Every year or two we hear about stars of the most popular sitcoms getting paid millions of dollars for every episode they are in. However, I have often wondered how much these actors get paid in royalties once the original episodes of their show are no longer airing. With so many sitcoms such as Friends and Cheers running on so many different channels, I assume that the actors in these shows are still getting paid pretty well. However, this is an assumption on my part, since I have not been able to find any figures for how much is paid out in royalties to these actors.
Is there a standard royalty amount that is paid to actors? Are they negotiated at the time the series is being produced? Or, are they negotiated when the reruns start airing? I would also assume that the bigger stars of sitcoms are paid more in royalties than the lesser characters, but again, this is an assumption.
So, how much are Ted Danson, Alan Alda, and their fellow tv actors making from their respective shows these days?
IIRC, the current SAG/AFTRA contract only gives actors residuals on the first rerun. After that, they get nothing unless they have a sweetheart contract with the network.
Wow, is that a fact. I had just kind of assumed that the guy who played Mr. Belding on “Saved by the Bell”, and all his extended family, was set for life since that show has been played on reruns on TBS for at least 20 years.
Why do you think the producers all want their shows to get 100 episodes in the can? Because that’s the magic number for syndication, and that money is pure profit for the studios. No residuals to pay, just rake in the dough.
I’m waiting for the link to the current contract to load, but that’s not the way it used to be. The basic SAG contract got you residuals on each showing, on a sliding scale based on the number of times the show ran. Residuals from commercials were based on the markets it ran in, with a fixed rate for cable. Names could negotiate better. Last year my daughter made a couple of hundred bucks on a show she did four episodes of in 1995 that was in reruns on Noggin. So, Mr. Belding is probably doing okay.
You misunderstand that presentation. Typically, residual rates are quoted for the first rerun, with subsequent reruns paying at a sliding scale. Here is an anti-contract page. A change to residuals on the first rerun only would be a revolutionary change - you’d be hearing the screams all over the world, and no SAG leadership would survive. The change is that they are not giving residuals to series players if the show repeats almost immediately. In the old mode a rerun would happen over the summer or when the show went into syndication, now they repeat the same week, or perhaps on a cable station.
BTW, the third bullet in slide 16
might be confusing. It does not mean people are working in tobacco smoke. Smoke work means any kind of dangerous work. Someone sliding down a ramp would be considered smoke. This means that working around lit cigarettes is now considered smoke work. You get extra money for smoke work, and there are stringent safety precautions.
I know the cast of Star Trek:TNG negotiated one heckuva contarct when they went to the 7th season. They got a sliding scale based on the number of times the show was sold into syndication, the number of tapes, laserdiscs (hey, this was the early 90s), and any other format that might come along.
I’ve heard Vicky Lawrence say that her residuals for Mama’s Family were something like $100 per month- not much at all. In a recent interview with the very bitter actor Kevin Hagen (best known as Doc Baker on Little House on the Prairie) he said he receives about $8 per week (but then he never had a contract- he said that if he’d had a contract instead of being pay for play he’d have earned well over $1 million since the show’s demise [which was the point of the article, a ‘Michael Landon was a greedy scumbucket’ rant]).
Some residuals trivia:
Jack Klugman & Tony Randall both earned much much more from residuals than from the series The Odd Couple. Ditto Werner “Col. Klink” Klemperer, and Bob Crane died very strapped for cash but had he lived a few more years he’d have earned millions as his residuals actually increased [I think he owned a part of the show, which is where the real money is). (I don’t think the producers realized quite how much money was in syndication during the late 60s and early 70s and thus they signed away more than they would today to moderately successful stars.)
Redd Foxx, who had a lifelong history of really bad business practices, signed over his residuals to Sanford & Son in a divorce settlement rather than pay his wife something like $800,000 and consequently he died penniless and she is still raking it in.
In the 1990s Audrey Meadows was still receiving residuals from The Honeymooners. She was the only member of the cast to have demanded them during contract negotiation.
None of the children from The Brady Bunch and none of the castaways from Gilligan’s Island received residuals after the third repeat. Carol (Florence Henderson), Alice (Ann B. Davis) and the estate of Mike (Robert Reed) still receive them however; the kids got royally screwed by their management evidently.
Many actors sell their residuals incidentally to intellectual property brokers (just like publishing rights to songs and copyrights to manuscripts). Sally Struthers is one who did this- it was profitable for the buyer but she should have held out for more (though luckily she knows some people who can feed her for just pennies a day).
True. My daughter got a check for 16 cents when an episode of a soap she was an extra in ran in Italy.
The reason you have a manager is so he or she can yell at SAG about where your money is, and knows how much you are supposed to get. SAG has a big office in LA (across from the La Brea tar pits, I believe) handling this.
I read that Dawn Wells from Gilligan’s Island got infinite residuals because of a clause in her contract. here is an excerpt from the article: It has long been stated that the entire cast of Gilligan’s Island never received residuals beyond the first four reruns of each episode. This was true for the entire cast except Dawn Wells. When the show was picked up by CBS and Dawn was cast to replace Nancy McCarthy, she was married to her agent at the time. In her original contract she was to be paid $1200 per week plus the residual contract the 6 other castaways received. Her husband/agent said that should the show become successful Dawn would not benefit from receiving such a limited residual option. Believing the show would flop, the CBS executives humored Dawn and her husband and put a clause in her contract giving her long-term residuals should the show ever syndicate. As a result from that clause Dawn has made literally millions of dollars as the years have gone by from syndication of Gilligan’s Island. This was never public knowledge. Dawn and series creator Sherwood Schwartz are the only individuals to profit long-term from the series.
I am a fan of Jim Beaver’s facebook page. Just a couple of days ago he posted this:
“I defy anyone to top this residual-check story: I’ve had one and two-cent checks delivered to me before (at a full-rate postage stamp per check). But this week, I got a check that beat those. The gross was one cent. But the net was zero cents. But that’s not all. They took out TWO cents in tax withholding, leaving an initial net of minus one cent, which they rounded to zero. 'Splain me dat, Lucy. (And yes, there was a 45-cent stamp on the envelope.)”
Somebody forgot to tell whoever is syndicating the 81 episodes of 'Til Death that you need 100. (I think the number 100 comes from the days of 24-episode seasons, and you pretty much needed four full seasons to make syndication viable.)
Do you honestly think that if Community is cancelled after its fourth season and has only 88 episodes, it won’t go into syndication?
I remember reading a story a few years ago in “Baseball America” about one agent who appeared as a child actor on an episode of “Streets of San Francisco”. He said he got a check for $114 (or thereabouts) every year as residuals for that appearance.
100 is the goal, not a hard and fast number. Producers like 100 because channels that air syndicated shows like 100. But as you’ve noticed, shows with fewer episodes will make it into syndication. Especially since nearly everything gets sold off to some cable channel today.
Logo, a gay-themed digital cable channel, subsisted on episodes of Wonderfalls (13 episodes total) in its first year.
