A reboot of Rod Serling's Night Gallery is in development

We can only hope the new writers follow "Pickman's Model."

Deadline has announced that SyFy is moving forward with plans to reboot Night Gallery, the supernatural anthology series that carried on Rod Serling's legacy after The Twilight Zone concluded.

While Night Gallery is often overlooked, it's a key piece of TV history, serving as Steven Spielberg's TV directorial debut (and Leonard Nimoy, too!) and a winner of a special Edgar Allan Poe award for the Serling-penned pilot in 1970. So far all we know about that reboot is that it's been picked up for development, Jeff Davis (Teen Wolf) and David Janollari (Midnight, Texas) will helm it, and the plan is to update the anthology to bring it into modern times. Other than that, we're all in the dark on what to expect... for now.

In episodes of The Twilight Zone, Rod Serling would often wander into the scene, adding a surreal aspect to the show with his mere presence, as if he could travel anywhere in The Twilight Zone that he pleased. It was an added pleasure for fans to see Serling himself walk the scenes, many of which came straight from his head, as he wrote dozens of those stories himself, from the first episode ever "Where Is Everybody?" to the penultimate series episode "The Fear." If you thought The Twilight Zone was eerie, the bulk of that was Rod Serling himself.

But for the second most memorable series that Serling hosted, Night Gallery, the TV icon contributed far less writing and by agreement, had a lot less to do with how the tone of the show was shaped. When these episodes started, Serling would emerge from the dark (or the night, if you will) and show us an ominous piece of art to introduce these chilling fantasies, some of which came from the mind of the horror master H.P. Lovecraft (fans' minds will fly to the memorable segment "Pickman's Model").

As fans prepare for the reboot of The Twilight Zone due out next year, it's likely more nerves will be steeled to see how the new version of Serling's masterpiece comes out, but for those who also maintain a dark place in their heart for Night Gallery, the idea of updating the series could also come with its own horrors. Good thing you can always watch the originals on MeTV!

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8 Comments

Wiseguy 66 months ago
You can NOT watch the originals on MeTV. Many of the longer episodes were drastically edited down to fit the half-hour rerun length, and worse, many of the shorter episodes were lengthened by adding nonsense footage from other Universal sources. Adding the Sixth Sense episodes only made it worse.
JeffBaker 66 months ago
I watched the original first-run! It made me become a writer of horror stories years later! I'm all for a reboot! (Hmmm...how about Jim Byrnes as the narrator?)
ECO473 69 months ago
I admit I'm not looking forward to this. I liked the original series, and despite the animosity between Rod Serling and producer Jack Laird, this was a pretty good show.
wanderer2575 70 months ago
Will be interesting to see if this keeps Serling's original vision of social commentary, poetic justice, and giving the down-and-out guy a second chance (similar to his vision for Twilight Zone). As noted, he had no control over the direction of Night Gallery, and he quickly grew to despise it. He stayed as host only because he was contractually obligated.

Two of the three stories in the original pilot movie ("The Escape Clause" and "Eyes") were adapted from Serling's book "The Season to Be Wary."
Tresix 71 months ago
This is one reboot that I hope keeps the original theme song.
RedSamRackham 71 months ago
I hope that a Night Gallery reboot will not drag in any 6th Sense reboot. ♣
BuckRogers RedSamRackham 70 months ago
I called those non-Night Gallery “Sixth Sense” episodes “The Gary Collins Show” as he seemed to be in the majority of them. I grew to loathe those episodes as well as Collins.
Wiseguy BuckRogers 66 months ago
Uh, yeah, since Gary Collins was the star of The Sixth Sense. Apparently, he did not appear in one episode and when Universal cut the hour episodes down to 30 minutes, they edited him out of another (with Joan Crawford).
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