Is Rod Serling’s Night Gallery as Good as The Twilight Zone? (2024)

It is almost unfair to ask if anything is as good as The Twilight Zone. Rod Serling's award-winning anthology series, with its groundbreaking blend of social commentary and hair-raising horror, continues to inspire generations of viewers, and it would be too much to hope that his follow-up series Night Gallery could be as powerful. However, the three-season show contains some legitimate gems with star-studded casts and top-tier directors, and fans are bound to find a few satisfying thrills.

In the horror-fueled anthology Night Gallery one finds famous names like Steven Spielberg and Joan Crawford, Vincent Price and Orson Welles. There are twisted tales from the likes of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert Bloch and plenty of Rod Serling's brutally ironic screenwriting. The show may not stand up to The Twilight Zone, but it's worth finding out why fans like Stephen King and Guillermo del Toro haven't forgotten it.

The Uneven Series Was a Disappointment for Serling, But It Has Its Fans

Night Gallery showed major promise with a feature-length pilot episode on which Rod Serling served as screenwriter and host — the curator of an art gallery who unveils a series of unsettling paintings. The images encapsulate the themes and content of the stories to come, an eccentric gimmick that made a big impression on Guillermo del Toro, as he described in his introduction to Scott Skelton and Jim Benson’s book Rod Serling’s Night Gallery: An After-Hours Tour.

As a young boy, I would watch Night Gallery very late at night in my grandmother’s house, after everybody went to bed. I have incredibly vivid memories of the series, of the fear that enveloped me when I watched each episode... Rod Serling’s carefully phrased introductions of (Jaroslav Gebr's and) Tom Wright’s horrific and dread-filled paintings...haunt my imagination to this day.

Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities obviously took a cue from this setup, with the creator introducing an eerie artifact at the start of each episode. Like del Toro's curios, the paintings in the Night Gallery intro have starring roles within the stories, like the portrait of blind blackmailer Joan Crawford in "Eyes," which was the directorial debut of Steven Spielberg. That standout segment is in excellent company with "The Cemetery," in which Roddy McDowall is tormented by an ever-changing painting that predicts his doom, and "Escape Route," where Richard Kiley plays a fugitive Nazi who is absorbed into a work of art.

Unfortunately, Rod Serling could not maintain creative control over Night Gallery. Later episodes did not make such clever use of the gimmick, and the second season suffered from the inclusion of goofy comedy sketches that diluted the show's frightful atmosphere. Despite Emmy nominations for the segments "They're Tearing Down Tim Riley's Bar" and the Lovecraft adaptation "Pickman's Model," third season episodes were scaled back to half an hour. With so little time to develop properly horrifying stories, the hamstrung show soon fizzled out, much to Serling's deep disappointment.

The Short-Lived Series Contains Some Timeless Classics

In spite of studio executives who didn't appreciate fine art, Night Gallery still managed to produce a few good scares. Guillermo del Toro and Stephen King both praised the terrifying segment "The Caterpillar," whose innocuous title belies the starring role played by a destructive earwig. In the anti-colonial segment "The Doll," a British officer is menaced by his niece's terrifying favorite toy. Fans are also fond of the Lovecraft-based segments "Cool Air" and "Pickman's Model," the latter of which was also adapted in Cabinet of Curiosities.

Night Gallery may not have been as consistently strong as The Twilight Zone, nor as deep, but it would be a mistake to write it off entirely. Rod Serling's sparkling writing often shines through the damage done by the studio, and the famous names attached to the show speak for themselves. Patient fans who can manage their expectations are guaranteed to find more than a few diamonds in the rough.