I honestly hate the lack of reruns. I don’t generally watch shows when they premier–I stumble on them later. And now that most shows seem to have an arc, I miss out on a lot. Reruns were the way I got caught up in the past.
You might think this would be made up for with online options, but it’s not. At least, not usually. Very few shows offer their full back catalog, and even fewer for free (with advertizing, of course). Thus I just don’t watch a lot of shows anymore. At least all my internet only shows let me see old episodes any time I want.
And, no, I’m not going to buy a Blu-Ray or DVD of the season. Those always cost way too much for casual purchasing. If I buy a series, it’s because I like it so much I want to support it, not that I just want to get caught up.
Netflix is all I have, and if you aren’t on there, I either have to pirate to get up to speed or just opt out. I mostly choose the latter. (I may consider Hulu Plus in the future, but, right now, the idea of paying to watch ads is not appealing enough for me to watch any show they have.)
I’d have to say it began around 1974–75, around the time of Fred Silverman’s tenure at first CBS, then ABC, and then finally NBC. Earlier, shows were locked in to the 13-week format, and weren’t cancelled for bad ratings until midseason (shows like “Gilligan’s Island,” which debuted in 1964, actually fell into a 39-episode production schedule, but this was trimmed back considerably as the years went by due to mounting production costs). By the mid-70s, competition between the three networks was so high that shows were being cancelled ASAP if they failed to attract an audience immediately.
There was another guy at NBC around this time named Marvin Antonowsky, aka The Mad Programmer, who axed a sitcom called “Faye” after just a few episodes, creating something of a scandal. The upshot of all of this was frantic rescheduling of existing shows and attempts to introduce new shows that were “different” in some way (like Silverman’s “Supertrain,” a hideously expensive flop). People had trouble following their favorite shows, and many series were unable to build a following.
This changed in the early '80s, when Brandon Tartikoff took over as Programming Director at NBC and allowed shows like “Hill St. Blues” and “Cheers!” to stay on long enough to build a following, despite initial low ratings. (Programmers had also begun to pay attention to demographics, rather than just raw numbers of viewers.) By that time, however, the practice of shuffling a lot of shows was firmly entrenched and would keep growing as time went by.
Remember that the tv season is from September to May, which is something like 39 weeks. TV show seasons have around 22-23 episodes, so you’re either going to have a ton of repeats sprinkled in during the run or have two large blocks with a long hiatus in between.
I seem to remember that during the 90s the liberal sprinkling of repeats was more the norm than a long hiatus, so I’d guess that pattern shifted in the mid-2000s.
Right; things changed between 1964 and 1968: “Gilligan’s Island” had 39 episodes in its first season, which was the norm back then. Repeats were only shown in the summer, when most folks were on vacation anyway. “Star Trek” I think had only 26 shows in its second season and 24 in its third and final season, so the number of shows per season had already begun to erode due to mounting production costs, and repeats became more common.