Rod Serling created and hosted The Twilight Zone. When the CBS program went off the air in 1965, the writers and directors went to a new CBS series to be called Wild Wild West and Rod Serling went to other projects, including narration for Jacques Cousteau tv broadcasts. When Wild Wild West left the air in 1970, Rod Serling was ready to try something new. Night Gallery would be similar to The Twilight Zone, with episodes tending more toward horror and the macabre. But there were still episodes with elements of mystery-suspense, fantasy and science fiction (in one episode, Mission Control hears astronauts scream after feverishly working on something. The camera pulls back to see what it was: a giant mousetrap).
The episodes were originally 1 hour long, consisting of 2 or 3 main stories (each represented by a wierd painting or sculpture in the night gallery), and various shorts. Serling hated the humorous shorts, which were added at NBC's insistence to compete with the higher-rated tv series "Love American Style" (which still shows occasionally over on TV Land channel), and were nonetheless popular with fans. The Sci-Fi channel has the half-hour version of reruns, which each consist of a main story and a short, as well as episodes of "The Psychiatrist" retitled with Night Gallery credits. For a collection of paintings used in the Night Gallery (and comments on the Psychiatrist episodes), check out: www.nightgallery.net, an unofficial website. Night Gallery originally aired 12-16-70 to 8-12-73. In addition to people from the original Twilight Zone series, Rod Serling also used a former actor-turned-director from the recently cancelled Star Trek tv series, Leonard Nimoy (Spock), and a new kid who was directing Columbo episodes named Steven Spielberg. Nimoy says of his directing debut there, "It was theatrical, adventurous & unpredictable." Starting on 2-11-73, Jack Webb (creator of Dragnet and Project UFO tv series) also tried a series on NBC to complement Night Gallery called "Escape," a suspense anthology that originated on radio, but it only lasted 4 episodes.For a complete description of the 1969 pilot movie, click here
The scripts for some Twilight Zone and Night Gallery episodes that were never done have been filmed recently. One was "A Town Has Turned To Dust," (1998, see video below) based on a true story from the 1950s or 60s, in which a black man was lynched for whistling at a white woman. Serling changed it to a story set in the old West, but the network still refused to let him film it back then.
He also wrote the first draft of the movie script for Planet of the Apes (so that's why the camera pulls back right at the end to show what Charlton Heston sees on the beach...)
Some of the movies & tv series of Rod Serling are available, but none of the Night Gallery episodes so far: