Okay, maybe I don’t watch enough TV to know the answer to this. I’m hoping that someone amongst the Cafe Society will know.
What I’m talking about (and maybe it doesn’t happen with all TV shows, just the ones I watch, or have watched in the last 3 years or so), is that shows like CSI during the regular TV season, seem to only haphazardly run a new show on their regularly scheduled night.
For instance, in my neck of the woods, CSI is on at 8 (maybe 9) on Thursday night. But instead of a new show each Thursday, the way it used to be, sometimes it’s a new show, then reruns for 2 or more Thursdays, and then maybe a new show again.
TV shows also shoot on a very tight schedule and work everybody to near death for several weeks in a row to push out a few episodes. Without a break every five or six weeks, you’d have pandemonium on your hands. Some super-complicated one-hour dramas like CSI actually have an eight-day schedule, and so they have to take a break or they’d never catch up.
It used to be that a TV episode took 6 days to make, so they could keep up a weekly schedule pretty steadily, with only Summer or Xmas breaks to give them a little catch up time where they needed it.
These days, especially the high profile large cast shows, they can take as much as 10 or 11 days to make an episode, and anyone can see that isn’t going to work for a weekly show, so they space them out in batches.
That’s why Lost has taken such a huge break from the air this season, so they can have a lot of catch-up time, instead of drip feeding like they did last time.
One, the networks are now packing new episodes into the sweeps periods when ratings are taken.
Two, the networks are more trigger-happy about cancelling shows then they used to be. So they don’t order as many shows in advance because any unbroadcast episodes after a cancellation are essentionally just lost money (barring possible syndication and DVD sales). The result is that the producers are forced to make the shows closer to their scheduled air dates and sometimes fall behind and need a break of reruns or hiatus to catch up and make new episodes.
Why I don’t get is something I’ve seen done by the previously mentioned CSI and a few other shows: what’s with them showing reruns from other seasons? I thought part of the point of showing reruns - besides acting as filler - was to give viewers the chance to catch up on (be drawn back into) what they might have missed earlier this season.
First, they need episodes in the sweeps months: November, February, and May. That’s twelve or thirteen episodes needed for the most important periods so half the season is taken right then. There aren’t enough episodes left in a television season to fill December, January, March, and April. On top of that, most shows start their season in September and the networks don’t want to go into reruns immediately on them so October gets new episodes too. The summer months and December are weak periods in programming so the networks don’t mind just putting filler in there. Finally running September to November and then February to May is a convenient way to break the season in half for a production schedule.
The reason why some shows have reruns from the previous seasons from time to time is that the network has a contract that they can air an episode a certain number of times. If they need to fill a time slot then they can just pull out an old episode.
This is how things TV has been for decades, yet every year, someone who has been watching TV all those years suddenly seems to notice it.
The general network TV rerun schedule is this:
New episodes start mid-September and run through Thanksgiving.
Reruns until mid-January.
New episodes until March 1.
Reruns until Mid-April.
New epsodes until Memorial Day.
Reruns until September.
There are some deviations (Fox, for instance, shows 24 without reruns), but the general pattern is still followed (Fox also started its new season in August this year).
This year, there’s a variation in that there seemed to be a week of new episodes last week. This was clearly a late decision on the part of the networks: both House and CSI had new episodes that were clearly designed to be a wrap up before reruns.
As for the first rerun of CSI, networks often rerun popular shows in place of badly-rated shows. Take a look a the Saturday night schedule: it has the lowest viewership, so none of the networks puts anything new on the air even during sweeps (other than reality shows).
It’s because the people in television aren’t as tough as they used to be. I noticed when I got the first and second seasons of Alfred Hitchcock’s show that each season was 36 episodes. Granted each was with different casts, but still.
The pussies at “Lost” make just six episodes and it’s; [little girl voice] “Ooohhh. We made SIX episodes. We’re sooo tired. We need a three month break.” [/little girl voice]
I think also, because shows are more serial and less episodic than they used to be, you notice more when there is a gap in the storyline, vs. the old days where, if Mork & Mindy was a rerun, you just said “shazbot” and moved on.
