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.
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