I’ve noticed that SpikeTV has been showing an awful lot of Star Trek: the Next Generation reruns. Three during the daytime, and sometimes a couple at late night too. I’m big fan of ST:TNG, so at the outset this seemed like a very good thing to me. Then I started thinking, Wait a minute. There might be a catch to this. Is Spike showing all its old ST:TNG’s because it is planning on canceling it :eek: ? You see, I have this theory that when shows go into syndicated reruns, they enter a contract where they have to show a certain number of shows. Then when they want to cancel it quickly, they sometimes try to show all the shows at once (though of course if I am wrong in assuming this, someone please correct me).
Well, are they going to cancel it? I anxiously await replies
Or it could be that SpikeTV doesn’t have a lot else in the way of programming just now and TNG is a good way to fill many hours of broadcast time. I don’t watch a lot of TNG but IIRC hasn’t Spike been running the two-part eps during the evenings?
I notice also Spike has cut back its DS9 to one per day.
Seeing as how they paid $365,000,000 to broadcast TNG (178 eps), DS9 (176 eps), and Voyager (172 eps), I would think they’d show it as much as they can to recoup their investment. That comes out to about $694,000 per episode. I wonder how many times they have to show it to break even.
Mr. Blue Sky, I’m hoping that my facetious meter is malfunctioning. That seems an absurd sum per episode, especially considering that Viacom owns Paramount and Spike TV. However, Spike TV paid a record $1.9 million per episode for CSI: New York, which is also a Viacom product, so it could be true.
As to the OP, Spike TV cannot “cancel” Star Trek:TNG. The show was cancelled long ago. They may discontinue airing episodes if they think another show will produce more revenue in that timeslot, however.
Back in 1987 when TNG first appeared, they noted that the show was actually only 46 minutes long. This allowed for 14 minutes of commercials so that stations (the show was originally syndicated, as was DS9) could sell enough commercials to pay for the show (which cost $1.5 million to produce at the time).
After its initial run, syndicators would up to an additional 2 minutes to sell even more ad time!
As someone who is watching TNG on Spike right now…
Just so everyone knows, Spike recently switched from:
DS9 2X/day
TNG 2X/day
to
DS9 1X/day
TNG 3X/day
and moved MacGuyver from the afternoon to 11AM, before the Star Trek block. What does all this mean? Beats me. But as an added data point, TNG is nearing the end of the series, episode-wise (should be done this month, I think); DS9 still has quite a ways to go. In the past, Spike has sometimes jiggled the episode order as series/season finales approached (so as to keep key two-part episodes together in a single day’s block, or so a season/series ended on a Friday).
