Night Gallery with John Karlen

[Josette]

I didn't know anything about this before it happened.  I watch Mission Impossible every night on MeTV and as the credits were rolling for Night Gallery before it came on, I thought I saw the name John Karlen.  I hurriedly rewound it and it said "John Karlen as Ed."  I have no idea what the episode was or anything else.

I tried looking up the schedule and found the name, Through a Flame Darkly, but I then tried looking that up and can't find an episode listed with that title.  What's funny is that Tyne Daly is on Mission, interesting, given their Cagney and Lacey together.

By the way, when one looks up someone on imdb, it always lists one thing that they are prominently known for as an identifier.  For Karlen they do have DS, which is interesting given how much more recent as well as successful that C&L was.

[Gothick]

Hi Josette, it was originally an episode of the Gary Collins series (I'm probably the only person here who still remembers Gary Collins, lol), The Sixth Sense.  When Night Gallery went into syndication in the early 1970s, it was syndicated in a half hour format even though it was an hour show.  For some reason the decision was taken to combine 25 minute edits of Sixth Sense episodes even though those were full hour long stories, so the edits wound up being hack jobs.  If you saw the "Night Gallery" syndie version of "Through a Flame Darkly," there's no guarantee that all of John's scenes would even have survived the editing process--which is a risk in general with a lot of current repeats of old Sixties and Seventies shows, given that the current standard is about 43 minutes of programming per hour of air time.

The Sixth Sense was not nearly as successful as Night Gallery, and a lot of Night Gallery fans resent like hell the intrusion of Sixth Sense material into the packets of NG episodes.  I always enjoy the chance to see Sixth Sense--a lot, possibly all, of the episodes were up on Youtube last time I checked.

G.

[Gothick]

Josette, here's the link for the Youtube upload of the episode, taken from a Chiller network broadcast:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s67WfA_unwU

Happy viewing!

G.

[Mysterious Benefactor]

It's really unfortunate that the The Sixth Sense eps were so butchered as part of Night Gallery! I used to really enjoy that show. But the good news for NG fans is that they've been running TSS eps for a while now and that show produced only 25 eps, so there's probably only about a half dozen left to run.

I've been deleting NG from recording on my DVR lately (because there's hardly much reason to watch half a TSS ep - I tried it a couple times and it made little to no sense) so I didn't realize that John Karlen would have been on, and when I read Josette's post I was disappointed I'd missed him. As Gothick said, there was no guarantee that all his scenes would have shown up - but it might have been fun to see what he was like in what was actually shown.    But now, thanks to Gothick, I can check out the ep on YouTube. Thanks for the link, Gothick!    And I'll also try to locate all the other TSS eps on YouTube when I get the chance. There was one on METV the other day with Patty Duke and Robert Foxworth that I was particularly disappointed about not being able to see intact.

[Gothick]

Patty Duke is always such fun... as long as one can ignore that she was, from what she wrote 20 or so years later, miserable while she was doing all of this.

Robert Foxworth... *rrrowrrr*

G.

[Gothick]

Karlen's role is confined to the fourth part of the episode.  You're not missing all that much to just watch this bit as a stand-alone:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f-rcN2ZOcGM

cheers, G.