Free to follow every thread. No paywall, no dead ends.
Rerun: the story on HearLore | HearLore
Common questions
Who invented the modern rerun and when did it happen?
Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz invented the modern rerun while Ball was pregnant with their second child in 1951. Before this moment, television networks simply went on summer hiatus, replacing their popular shows with lower-priority filler programs.
What was the first proof of concept for the success of reruns?
Rod Serling's 1955 teleplay Patterns provided the final proof of concept, drawing more viewers in its second run than it had during its initial broadcast. This phenomenon occurred because audiences who had missed the first airing a month prior tuned in to catch the reairing, creating a word-of-mouth effect that networks had never anticipated.
How many episodes are required for a weekly series to be rerun in daily syndication?
Generally, about 100 episodes, representing four to five seasons' worth, are required for a weekly series to be rerun in daily syndication at least four times a week. Very popular series running more than four seasons may start daily reruns of the first seasons while production and airings continue of the current season's episodes.
When did contracts for new shows extend residual payments for performers regardless of the number of reruns?
This situation remained unchanged until the mid-1970s when contracts for new shows extended residual payments for performers regardless of the number of reruns. Most performers signed contracts that limited residual payments to about six repeats, after which they received nothing while production companies kept 100% of any income.
Which classic television channels carry reruns of programming dating back to the black-and-white television era?
Rerun
Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz invented the modern rerun while Ball was pregnant with their second child in 1951. Before this moment, television networks simply went on summer hiatus, replacing their popular shows with lower-priority filler programs. The strategy of rebroadcasting I Love Lucy during the summer months proved so successful that it fundamentally changed how television schedules were managed. Rod Serling's 1955 teleplay Patterns provided the final proof of concept, drawing more viewers in its second run than it had during its initial broadcast. This phenomenon occurred because audiences who had missed the first airing a month prior tuned in to catch the reairing, creating a word-of-mouth effect that networks had never anticipated. The success of these early rebroadcasts established the economic model that would eventually support the entire television industry.
The Kinescope and The Lost Decades
Television shows from the late 1940s and early 1950s were performed live and often never recorded, meaning they vanished into history without a trace. Networks began making kinescope recordings of live broadcasts from the East Coast to allow for later transmission on the West Coast, creating the first physical copies of television history. These kinescopes, along with later videotape technology, paved the way for extensive syndication of television series. However, the lack of awareness regarding the potential for revenue led to a tragic loss of cultural heritage. Most performers signed contracts that limited residual payments to about six repeats, after which they received nothing while production companies kept 100% of any income. Many shows did not even have their copyrights renewed, and others were systematically destroyed, such was the lack of awareness of the potential for revenue from them. This situation remained unchanged until the mid-1970s when contracts for new shows extended residual payments for performers regardless of the number of reruns.
The Syndication Economy
A television program goes into syndication when many episodes are sold as a package to cable channels or local television station owners. Often, programs are not particularly profitable until they are sold for syndication, creating a secondary market that sustains shows long after their original run ends. Generally, about 100 episodes, representing four to five seasons' worth, are required for a weekly series to be rerun in daily syndication at least four times a week. Very popular series running more than four seasons may start daily reruns of the first seasons while production and airings continue of the current season's episodes. Until around the early 1980s, shows that aired in syndication while still in production had the reruns aired under an alternate name to differentiate the reruns from the first-run episodes. Barter syndication emerged as a model where television stations were offered the program for free in exchange for a requirement to air additional advertisements without compensation, a practice that remains common in radio and is the foundation of free ad-supported streaming television.
Channels that devote at least some of their program schedule to postsyndication reruns include Nick at Nite, TV Land, TBS, USA Network, WGN America, Logo TV, Pop, Discovery Family, Game Show Network, Boomerang, Nicktoons, INSP, fetv, RFD-TV, and the Hallmark Channel. Equity Media Holdings had been using low-power television stations to carry its own Retro Television Network in various markets, but those stations were sold to religious broadcaster Daystar Television Network after Equity went bankrupt.
How did reruns transform the sitcom The Office from a failure into a classic?
The series started to gain traction once the BBC decided to repeat it in a different timeslot, and The Office went on to be an award-winning and critically acclaimed show which has regularly featured in lists of the Best Sitcoms ever. In 2019, the series was ranked 6th on The Guardian's list of the 100 best TV shows of the 21st century.
The growing availability of cable and satellite television channels, combined with over-the-air digital subchannels, led to the creation of specialty channels built solely to run former network programming. Branded as classic television, these channels often carry reruns of programming dating back to the black-and-white television era and are promoted as nostalgia. Depending on the programs chosen for a classic network, running the format can be very inexpensive, due to many shows beginning to fall into the public domain. Channels that devote at least some of their program schedule to postsyndication reruns include Nick at Nite, TV Land, TBS, USA Network, WGN America, Logo TV, Pop, Discovery Family, Game Show Network, Boomerang, Nicktoons, INSP, fetv, RFD-TV, and the Hallmark Channel. Equity Media Holdings had been using low-power television stations to carry its own Retro Television Network in various markets, but those stations were sold to religious broadcaster Daystar Television Network after Equity went bankrupt. Since the early 2010s, the growth of digital subchannel networks has allowed for increasing specialization of these classic networks, creating channels solely for comedies, game shows, ethnic-oriented programs, lifestyle and reality programming, westerns, music programming, sports programming, sci-fi and action programming, true crime and court programming, news programming, and feature films.
The DVD Revolution and Retail
With the rise of the DVD video format, box sets featuring season or series runs of television series have become an increasingly important retail item. Some view this development as a rising new idea in the industry of reruns as an increasingly major revenue source in themselves instead of the standard business model as a draw for audiences for advertising. While there were videotape releases of television series before DVD, the format's limited content capacity, large size, and reliance on mechanical winding made it impractical as a widespread retail item. Many series, such as Modern Family and Grey's Anatomy, may release DVD sets of the prior season between the end of that season and the beginning of the next. Some television programs that are released on DVD, particularly those that have been out of production for several years, may not have all of the seasons released, either due to poor overall sales or prohibitive costs for obtaining rights to music used in the program. One such incidence is Perfect Strangers, which has seldom been in wide syndication since the late 1990s primarily due to lack of demand, which had only a DVD set of the first and second seasons released due to the expensiveness of relicensing songs used in later seasons of the series that are performed by the show's two lead characters.
The British Broadcasting Paradox
In the United Kingdom, the word repeat refers only to a single episode, while rerun or rerunning is the preferred term for an entire series or season. A repeat is a single episode of a series that is broadcast outside its original timeslot on the same channel, usually the repeat of the scheduled episode that was broadcast in the original timeslot earlier the previous week. It allows viewers who were not able to watch the show in its timeslot to catch up before the next episode is broadcast. Early on in the history of British television, agreements with the actors' union Equity and other trade bodies limited the number of times a single program could be broadcast, usually only twice, and these showings were limited to within a set time period such as five years. This was due to the unions' fear that the channels filling their schedules with repeats could put actors and other production staff out of work as fewer new shows would be made. It also had the unintentional side effect of causing many programs to be junked after their repeat rights had expired, as they were considered to be of no further use by the broadcasters. Although these agreements changed during the 1980s and beyond, it is still expensive to repeat archive television series on British terrestrial television, as new contracts have to be drawn up and payments made to the artists concerned.
The Office and The Second Life
It has been common practice by networks, notably the BBC, to rerun some series after they have not fared particularly well on their original run. This was particularly common with sitcoms such as The Office, which had very low ratings in its first series, as well as a poor reception from both critics and focus groups and was almost cancelled. The series started to gain traction once the BBC decided to repeat it in a different timeslot, and The Office went on to be an award-winning and critically acclaimed show which has regularly featured in lists of the Best Sitcoms ever. In 2019, the series was ranked 6th on The Guardian's list of the 100 best TV shows of the 21st century. This phenomenon demonstrates the unique power of reruns to transform a failure into a classic, allowing audiences to discover shows they might have missed during their initial, poorly promoted broadcast. The strategy of using reruns to build an audience has become a standard tool for networks worldwide, proving that a show's value is not always determined by its initial ratings.
The Omnibus and Global Variations
In South Africa, reruns of the daily soap opera 7de Laan and others are called an omnibus. The omnibus is a weekly rerun that is broadcast on a Sunday afternoon on the original channel, and it only broadcasts the past week's episodes back-to-back. Reruns are often carried by Canadian broadcasters in much the same way as they are in the United States, especially on specialty television channels that rely largely on off-network or library rights to programs. Reruns of a broadcaster's own library programs are often used to comply with Canadian content regulations enforced by the CRTC, requiring that a minimum of the broadcaster's programming be dedicated to programming that is produced by Canadians. In the United Kingdom, most drama and comedy series run for shorter seasons, typically six, seven, or thirteen episodes, and are then replaced by others. An exception is soap operas, which are either on all year-round, for example EastEnders and Coronation Street, or are on for a season similar to the American format. As in the U.S., fewer new episodes are made during the summer, and until recently, the BBC, ITV, and Channel 4 commonly repeated classic shows from their archives, but this has more or less dried up in favor of newer and cheaper formats such as reality shows, except on the BBC, where older BBC shows, especially sitcoms, including Dad's Army and Fawlty Towers, are frequently repeated.