Jerry Golod, Tales From the Darkside Producer, Dies Aged 87
Jerry Golod, the producer who brought Tales From the Darkside to television, has died aged 87.
He died at his home in Rancho Mirage after a brief battle with cancer. His daughter, Dori Golod Howell, confirmed the death to The Hollywood Reporter.
Golod was born Jerome Golod in the Bronx on 26 Dec. 1938. He graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School and City College of New York before building a career in network television.
He joined CBS in 1975 as vice president of children's programs. He moved to NBC Entertainment in 1979 as vice president and national program director, a post he held through 1980. In the early 1980s he left the networks to launch his own company, JayGee Productions.
His best-known credit grew from a simple pitch. Golod approached filmmaker George A. Romero and producer Richard P. Rubinstein with the idea of bringing the sensibility of their horror film Creepshow to television. That conversation evolved into Tales From the Darkside, an anthology organised around standalone horror stories.
The series aired in first-run syndication, meaning new episodes were sold directly to local stations rather than through a national network. It ran for four seasons from 1983 to 1989. The pilot, “Trick or Treat,” was co-written by Romero and directed by Bob Balaban.
Golod’s other credits spanned adventure series and telefilms, meaning films made for television. He produced Adderly, starring Winston Rekert, which lasted two seasons from 1986 to 1988. He executive-produced the 1985 telefilm Brass, starring Carroll O’Connor, Lois Nettleton and Vincent Gardenia, and the 1990 telefilm Return to Green Acres, which reunited Eddie Albert and Eva Gabor. He also produced a rebooted Land of the Lost.
For fans, this means his name sits behind a show that kept horror on weekly television outside the networks. Tales From the Darkside did not need a prime-time slot to find viewers. It reached them station by station.
The series later drew interest for a revival. A half-hour Tales From the Darkside reboot was in development at The CW, with Golod on board to executive-produce, according to earlier reports from The Hollywood Reporter. Mitchell Galin and Heather Kadin, then president of K/O Paper Products, were also attached to that version.
