A mob boss whacks his partner then hires a famous puppeteer to do a private show using the corpse as a marionette. Hmmmm...When you put it that way it sounds a lot more interesting than watching it was.
Season 4, Episode 5 "No Strings" could also be called "No Stars" and is a perfect exemplar of how this weak show deteriorated in its final season. It features actors known for playing roles like Reporter #1 or Card player #2 or Thug #1 or Waiter or Guard #1. These are people that bigger productions cast in walk-ons to blend in and be living set-pieces.
Tales From the Darkside would quite often provide viewers with a jarring horror story that fired the senses, sent pulses racing and even provoked cackles of laughter at the profundity of some biting irony revealed in it's endings. More often it provided low-brow comedy. In such instances it delivered neither laughs nor chills and was vastly inferior to its evil twin series Tales From the Crypt - which was similar in tone but endowed with greater panache and wit.
Several episodes could have opened with the narrator's voice saying "And guest-starring on tonight's episode is somebody else ya never heard of". Those were episodes which didn't feature d-list celebs (the BIG stars in this series) from bad sitcoms. But mainly it was the ironic tone, the bush-league production value and the incoherence of various plot-lines that sank the worst of the episodes in the series and diminished the appeal of the better ones.
Three or four actors in a single location often on a set where most of the action took place in a single room suggests dinner theater - not television. But other horror anthology series were able to stage utterly brilliant teleplays with little more. The original Twilight Zone which did that consistently remains the standard for the genre and but a few episodes of Tales From the Darkside were ever its equal in quality.