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Since a program's 'season' has gotten progressively shorter over the years, they have to show more reruns to fill up a year. When the season was 26 episodes, they could easily go from September to December before they even had to resort to a rerun.
Exactly what DanielAvery says. As a fan of many 1950s, 60s TV shows, I've gone back and looked up info about a show's production schedule....some shows produced 30 or more original episodes in a season. Let alone 26 episodes.
So yes, OP same season repeats -- during the season -- are more common now. Decades ago there might be "summer reruns," but certainly not the same episode two weeks later like you might see today. More than once, back when I was still watching network TV, I'd think, bewildered, "I just saw this episode two weeks ago." But fewer episodes being produced -- coupled with production falling behind schedule for whatever reason -- and execs make the decision to air an episode that was just on not a month ago. So there you have it.
At first, OP, the way it was phrased, I thought you were asking about whether channels are showing "syndication" reruns much sooner after a show leaves air. Heck, now they're rerunning (syndicating) shows that are still ON THE AIR. Decades ago there was usually a much longer time between original air date and reruns (syndication.)
SNL is also a special case since so much of their material is "this week's headlines"/topical. What is news in one week can be forgotten in two months, so SNL tends to hurt its own syndication value by making sketches about topics that might not hit their mark once the topic has been forgotten by the audience. This might encourage them to re-air more recent material than the average show.
The SNL thing gets ridiculous. I know about the classic ones that show earlier in the evening, sometimes going back to 70's episodes. But I swear sometimes they will show one that was originally broadcast two or three weeks prior, during the regular time slot. I wish I could see a list of their recent SNL broadcast history to confirm this.
It definitely happens all the time. Sometimes it's SO recent, you aren't even sure by the cold open whether it's a rerun, because the topic is still/again in the news!
They do usually, during a show, flash an ad for who's appearing the next week--though it could be live, or could be a rerun--and you could check and see if that combo of host/music guest was on recently. It seems like it's rare to get 3 new ones in a row, as a very general average.
This comes up relatively often in this forum. What you are saying here simply wasn't universal in the 1970s and really wasn't even universal until the mid-1980s.
All in the Family is often cited as an example of a paragon series of the 70s, but :
The series began in January 1971 with a mid-season series premiere, not as a replacement, but rather to give the new show a boost from an excellent lead-in (Hee Haw); and
New episodes of the series was generally broadcast from late September until late March.
Only two episodes of the entire run of All in the Family were broadcast in April: The first and final seasons' finales - the first season simply because there was no other way to fit 13 episodes in between its premiere date and the end of March, and the final season simply because they took up one week with perhaps the first 90 minute clip-show in television history.
No new episodes of All in the Family were ever broadcast in May.
The same is true of other major series from the 70s: Only one new episode of Ironside (the two-hour 7th season finale) was broadcast in May. I don't recall why that was the case; maybe there was some event that occurred that, out of sensitivity, the network decided to delay the season finale. M*A*S*H also initially ran late September to late March. Only one season had new episodes bleed into May, in 1981. And there are many examples of series that premiered mid-season, for the same reasons that they premiere mid-season today: It was planned that way. Eight is Enough is one example.
There were 70s and 80s series that broadcast September to May back then, but invariably they followed the same pattern that is still prominent today: Charlie's Angels, for example, ran September to May from 1976-1980, but did so the same way that many series do today, including having no new episodes this time of year.
It just seemed more seldom in the past to have a television series debut in the middle of a season. The first two shows I remember being launched mid-season were "Valerie" and "The Wonder Years" It seemed very special when these shows just appeared in the middle of the winter because it seemed like that never happened back then, maybe one of two shows on the entire prime-time schedule during a season. "Quantum Leap" also fell into this category (I believe it debuted as a special on Easter)
Age does such things to our perception. There are paths I walk down now that I could swear are longer than they were before.
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