The Season Finale

Well, it’s that time of year again: the time when we laugh harder, cry harder, and rush out and buy advertised products harder than we ever have. Or so the networks hope. Yep, it’s finale time.

A season finale is a special type of episode. For most shows, it’s going to be several months before you see a new episode, and they want to make sure that you’re as hooked as possible. After all, you’ll be tempted in the fall by all the new and shiny shows that everyone is rolling out (most of which will be cancelled within the first half of the season anyway). The summer’s a long time and, as previously discussed, there aren’t as many reruns to keep you reminded of what good times you and their show had. What if you get a taste of a new show in the same timeslot and you stop watching theirs? It would be absolutely terrible.

Therefore, finales pull out all the stops. Traditional examples of finale pandering (and I won’t be including episodes/series because there are far too many): weddings! Babies! A long-awaited kiss/declaration of love! Drama! Death! Almost-death! Characters in peril! Proposals! Pregnancies! Revealed secrets! Fights! Epic storylines! Guest stars! Actual-conclusions-of-story-arcs! …and many more I’m sure you can suggest.

A lot of these are similar to sweeps storylines; again, these are episodes the networks really want you to watch. The motivation is slightly different, though—they want you to watch now so you’ll be sure to watch later. For this, they have their ace-in-the-hole: the cliffhanger. Now, I’ve already written a whole entry about cliffhangers, so I won’t go into them too much. But cliffhangers are almost ubiquitous in season-enders. They’re a great way to make sure the audience wants to watch the next season—or at least the first five minutes of the next season. If they come up with a cliffhanger intense enough—or one the audience can’t figure out how the protagonists will get out of—it has the potential to be talked about throughout the summer, which leads to high numbers for the season premiere. And if it’s being talked about, it’s likely new viewers will be brought to the show by word-of-mouth. The right season finale cliffhanger can be gold for a show (see “Who Shot J.R.?” from Dallas).

There is some danger in ending on a cliffhanger. Not all shows know if they’re coming back the next season; upfronts take place after the episodes have been filmed. Some shows get an early green light. Some shows get news of cancellation early, which is in some ways a blessing. They can find a way to wrap up their storylines and give a complete send-off to the show, knowing it will be their series finale.

But some shows are “on the bubble.” They could be renewed, they could be cancelled; it depends on what the network has on their plate for the next season. Those shows take a risk when they end on a cliffhanger, because, if they’re not renewed, that’s how their story ends. Fans are incredibly frustrated when a show is left with an open ending. If a show doesn’t take the gamble, though, they risk losing viewers the next season to shows with storylines that haven't been wrapped up in a neat and shiny bow.

Reruns, and a Lack Thereof

Well, it’s been a couple weeks, folks. Sorry about that.

But my long hiatus inspired me to focus this week’s blog on what I promised you a while ago: the death of the rerun.

Reruns were great. Say you missed an episode, or got into a show late in the season—you could always count on a hiatus full of reruns to catch up. But that’s unfortunately not really true anymore.

To clear up one small potential confusion: reruns vs. syndication. A rerun is an episode of a show that is played again in its normal timeslot instead of a new episode. As seasons got shorter, they were used during hiatuses to fill out the season. When a show is in syndication, it is played in order (generally) on another channel in a different timeslot. The current season won’t be a part of the syndication set, so it’s not as useful for catching recent missed episodes. (There’s also the instance of a show repeating its last episode at points throughout the week—this is common on non-network channels like USA. I believe they call them “encore airings,” which works for me as a name, so I’ll go with that.)

In any case, reruns have gotten fewer and farther between in the past several years. Some shows still use them during hiatuses, but it’s also become in vogue to replace these rerun episodes with new content of some kind. Reality TV shows often serve this purpose, but scripted programming has also been used to plug hiatus gaps. The most glaring example of this is the summer hiatus. Once filled with a variety of reruns, summer tends to be glutted with reality television and shorter runs of scripted shows.

Why? Well, odds are, viewers will watch something new rather than an episode of something they’ve already seen. You can get a larger audience with something new. Basic cable shows clicked onto this concept many years ago, and started airing new programming opposite the networks’ regularly scheduled hiatuses. USA, TNT, FX, and others knew they couldn’t compete with the basic networks during the normal season—a hit show on cable would likely be cancelled in two weeks on a network because of its low ratings—so they shifted their schedules. And the networks decided they needed to jump on the bandwagon as well, or lose to the suddenly-available new content.

The other big blow to reruns: TiVo and the internet. All of a sudden, it didn’t matter as much if you couldn’t watch right away or forgot to catch a show—there were plenty of ways for you to catch up on what you missed. And TiVo meant you didn’t have to worry if you wanted to watch two shows at once; you no longer needed to wait and catch up on the second one during the summer.

Overall, the decline of the rerun was probably a profitable decision by the networks. While it costs more to air something new than to air a rerun, reality TV is cheap to produce and the increase in viewership (and therefore ad revenue) makes up for it. Still, we do have to take into account the main downside of not airing reruns: less exposure. With reruns, people could happen onto a show during a hiatus and decide it was worth watching regularly. The potential for grabbing new viewers was strong. Now, a show’s exposure is often limited to its new episodes. If you look at the math, that’s probably half of what could be expected a decade ago. So while this strategy is profitable on the surface, it remains to be seen if the networks are actually shooting themselves in the foot.