The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet (14 years). It was a carryover from radio, so that might have given it its first season. Then a few years later, Ricky Nelson became a teen heartthrob, so that carried it for for maybe three season. But 14 seasons???
Bewitched (8 years) A clever idea. The only problem is, it ran about 5 years too long.
My Three Sons (12 years) Any show about 3 sons that has to go through 4 sons, marry three of them, start a second generation and have to replace one crotchety old grandfather type with another is pretty sure to wear out its welcome.
Joanie Loves Chachi I’m amazed this show was actually renewed for a second season!
The Naked Truth “This Tea Leone sitcom isn’t working. Let’s cancel it and try something else with her.”
“But her contract says she’s the star of a show called The Naked Truth. If we cancel it, she can walk.”
“Okay, keep the name. Just make it a completely different show. How long is her contract?”
“Three seasons.”
“And if this doesn’t work, then change it again for the third season.”
This is what I was going to nominate. The two things that baffle me about this show are that it’s been on almost as long as The Simpsons has and that it didn’t die even after the advent of YouTube.
I used to watch King of the Hill, but I just forgot about it eventually. Does anyone? Apparently so, because it’s still in production, even though they were planning on ending it either this or last season.
I’m amazed I’m the first to mention Knot’s Landing. It was a mediocre prime time soap opera that got on the air because that was a huge genre back in the seventies. And then it somehow managed to stay on for fourteen seasons, long after the genre that initiated it had passed. My theory is that not even the people at CBS were watching it so they just assumed it had already been cancelled.
To provide possible explanations as to the long runs of two series named here-
I have some television syndication ratings from the 1980s in hand, and Hee Haw was consistently one of the most popular syndicated (as late as 1984, still making monthly Top 10s) programs. They found their niche, and the fact that they aired in syndication rather than on a network probably helped in some cases.
As for Ozzie and Harriet, ABC (which aired the series) tended to have issues involving coverage and viewership during the 1950s and even into the early 1960s, putting it in the situation that Fox was in for the first decade or so of its operation and that the CW is in now, in which series that would have been canceled on NBC or CBS for rating performance end up being renewed due to different expectations.
I’m, at the moment, having trouble thinking of a really good choice, as the examples I was thinking of all are either “programs pre-1970 where sponsor cloat resulted in a longer-than-obvious run”, or “programs that air in syndication that, while not popular on the whole, find a big enough niche to generate the revenue needed for a continued run”.
Never watched Wings myself, but looking it up in an old copy of The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows, I can see why it would have been immediately successful-- created by the Cheers folks, following much of the same formula, and most importantly, was part of NBC’s very popular 1990s Thursday sitcom block. in its first two years it had Cheers as its lead-in, and in its third year, was sandwiched between Mad About You and Seinfeld. In fall 1994, it was placed in a weird, probably undesirable position, kicking off the Tuesday primetime line-up, leading in to the Martin Short Show, but by then it was established. (I also note that NBC was showing the show twice a week at some points, so there was a hard sell there…)
As for America’s Funniest Home Videos, I’d imagine its incredibly low production costs make it a great schedule filler, guaranteeing at least a modest profit even on nights/times where commercial revenue is pretty low. (I note it’s a perennial in the early Sunday prime-time slot against 60 Minutes, a notoriously difficult slot to program, so I have a feeling that its cheapness and mindlessness is precisely why it lasts.)
My nomination for inexplicable popularity: Entertainers with Byron Allen. A lightweight fluff celebrity interview program that’s been on for 10 or 15 years now, and looks like it was put together by a high school AV class. It’s cheap and syndicated, whch probably goes 90% of the way of explaining why it lasts (locally, it’s used to fill overnight slots when infomercials aren’t being run), but it’s not entertaining at all. The only reason I can see that it’s lasted is that it’s easier for TV station managers to just renew it every year rather than look for replacement programming for a timeslot where the viewing audience can be counted in the dozens.
The majority of TGIF can qualify. The baby of all those shows is Step-by-Step which lasted for a mere 7 seasons, as opposed to Full House, Perfect Strangers, and Family Matters (which was a spin off of Perfect StrangersThe More You Know). None of them were good, but they appealed to kids and gave parents the satisfaction that watching TV with their kids counted as quality time if they threw in some nefarious plot here and there.
For me, the greatest offender in this debate is D.A.G. This shit show lasted for 17 episodes. The only reason why I kept the TV on during the Pilot was because I was sure that the network was going to pull the series mid episode and I wanted to be witness to it.
America’s Funniest Home Videos is still on? I had no idea. I loved it when it was a new show, but I assumed that it died in the mid-90s. I was happier then.
Home Improvement.
A good friend of mine was a guest star on that show once and I could only stand to watch it until his segment was over. How that show became a hit is a mystery to me, then again, never being able to sit through an episode without nodding off would explain why it will forever remain a mystery to me.
Also, I lived in Germany during the entire 80’s, so I missed all of American television for that decade - and now watching some of those shows, I can tell you I feel I missed nothing. And I am not a racist by any means, but wow - some of those 80’s shows with all black casts were truly dreadful…the one with Jimmy Walker or the one with the dry cleaner or the Redd Foxx or any of those other horrible Nick at Night repeats that I occasionally see and go, “People thought this crap was funny?!”
Perhaps you were in Germany longer than you realize. I think you’re referring to Sanford and Son, Good Times, and The Jeffersons, all of which aired in the 1970s. Redd Foxx briefly revived the Fred Sanford character in the '80s and The Jeffersons continued until 1985, but Jimmy Walker’s last episode of Good Times was in 1979.
And yes, people thought Sanford and Son at least was very funny.
Thanks, TWDuke, for the names of those shows, and yes, you are partially correct…I lived in NYC in the late 70’s before moving to Berlin and rarely watched television, (out whoring around) so I might as well have been in Germany. And watching episodes of Sanford and Son now on Nick at Night go over my head and are really not funny at all…maybe you had to be there.
In the UK the prize goes to Last Of The Summer Wine which seems to have been going for ever and is well past its sell-by-date. When it first started it was funny, but you can only have so many situations where the sight of three old men careering down a hill in some home-made contraption is amusing. Inexplicably a new series of this programme started last week.
