So did Seinfeld. They refused to help a guy getting mugged and then were put on trial with clips showing their previous bad character AND that was after a tribute clip show celebrating it. That’s what pissed ME off about the finale. I just watched a clip show to get me ready for it and then it’s just ANOTHER clip show?
Until it came back last year, the original X-Files Finale was also a clip show.
The Dick Van Dyke Show also ended with a clip show–“The Last Chapter,” in which Rob finishes his long-awaited book, triggering clips of his wedding, Richie’s birth, the time they thought they had the wrong baby, and so forth.
“The Last Chapter” tends to show up next to last in syndication, because of production order. But it originally aired as the series finale.
Leave it to Beaver did one as their final episode. June found an old scrapbook while cleaning out the attic.
Bewitched not only had episodes that reused whole scenesout of earlier episodes, it also recycled entire scripts.
I always associated clip episodes with down periods of the TV season. I don’t know if television seasons have the same arcs that they did in the classic network era.
Season premieres, sweeps periods, holidays, season finales, and summer repeats. The clip shows seemed to come around the holidays or after a sweeps period.
I thought a clip show was Talk Soup , the Soup, etc. where they show clips of other talk shows. Don’t recall seeing a show with clips of other episodes of that show but maybe I did and cannot remember .
They were also used a lot to “celebrate” a milestone, like 100 episodes or 200 episodes of a long-running show. I always enjoyed those.
I remember one now, it was Barney Miller and they honored Jack Soo who died while the show was still doing new episodes.
They used to be very common–check out some of the examples (under Live Action TV) here.
Good link.
It answers the NCIS clip show question: From December 2014.
One weird item. In mentioning Discovery Channel’s 25th Anniversary stuff airing a Mythbusters clip show, it has a link to the page this appears on. Nice.
I found this (from Darren Garrison’s link) to be interesting:
mmm
Some band ought to release a debut album titled, “Greatest Hits”…
Colbert often does them on Friday nights. He films a new monologue in front of the Thursday night audience and does the scene where he runs out of the studio at the end. He usually includes a joke about how this is a great Friday night crowd, unlike that Thursday crowd.
Between the two, he typically just runs repeats of guests mostly from the current week, but occasionally from previous weeks. You can tell because his tie changes color.
He used to do this every Friday, but now it’s not so consistent. Sometimes the clips might include stuff that was edited out of the previous show.
Incidentally, this is one of the reasons the guests on late night shows don’t remain on the couch after their segment is over. It’s easier to do clips.
Letterman taped his Friday show on Thursday so maybe that’s where he got the idea.
Colbert has generally done this. But the “clip show Friday” thing is a summer thing, for the most part. Letterman just did a rerun on Fridays during the summer in the last years of the show.
Note: Friday is considered a dead night for talk shows. Letterman’s old show was initially only M-Th. NBC ran some video garbage on Friday nights. It was a while before they gave him the Friday slot.
Conan still only does M-Th. And he does double episode tapings quite a lot. Sometimes weeks in advance. Many band performances and such are taped separately and inserted in.
A rerun of In the Heat of the Night is on right now, and it is a clip show. The framing device is a reporter interviewing the cops.
I actually marathoned the show. They even would recycle jokes, setup and punchline, from the previous episode!
at least for me, this was extra annoying because Seinfeld clips don’t really work out of the context of the full show. So, if you were a fan and had seen all of the episodes already you could maybe think back to how funny it was originally but if you weren’t much of a fan the clip show was practically nonsensical.
ETA: Back in the day when a typical season was 24+ episodes, a clip show was probably a great way to give the writers a break. Nowadays, with shorter seasons, the need to pad out your show is probably reduced?
I think part of it, too, was that prior to DVDs being common for tv shows, this was, for many people, the only chance to re-see favorite scenes, especially from prior seasons. Now, we not only have DVDs at the end of each season, but streaming, and people can see the old content anytime they want, and so are less tolerant of it during the weekly broadcast, instead wanting new content.
And I have no idea when the standard network tv season went to 22 episodes per season. Though certainly cable series often have shorter seasons. But I don’t remember weekly network tv series habitually being >22 episodes per season since I was old enough to pay attention to that. The latest clip shows I can think of for series that I watched were probably 2002 or 2003.
A lot of them do work, IMHO. E.g., “He took … it … out.” is great as a standalone bit.