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Does it seems like they are showing more recent reruns these days?
I'll often see something like a Saturday Night Live that I just saw a few weeks ago. Unfortunately I can't give any other examples of shows since I don't watch a lot of current shows. But it really seems like the reruns that I used to see when I was younger were much older. Sometimes from a previous year. It seemed like they would rarely do something like show a rerun from the same season since it was just shown and still in the viewers' memories, compared to something that people had not seen in a while and might enjoy more because of the longer lapse of time since they had last seen it.
No, it seems like reruns have always been from the current season. It gives people a chance to catch up on episodes they might have missed. Showing episodes from earlier seasons might be an issue with syndication deals.
If you want to watch older episodes of SNL, NBC typically shows them on Saturdays before the local news.
No, it seems like reruns have always been from the current season. It gives people a chance to catch up on episodes they might have missed. Showing episodes from earlier seasons might be an issue with syndication deals.
Precisely. This was especially the case in the past, before the major networks had their own production studios. Back then, production studios would sell the rights to broadcast their programs and those contracts would specify first run broadcasts and a specific number (generally one or two) rebroadcasts over a yearlong period. Even though many of these deals are now between different entities within the same company, the same arrangements generally apply.
No, it seems like reruns have always been from the current season. It gives people a chance to catch up on episodes they might have missed. Showing episodes from earlier seasons might be an issue with syndication deals.
If you want to watch older episodes of SNL, NBC typically shows them on Saturdays before the local news.
I'm positive that Johnny Carson would sometimes show episodes from years prior.
Maybe current shows are more "serial" these days? Like each episode is part of a longer story (like a soap opera)? TV shows didn't used to be like that, except for the evening soaps like Dallas, Dynasty, etc. Each episode was a standalone story with a clear beginning and ending, where you didn't really need to know any details about the characters or anything to follow it. I know that X-Files episodes could be either/or. Some were standalone, while others were part of the serial.
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.
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. Nowadays they may have reruns interspersed in mid-October, and again in January (to save the original episodes to air in November and February Sweeps). They'll stretch the available episodes as much as they can, but they end up showing reruns of episodes that (in theory) only aired a month or so earlier.
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I'm positive that Johnny Carson would sometimes show episodes from years prior.
From what I recall, he would air reruns of shows produced about a year previously. He had no problems with syndication and "seasons" since the show aired all year round (like soaps do). I'm guessing he chose one year because enough time had passed for people to forget the jokes.
Something that is done now that was not done years ago with reruns.
Some, or most, or all of a new show's episodes will be rerun over an evening, or a few evenings, typically in late summer just before the new season starts.
I suppose they do this to build hype for a show that got marginal ratings, allowing viewers to binge watch and catch up and get into the show, hoping they will continue to watch next season. For example, this year the sitcom Splitting Up Together did a binge, and I watched some of it. However its not that good of a show, and I didn't keep watching.
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.
No, you're right that in the actual SNL timeslot, they do replay episodes from the current season. They probably chose more recent epiaodes so that the topics being covered on the show are still somewhat relevant. Last nights repeat was the Seth Myers episode from October 13. Next week is Jonah Hill from November 3... So actually it seems like they just start replaying the repeats in the order that they aired.
Has to do with the shorter television "seasons." Back in the 70s and 80s, a TV season ran from Labor Day-Memorial Day, and 85-90% of series debuted in the fall. Back then, the only times a show would debut mid-season was if the program designated for that time slot in the fall failed horribly, a writer's strike happened, or a miniseries or movie special garnered sky high ratings and was hurriedly converted into a regular series. (see Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman, and The Wonder Years). Both of those long-running series were originally intended as one-time movies. With Netflix, internet, and on-demand programming, television seasons have shortened into two or three smaller seasons in the time between September and May. There is also a summer season, which in previous years heavily relied on repeats of shows from the prior season. With seasons ending 3-4 times a year, there's quicker turnaround and repeats are more recent than in years' past when you'd see an episode of a show that aired in September and wouldn't see it again until June or July.
Has to do with the shorter television "seasons." Back in the 70s and 80s, a TV season ran from Labor Day-Memorial Day, and 85-90% of series debuted in the fall. Back then, the only times a show would debut mid-season was if the program designated for that time slot in the fall failed horribly, a writer's strike happened, or a miniseries or movie special garnered sky high ratings and was hurriedly converted into a regular series ...
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.
No, you're right that in the actual SNL timeslot, they do replay episodes from the current season. They probably chose more recent epiaodes so that the topics being covered on the show are still somewhat relevant. Last nights repeat was the Seth Myers episode from October 13. Next week is Jonah Hill from November 3... So actually it seems like they just start replaying the repeats in the order that they aired.
But I've seen instances where the rerun was only about two weeks old. That's why I wanted to know if there was a broadcast history.
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