With season 3 of Night Gallery, the show moved to half an hour and often only had one story per episode, which allows some of the better tales to breathe. Or so you’d think, until you realize they had only 24 minutes for each story.

Sadly, this is the last season of the show, but we’ll try not to be too broken up about it. But when you read about how this show was treated going into season 3, that gets a bit difficult.

According to Rod Serling’s Night Gallery: An After-Hours Tour by Scott Skelton and Jim Benson, NBC wanted some changes with the show, as it kept coming in second place to CBS’s Mannix. Beyond the half an hour format, they also made the show more action and suspense instead of outright horror. And they moved it from Wednesday nights to Sundays, a night usually reserved for family viewing.

Serling was not pleased.

“I’m fucking furious. These people are taking what could have been a good series and are so commercializing it,” he told actress Tisha Sterling.

Instead of a battle between Laird and Serling, now he was facing Universal, who wanted to keep NBC happy so the show could be picked up for syndication and make them money. And NBC wanted “an action-packed horrorfest.”

After one of his scripts, “A View of Whatever” was rejected, Serling even wrote a resignation letter in May of 1972 and asked for his name to be taken off the show. However, he had a contract with Universal and he was stuck.

Now that there was one story per week, the creative budgeting that allowed for multiple stories to be shot all in the same larger budget went away. And Jeannot Szwarc said that the scripts weren’t the same quality because once the network stopped caring, everyone else seemed to. “The ratings were good enough, the demographics were sensational, but NBC never understood that show,” he said. “All those guys are heavily into control and there was something a little bit chaotic and anarchistic about Night Gallery that NBC didn’t like.”

CBS responded to the move by sending Mannix to Sundays and ABC had their Sunday Night Movie, which always got big numbers.

The funeral for Night Gallery started before the season did.

Directed by Jeannot Szwarc and written by Halsted Welles from a story by Clark Ashton Smith, “The Return of the Sorcerer” finds Noel Evans (Bill Bixby) answering a want ad for an interpreter. He’s to work for John Carnby (Vincent Price), a sorcerer who is studying the Latin Necronomicon but has found a new Arabic book of spells. The last two men he hired have quit and he threatens Noel’s life to keep him on task.

Meanwhile, Carnby’s assistant Fern (Tisha Sterling, The Coming) has dinner with Noel. joined by her Carnaby’s goat father. There, he learns that the warlock has already killed and dismembered his twin. But more importantly, Fern wants him. She wants him bad.

The translation of the Arabic book frightens Carnaby more than Noel, as it discusses that some magic users can keep their power. Even after death. Even after dismemberment. He cries of his brother, “I hated him because his magic was stronger. But Fern — she caused it! She wanted to be stronger than both of us.”

What follows is a Black Mass — on a Sunday night on NBC no less — where the two brothers are reunited and, one assumes, Fern finally has the power she craves. Now, spider to the fly, she wants to lead Noel to her bed.

What a wild story to start this season off with. The sets were designed by Joseph Alves, who worked with Szwarc on Jaws 2 and ended up directing Jaws 3, as well as building the model New York City for Escape from New York and many other production design miracles. Szwarc showed him the art of William Blake and Aleister Crowley, which led Alves to Dennis Moore and Babetta Lanzilli, the witch owner of the Sorcerer’s Shop in Hollywood.

The Black Mass in the show really does have the names off Astototh, Asmodeus, Baal, Belial and more. It was all too much for Serling, who said “I believed those words we were saying were really powerful and meaningful, and one shouldn’t conjure up that kind of energy. It frightened me. I felt I was giving myself over to some dark. horrible force.”

Again, in 1972, this could air on prime time. At the start of the next decade, the Satanic Panic would be in full bloom.

Despite how dour season 3 will get, this is a great start filled with talent. Let’s see how things progress.