Just As I Thought

In defense of the rerun

The latest miscalculation by the television networks: the “split season”.

The latest miscalculation by the television networks: the “split season”.

A year or two ago, the suits at the networks discovered a disturbing (to them, at least) fact: reruns of hit television shows don’t fare well in the ratings.

Duh.

This gave them the excuse they needed to eliminate reruns. The first show to stop airing repeats became “The West Wing,” if I remember correctly; which soon after tumbled in the ratings even with only first-run episodes.

“Lost” was next, with each episode being shown only once and a no-repeats policy in effect. It, too, began to falter in the ratings. Coincidence?

The networks decided to make a virtue of this new, no-repeats scheme by labeling the various segments of first-run shows as “seasons.” And now the term “Fall Finale” has entered into the zeitgeist.

What used to be the last episode before the December repeats is now… well, the last episode. And therein lies the problem.

Let’s take “Lost” as an example. In the old days, we’d have had six weeks of new episodes followed by six weeks of repeats, then new episodes again. The show would be fixed in our minds as airing at a certain time every week and would become a habit. Boom — those repeats are taken away, and instead we have six weeks of Lost and then six weeks of… I dunno. Something else. Lost isn’t there anymore. It seems like it’s been canceled. It has disappeared from our television listings.

Then there’s a show like “Jericho.” It had a good start, it was rough around the edges and needed some work, but we stuck with it… then it went off the air after a “Fall Finale.” It’s gone, there’s no mention of it on the air. The natural conclusion is that it was canceled or moved or something…

Here’s the thing: when these shows do come back, viewers will have to adjust their habits to get back into them. And many people won’t bother. Even though those vaunted repeats don’t perform well in the ratings, they serve a very important purpose: ensuring that your audience comes back quickly and easily when the show returns to new episodes. “Battlestar Galactica” split their season in two; but they kept us supplied with repeat airings in the middle to keep us addicted.

Either that, or the networks will adopt a policy more like the UK (rather than this half-assed version they’re trying now): run all episodes of a season in order with no hiatus in the middle. Just show the episodes, straight through, for 26 weeks. Boom. Done. (This is obviously easier in the UK, where a “season” can consist of as little as 6 to 13 episodes.)

I don’t know about you, but I am simply no longer invested in “Lost” after this hiatus; and no longer have any interest at all in “Jericho” because it wasn’t around long enough to become a habit. I think a lot of people are going to feel the same way; I’ll bet that this no-reruns experiment will die a quick death by next fall.

2 comments

  • Um, in the really old days, they did used to run all 26 episodes in a row, then they would repeat the entire season over the summer, starting in March/April. (The assumption was that most people were strting to spend time outdoors.) I remember reading about shows the the otriginal Star Trek struggling to keep up with the filming schedule, to the point where they had to do that 2-parter, mostly with footage from the old pilot with Captain Pike.

    I also remember the good old days when a show had an entire season to build an audience… not six episodes.

  • Actually, they had reruns back then, too. Star Trek didn’t run all episodes straight through in a row, they had regular repeats as well as pre-emptions for holiday specials and the like. But no, they didn’t have nearly as many repeats and certainly not a six-week interruption in the middle of a season.
    I was reading recently about the first few years of “Doctor Who” in the 60s. It was done as a weekly serial, and they almost never had repeats — they wrote characters out for a week so that they could have some time off, but the show kept going. When they finally aired a repeat, they actually wrote it into the end of the preceding episode: the Doctor said he would show a prospective companion what it was like to travel with him, thereby making the repeat part of the continuity of the show!

Browse the Archive

Browse by Category