I was just wondering if networks keep copies of every episode for shows that are not serial dramas or comedies or ones that are likely to make money on DVD’s. What about a show like COPS? There’s years worth of the stuff, but they are pretty much the same from one year to another. How about dating shows or game shows? Would the public be able to have access to them if they made a request?
I think that’s more the production company’s job, since they “own” the show. Granted, there are probably still plenty of shows that are actually produced by the network that airs them, but my understanding is that’s much less common today than it once was.
I would guess that they do, since with data storage so cheap these days, there’s really no reason not to. Older shows, though, (say, back in the 60s) were generally not kept, such that in many cases the only copy that exists is one made by some technophile early-adopter who had a wire-spool recorder or the like. Or, more often, they exist only in the notoriously-unreliable memories of those who saw them.
That was the case with early episodes of “The Tonight Show.” Apparently they just recycled the tapes. Johnny Carson was reportedly so pissed about it, that he had all future episodes stored in a special vault.
I was going to bring this up and you beat me to it. On anniversary shows Carson would lament not having episodes with Groucho Marx and Tiny Tim on the couch.
One special case was made to save the Ed Ames tomahawk sequence. Otherwise NBC bulked the video tape and reused it.
The company that produces the show owns the show. The network is contracted to carry each program a set number of times.
I was thinking about this same thing the other day. What about older shows or broadcasts?
I imagine anything in the last 20 years could be easily and readily accessible from digitized data banks.
What about a recording of the January 17th 1954 noon hour news broadcast from Milwaukee?
As far as produced shows, would they have kept outtakes and such?
a bit tangential re. the noon news from MKE…
you should check out the first Today show if you haven’t seen it…pretty interesting how news actually was like before today’s ADD-ridden, 24-hour infotainment cycle.
http://www.hulu.com/watch/5120/nbc-news-time-capsule-the-first-today-show-january-14-1952
Really? The front page story is about “exploding rayon sweaters”, the show advertises the “music of today and what good records are coming out tomorrow”, includes a news ticker crawling on the bottom of the screen and brags about it “not being stuffy about” the news. I’m kind of surprised how little its changed!
Video tape was considered too expensive before the 1970s for the networks to save most copies of their own shows. Their isn’t even a surviving copy of the first Superbowl broadcast, and that was carried by both CBS and NBC.
I’d imagine all COPS episodes are archived by Fox. The show began after it was known how lucrative syndicated television could be and COPS is rerun on cable these days.
Thanks for the replies.
How about dating shows and game shows? These kinds of things don’t lend themselves well to reruns, would networks or production companies even bother keeping them around? Any chance I could get a season of, for example, Wheel of Fortune for the year 2001 or Blind Date for 2007?
These days they keep copies of everything. With all the cable channels in existence, there is always money to be made from syndication. The Game Show network is pretty much nothing but reruns of daytime game shows.
Almost certainly not. For one thing, videotape wasn’t introduced for commercial sale until 1956, and when it was introduced, blank tape cost something like $300 for a 1-hour reel. Strictly from a cost perspective, it made sense to reuse the tapes.
The only way to preserve a program in 1954 would have been by kinescope – which was basically a film shot from the video screen. Not only was it expensive, but it resulted in a really poor picture. A station might have kept the filmed reports in a library for future reference, and it might have kept the *script *from the newscast, but usually kinescopes were made only for a specific need.
There’s a bunch of missing Doctor Who episodes froma few decades ago.
Nowadays, things last forever digitally, but back then archives were rooms full of tapes.
They even keep the original film version nowadays. This is how they are showing Seinfeld reruns in HD even though it was never broadcast in HD.
http://www.engadgethd.com/2008/09/03/seinfeld-goes-hd-on-tbs-hd/
Many sporting events from the past were not 100% saved - only highlights were kept. That’s true even for big events like the World Series. I read somewhere that around 1970 they started saving entire games. That’s why you don’t see really old games on ESPN classic, they just don’t exist in any format.
The Gameshow Network shows reruns of random game shows. Fox Reality Channels shows reruns of old reality shows. Plus a lot of this “junk” is up on Hulu nowadays.
The lesson is that you never know when you will be able to make money off of stuff in the future, and it’s smart to have a serious archive system and to store everything.
Worth a visit if you’re in NY or LA: The Paley Center, formerly the Museum of Television and Radio.
If it’s old and rare and it exists, they archive it.
This has been a large enough problem that the Library of Congress held hearings on it.
The link is to an exceedingly long transcript, but for a good summary of the problem, look at the testimony of the first witness, Edie Adams, and her story of trying to preserve Ernie Kovacs’ work. She talked about pretty much every problem about finding and saving the old programs.