time constraints. Rather begrudgingly,
Serling returned to record ‘new’ introductions for Night Gallery, paid
$100,000 for his efforts. But perhaps the most egregious tampering to the
franchise was Laird’s decision to include episodes from the failed hour-long Sixth
Sense (1972) - starring Gary Collins, severely edited down to a half-hour
and packaged in the Night Gallery syndication deal, merely to pad out
the programming. Having burnt, not only his bridges in television, but also his
creative genius down to a cinderblock, Serling retreated to radio and The
Zero Hour, yet another anthology of mystery and suspense in which he merely
contributed his strengths as the narrator without actually writing a single
episode. The series lasted 2 years.
Viewed today, Night Gallery
is not of the caliber one might expect, especially to fans of Serling’s
aforementioned ‘other’ anthology series. Artist Thomas J. Wright’s
paintings used to introduce each story segment are moody artistic tomes, often
depicting an ominous atmosphere otherwise never to actually materialize in the
episode about to unfold on the screen. Steven Spielberg cut his directorial
teeth on the pilot episode’s second segment, ‘Eyes’ - to star one-time
Hollywood diva, Joan Crawford as a born-blind socialite who pays a desperate
man (Tom Bosley) $9000 dollars to extract his eyes so she may see again, if
only for a mere 12 hours. While Crawford is particularly potent as the despicably
selfish maven who blackmails her doctor (Barry Sullivan) into performing this
surgery, the episode – by far the most competently directed and completely
realized of the 3 featured in the pilot, still lacks shock value. It is bookended
by a pair of duds. In the first, ‘The Cemetery’ – directed by
Boris Sagal, a young man (Roddy McDowell), eager to spend his inheritance,
hastens the death of his crippled uncle (George Macready) only to be taunted by
the old man’s butler (Ossie Davis) who stages several terrors to convince the
man he is losing his mind. In the last episode, ‘Escape Route’, an
escaped ex-Nazi (Richard Kiley) is brought to heel for the atrocities committed
during the war. In Season 1’s opener, we meet ‘The Dead Man’
(Michael Blodgett), who, under hypnosis by his physician (Douglas Heyes) is
able to exhibit symptoms of several severe illnesses before accidentally dying
from the experiment. Alas, the young man’s corpse will not rest until his life
cut short is avenged. We also are introduced to the aged ‘The Housekeeper’
(Jeanette Nolan), whose mind is transplanted into the body of the vacuous lady
of the house (Suzy Parker) by her enterprising husband (Larry Hagman), desiring
a more docile creature as his wife. Naturally, he gets far more than he
bargained. In Room with a View, a wealthy invalid (Joseph
Wiseman) takes advantage of his naïve nurse (Diane Keaton) to wreck his
unfaithful gold digger wife’s affair with their chauffeur. In ‘The Little
Black Bag’ a disgraced doctor/come hobo (Burgess Meredith) uses a
medical bag, unearthed from the year 2098, to unlock all the medical secrets
that will restore his reputation within the community.
In ‘Certain Shadows on the
Wall’, a deceased woman (Agnes Moorehead) is reincarnated as a darkened
imprint in the parlor, to taunt her family from the beyond. In ‘Make Me
Laugh’ a struggling comedian makes a particularly wicked pact with a
supposed ‘miracle worker’, while in ‘Clean Kills and Other Trophies’, a
big-game hunter (Raymond Massey) pays the price of some vengeful gods when he
forces his son to shoot a deer. In ‘Pamela's Voice’ a
philandering husband (John Astin) murders his wife (Phyllis Diller), only to
have her stalk him in the afterlife. In ‘Lone Survivor’ a man (John
Colicos) adrift in a lifeboat labeled Titanic gets picked up by the Lusitania.
In ‘The Doll’ a disfigured child’s toy is used to exact revenge upon
an officer (John Williams) in the colonial forces of Queen Victoria. Aside: if
I appear to be making short-shrift of these synopses it is only because there
really isn’t much there to delve into with any degree of analysis. The
characters here are one-dimensional cardboard cutouts, relying almost
exclusively on the presence of the actors to anchor them in a more familiar
understanding of what makes them tick. The one exception arguably is ‘They're
Tearing Down Tim Riley's Bar’ in which a harried has-been salesman
(William Windom) is afforded one final opportunity to relive his more glorious
past at the local watering hole that once meant so much to him, now - about to be
felled by the wrecking ball. Of all the episodes in Season 1, this is
the most poignant and ever-lasting in the mind’s eye, and, indeed, it was
Emmy-nominated at the time for its wonderful writing and Windom’s tenderly felt
central performance. In ‘The Last Laurel’ Jack Cassidy plays a
crippled athlete who plots the kinetic use of his mind to commit a murder.
Finally, Serling takes us to NASA’s mission control for ‘The Nature of
the Enemy’ in which a calculating scientist (Joseph Campanella) is
otherwise reduced to bubbling fear as he observes an unlikely disaster unfolding
on the moon. In ‘The House’, a young woman (Joanna Pettet),
having repeatedly dreamt of an idyllic cottage nestled in the woods, actually
manages to find the place in reality, but with less than charming consequences.
Neither Universal nor NBC were particularly
impressed with Night Gallery, and, frankly, it’s easy to see why. Most
of the aforementioned episodes struggle for far too long to get off the ground.
There is too much preliminary exposition that just drags on and on, and then,
suddenly, a slam-bang finish appearing out of nowhere to cap off, or rather, attempt
to explain away the premise. Serling would have done better to commit each
episode of Night Gallery to a single, better-evolved tale of terror,
instead of cramming two truncated vignettes into a single night’s programming.
For some reason, Serling, who pretty much perfected the half-hour anthology
format in Twilight Zone, herein has a lot of problems conforming to its
time constraints. Despite their star power, these episodes just feel like loosely
strung together trailers for coming attractions never to actually arrive on the
screen. Perhaps realizing the creator was ‘too close’ to his brainchild, producer,
Jack Laird gradually ousted Serling from the series, hoping to retain his
services merely as narrator of the franchise. In the end, neither achieved what
he had set out to do, leaving Night Gallery a fractured mess of lost
opportunities to linger further in its aforementioned syndication hell. In
1975, as episodes of both Night Gallery and Twilight Zone
continued to be main staples on UHF ‘filler’ programming schedules, Rod Serling
suffered a major heart attack. Rushed to hospital, Serling had his second heart
attack while receiving treatment and was fast-tracked for open heart surgery to
save his life. Alas, too little/too late, after 10 hours in surgery, Serling had
his third, fatal attack, dying on the operating table. He was only 50
years-old.
Rod Serling today is revered as one
of the giants in television drama and rightly so. His early works, leading up
to and including The Twilight Zone helped to legitimize the staying
power of television, once dubbed ‘that little black box’ of no account
in everyone’s living room by Hollywood’s moguls and the cultural mandarins of
their time. Moreover, Serling’s efforts became some of the first solidly
produced examples of TV drama at its finest. At his best, Serling’s creative
authorship skewed towards the macabre, yet indulged in sober and introspective
future forecasts about humanity, in a world he would never live to see, but,
since have proven much of his prophesies as science fact rather than sci-fi
fancy run amuck. Were that Serling had lived another several decades, there is
no telling what else his creative genius might have cooked up for the camera
and the radio. While Serling rather abhorred television’s commercialized and
profit-driven format at the expense of art, sandwiching “meaningful drama
when every fifteen minutes proceedings are interrupted by twelve dancing
rabbits with toilet paper”, there is little to refute he came to terms with
achieving some of the best work possible under these stringencies and
shortcomings. Others have repeatedly tried to resurrect his efforts for the
modern age. But none have come even near to celebrating Serling’s daring. Arguably,
they ought not even try. In hindsight, Night Gallery does not represent Rod
Serling at his creative best. While some will undoubtedly unearth the nostalgia
to be gleaned from seeing this series again, it does not hold up under closer
scrutiny and is, regrettably, a footnote in Serling’s otherwise illustrious
career.
Night Gallery:
Season One arrives on Blu-ray via Kino Lorber in dated transfers that are thoroughly
in keeping with Universal Home Video’s short-sightedness in remastering any of
their back catalog, either film or TV-based for future generations to study in
optimal quality. I really am at the end of my rope with Universal. Their
cherry-picking of classics to properly remaster has been distilled into a
trickle of goodies, while primarily using third-party distributors like Kino as
a mere dumping ground for product they would rather license out in whatever
condition it presently exists, than cherish as part of their own illustrious
studio heritage. Night Gallery was shot of film stock. So, there is no
reason for the occasionally egregious edge effects that plague virtually all of
the episodes in this release. The credit sequence for the pilot is a disaster,
with strobing and edge effects marring its moodiness. While color saturation
throughout is relatively excellent, certain shots appear to have been culled
from faded dupes or other sources. We have the careworn look of episodes not
given any further care or consideration to eradicate age-related artifacts. So,
lots of chips, nicks, scratches, etc. Contrast is pretty solid. But
occasionally, we get fading and ‘breathing’ around the edges, and some minor
image instability. The 2.0 mono audio is adequate, predictably bright, though
without much ambience to enliven the sound field. Prepare for audio
commentaries here from Gary Gerani, Jim Benson, Scott Skelton, Tim Lucas,
Amanda Reyes, Constantine Nasr, Taylor L. White, Kim Newman, Stephen Jones, and,
Craig Beam. While welcomed additions, like the episodes themselves, most just
feel like ‘rush jobs’ cramming in as much background info as they can before
the next vignette unfolds. The most fascinating extra here is ‘The
Syndication Conundrum’ – a 58-min. featurette in which Craig Beam
documents how Laird’s troubling aspiration to recut Night Gallery to conform
to the half-hour format resulted in editorial decisions that did not always
serve the storytelling, using side-by-side comparisons of a full episode to
illustrate the point. Bottom line: Night Gallery: Season One is a postscript
in Rod Serling’s career. While some of what’s here will likely bring back fond
memories for those who grew up watching the series in syndication, nothing here
elevates its reputation to the A-list status of Serling’s efforts exhibited elsewhere.
Regrets.
FILM RATING (out
of 5 – 5 being the best)
2.5
VIDEO/AUDIO
3.5
EXTRAS
5
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