I saw this question in another message board, but no good answer is given. When a TV show is cancelled, especially with those that have little chance to be syndicated or released on DVD, what physically happens to the episodes? Are they stored and for how long? How hard is it to retrieve little remembered TV shows?
They belong, almost certainly, to the production company. As long as the production company survives, its likely to maintain an archive in which these episodes will be included. If and when the production company closes, the archive may be offered for sale and, if no-one wants it, scrapped.
A lot of them are on Netflix and/or Amazon video on demand now.
Depends. Years ago the BBC reused master tapes and even just destroyed episodes. There’s been much effort to find ‘missing’ episodes of such shows like Doctor Who.
Nowadays, they’ll be saved, just because storage is so cheap, and no matter how unpopular the show, they’re likely to be able to find someone or another who’ll be willing to buy it.
Practice used to be to use them for fill late in the season or during the summer. That’s what happened to the last few episodes of Max Headroom.
Until someone with real experience can answer…
There are big underground film vaults like this.
Right now I’m interested in the restoration of the Donner vision of Superman II. Sure, it was a big movie, but they saved all the little clipped pieces of film and magnetic sound recordings. It’s amazing it was all still there.
I don’t know what happens now, but decades ago, anthology shows like*** Love, ***American Style often bought and used portions of unsold sitcom pilots and unused sitcom episodes.
The best known example? Garry Marshall made a pilot for a 50s nostalgia show. He shopped it around, didn’t find any takers, and sold the pilot to Aaron Spelling, who used it as a segment in Love, American Style. Not long afterward, the movie ***American Graffiti ***and the Broadway musical Grease became big hits, and ABC decided they wanted Marshall’s show after all.
Happy Days.
“…are you here AGAIN?”
Unaired episodes can actually be aired, just not in the US.
E.g., the (horrible, horrible) US remake of Coupling was canceled in the US after 4 episodes aired. A total of 11 episodes were made, including an unaired pilot. Supposedly, the later 6 episodes aired in markets such as Mexico. (Grounds for a diplomatic dispute, if you ask me.)
Carsey-Warner threatened to release this on DVD, but never did.
I think one reason some companies like to hold onto such programs is in case one of the actors becomes huge, then they’d re-release them and hope to make a few bucks. I’m not sure if that has happened in reality in recent years. (It does happen with movies.) But people gotta dream.
I do recall some terrible show that was canceled after 3-4 airings, leaving seven or eight in the can. Not too long after it was spiked, I saw it as a DVD set with the splash “CONTAINS THE ENTIRE SERIES!!!”
This, while an endless number of quality older shows are either not available at all or only have one or two seasons available. (Hill Street Blues, which only after years of delay has seasons 3-8 or whatever available at a fairly high price.)
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Moving thread from General Questions to Cafe Society.
When they released The Comeback on DVD, they taglined it “The Complete [del]First[/del] Only Season”.
And being television executives, they’d even lied about that. The show is now scheduled to be brought back for a second season.
I’m seeing episodes of Westerns well over 50 years old turn up on the net. That’s way too early for anybody to have taped them, so I guess it must have been SOP to save them, although obviously many got lost.
And I’m not talking about megahits like Gunsmoke and Bonanza. I’m seeing stuff I never heard of, like Colt 45, or The Deputy (starring Henry Fonda!).
Sorry I wasn’t clear. I meant it was way too early for anybody at home to have taped (let alone DVRd) them, which is the source of most “unofficial” TV content on the net.
As for kinescopes, they were used to record live broadcasts. I’m talking about filmed shows, so all they had to do was save the film.
I’ve always wondered what happens to things like TV news or sports coverage - particularly now that we’ve moved to 24-hours news. I always assumed that, at least in the UK, there was a legal obligation to retain at least things like interviews, and nowadays it’s entirely feasible to have a digital recorder running 24/7 backing up an entire channel, but what happened in the late 1980s, 1990s? Clips from old news programmes are occasionally broadcast in “do you remember 1989” programmes, so perhaps they just kept a low-fi archive somewhere. Or alternatively the vast majority was dumped, and clip shows only feature stories for which the footage survives. Dunno. The BBC seems to have kept a lot of old 1970s football matches, but would something like Grimsby vs St Mirren in 1974 have been kept?
Or things like Breakfast TV shows. There’s a market for old television game shows (which I assumed were wiped), I wonder if there’s a market for TV-AM circa 1987?
There’s an archive at some college in the U.S. of every news broadcast for the past few decades. I’m not sure they’re still doing it because there isn’t the need anymore, but at one time they were invaluable.
I’m sure all the major news organizations now keep all their broadcasts in some format.
I don’t see how you can call them liars, though… the show is called Comeback, after all. 