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100 episodes is frequently cited as the threshold at which point a television series becomes viable for syndication in the United States.^[1][2][3] Although much depends on the length of a show's seasons, this point is usually reached during a prime time series' fifth season.

Contents 1 Successes and exceptions 2 Lower expectations and disappointments 3 Reality television 4 See also 5 References

[edit] Successes and exceptions

Syndication is often a profitable enterprise because series can run for decades after they stop production. In this way, many shows that do not gain much profit during their first run will still prove to be viable to the network if they can last 100 episodes. 100 episodes are effectively required for strip syndication, as this allows for 20 weeks of five-day-a-week reruns before repeating an episode. However, there are exceptions; for example, the 65-episode block, common in Children's programming, allows for a 13-week cycle of daily showings that repeats four times per year. Also, syndicated dramas are often syndicated weekly and as such do not rerun episodes as frequently.

Shows of fewer episodes have become syndication successes. For example, Lost in Space ceased production in 1968 after 84 episodes because it was becoming very expensive to produce. More famously, the original Star Trek series had only 79 episodes available when it ended in 1969 but became successful enough in syndication to spawn 11 movies and four spin-off series. Extreme examples include The Prisoner and Hondo, both successfully syndicated for more than 30 years despite having only 17 episodes produced. Similarly, The Honeymooners was syndicated with only 39 episodes produced, though later compilations of other Honeymooners sketches from The Jackie Gleason Shows eventually brought this number to well over 100. The 1973-1974 series Dusty's Trail only lasted 26 episodes yet has been repeated to this day due in part to its public domain status, which makes it extremely cheap to repeat. More recently, Clueless has been more successful in syndication than during its network run even though only 62 episodes had been produced by the time the series ended in 1999. The original 1978 series Battlestar Galactica and its spin-off Galactica 1980 produced a mere 31 episodes put together, and yet it not only remains in syndication but was popular enough to inspire a 2003 reimagining that produced a 75-episode TV series.

GSN reruns several game shows that ran less than 100 episodes, including Greed (44 episodes), Double Dare (65 episodes), Dog Eat Dog (26 episodes), and several others. Incidentally, only on rare occasions have game shows been rerun on broadcast television. Despite having very high output as far as numbers of episodes (a typical 13-week run of even an unsuccessful game show yielded 65 episodes), most networks instead opted to recycle the tapes of those shows, as it was viewed at the time as a more profitable practice than trying to sell reruns of daytime programming. With the advent of cable channels, rerunning game shows has become more common; for instance, Merv Griffin's Crosswords, which lasted one season and 225 episodes in syndication, continues in reruns on FamilyNet to this day, two years later.

[edit] Lower expectations and disappointments

On the other hand, a 100-episode series may be syndicated, but aired in inconvenient or odd time slots such as early morning, mid-afternoon or late at night, if the show wasn't critically acclaimed during its network run or was a show under the radar and doesn't warrant a prime timeslot; examples include The Parent Hood, Grace Under Fire, My Wife and Kids, Still Standing, and Yes, Dear.

There are also cases, such as Mad About You and Newsradio, where a series is expected to do well in syndication but ends up with disappointing Nielsen ratings and revenue. Reasons include dated references in early seasons, or plotlines in later seasons that fall flat, causing the series to end up being defined by that one plotline or season rather than as a whole, changing the audience's perception.

[edit] Reality television

In particular, reality shows that have reached the 100 episode milestone have found syndication problematic. With the serial episodic nature of the shows, along with the game show elements that come with competitive reality programs, and the "event" nature of first-run reality shows to have unique elements to them to appeal to audiences on their first runs on networks, these factors hamper their attempts to have the programs have a second life in syndication. Previous seasons of The Amazing Race, for example ran on GSN starting in 2005 nightly; however the factor that the winning team at the end of each season was already known and the loss of the unexpected drama within each episode didn't draw many viewers to the second-run episodes, and subsequently by the beginning of 2006, GSN decided to show the repeats only in a late overnight slot. MTV's The Real World also failed to generate much audience interest in a three-year syndicated run when offered to local stations, as MTV's tactic to marathon entire seasons of the show often on the network reduced the value of the episodes to be more of a filler than as a series. However, these marathon events, where networks such as MTV or VH1 have shown an entire season of a reality program in a block, have been successful enough for them to become common on the networks: in 2008, both channels have frequently broadcast a season of America's Next Top Model in this fashion, airing all of the episodes in order in a single day.

Additionally, NBC's Fear Factor (a reality series in which each episode was self-contained) was promoted by that network's syndication division as "repeat-proof" when the show was sold into syndication to local broadcast networks and FX in 2004, with some stations showing the program twice a day.^[4] After a strong start though, and as NBC began to use Fear Factor to plug weaknesses within its schedule, the ratings for the show's repeats fell, and by the beginning of 2006, FX had stopped airing Fear Factor (though it began to air in mid-morning again in the fall of 2006), and the show's syndicated run ended quietly in mid-September 2006.

[edit] See also

• Rerun

[edit] References