Jerry Golod, who helped bring George A. Romero's Creepshow to television in the form of Tales From the Darkside and also produced Adderly, Return to Green Acres and a rebooted Land of the Lost, has died. He was 87.

Golod died Wednesday at his home in Rancho Mirage after a brief battle with cancer, his daughter, Dori Golod Howell, told The Hollywood Reporter.

In a career that spanned more than four decades, Golod served as an executive at CBS and NBC before launching JayGee Productions in the early 1980s. He had a knack for identifying an unconventional idea and finding a way to bring it to the small screen.

After the Stephen King-scripted horror comedy anthology Creepshow (1982) became a hit at the box office, Golod approached director Romero and producer Richard P. Rubinstein with the idea of bringing the film's sensibility to television.

Rights issues prevented them from simply making a version of Creepshow, but their idea evolved into Tales From the Darkside. Romero co-wrote the pilot,  Trick or Treat,  directed by Bob Balaban, and the show played in first-run syndication for four seasons (1983-89), becoming a cult favorite and attracting stories and scripts associated with the likes of King, Harlan Ellison, Clive Barker, Robert Bloch and Michael McDowell.

While reading Elliott Baker's 1971 book, Pocock and Pitt, Golod became intrigued by a secondary character named Adderly, an intelligence operative whose injured hand had altered the course of his career.

From that came the adventure series Adderly, starring Winston Rekert. Produced in Toronto in association with Orion Television, it was an early example of creating original dramatic programming in Canada at substantially lower costs when compared with Hollywood productions. It lasted two seasons (1986-88) and aired on CBS in late night and in a summer primetime run.

Born in the Bronx on Dec. 26, 1938, Jerome Golod graduated from DeWitt Clinton High School and City College of New York. He began his career at the advertising agency Dancer Fitzgerald Sample and by the early 1970s was vice president and associate director of progr

#hollywoodreporter  #podcastdailynews