The way I understood it, once a show reaches 4 seasons, it’s deemed profitable or at least worthy of reruns? Why/how?
I’m not american if that’s relevant.
In: Economics
Syndication is when the producers of a TV show start selling it more broadly to local networks. It is, as you noted, mostly associated with reruns. Local TV stations would have new, proprietary shows to run during “prime time” in the evening, but there are many more hours in the day. Rather than just air nothing in the daytime or at night, they would purchase older shows with long libraries and play them on infinite rotation. Before the days of streaming or even DVD box sets, there could be significant audiences for these reruns, made up of people who missed the show when it aired new.
The four seasons (I’ve also heard 100 episodes) benchmark came from the idea that doing reruns of a show with a small library would get stale. If a show only ever made 10 episodes, people who tuned in when it was playing would probably recognize the episode from a few weeks ago. With 100 (or more) episodes, it takes longer to loop back around. Even if someone ends up seeing the same episode twice, it will still feel “fresh” because they had a break of a few months rather than a few days. I don’t know if these benchmarks were ever rigorously tested. It was just “common knowledge” in the TV business.
With the rise of streaming, syndication has become much less important for television. In the syndication era, TV producers gave preference to show concepts that could generate an infinite supply of interchangeable episodes. Each episode is self-contained and built on a reusable formula like a procedural or hangout comedy. Shows like this were much more likely to reach syndication and fetch high prices there. Now that everything is available on demand, producers are more comfortable with shows that tell a particular story across a small number of episodes, because they can expect audiences to watch them in order and at their own pace.
Syndication simply means that a TV show can be purchased and run by any local network.
Most shows are created by the network that initially airs them (e.g. CBS and The Big Bang Theory, NBC and Law and Order). They will be the only one who can air them for a time period.
Eventually, they are willing to sell the rights to other networks, usually local affiliates, so you may see reruns of a show on FOX in one area, but ABC in another, and so on.
The four seasons was just a guideline for when a show may have been popular enough to put into reruns. There’s nothing stopping anyone from syndicating a one-season wonder like Firefly if the rights holder is willing to sell.
Some shows are made for syndication, though, and go directly to the phase where they are shopped to networks.
Syndication doesn’t just happen with TV shows; it happens with all kinds of media. Magazine articles, comic strips, radio programs and more.
Syndication is just an agreement to let other companies use your media. In TV, it’s usually *old* TV episodes.
If you have a TV show that was popular for 4 seasons, other TV stations know that it will be good enough to fill “dead air”.
Making new content is really expensive. It’s a lot cheaper to take somebody else’s content and pay them.
The former gold standard was 100 episodes, which for 50s/60s shows would be 3 seasons and 4.5 seasons when TV shows went to 22 episode seasons.
Unlike most other countries, there are no over-the-air national channels. Channels local to an area will contract with networks to fill a majority of the programming day. Partially because of law and partly because of tradition networks do not program from 4-8 PM save for 1/2 hour of national news.
Local stations until the last 10 years would have 1/2-1 hour of their local news, and would have 2 1/2-3 hours to fill. They would generally do this by purchasing programs sold by syndicators, as it was the law for a long time that networks could not sell the programs themselves. Usually the pre-6 PM shows would be mix of talk shows, cartoons, reruns of old sitcoms, or old movies. After the news, it was usually game shows or celebrity shows like Entertainment Tonight.
Starting in the early 00s, it became more profitable for local stations to program news from 4-6, as they would keep all advertising revenue as opposed to sharing with a syndicator. Because of this, many hour long shows and movies faded from syndication, and most comedies went to non-network stations in the market. There is also a very arcane rule that in larger markets, a majority of stations are forbidden from showing syndicated reruns between 7-8 PM.
Unlike past days, syndication of reruns is no longer lucrative because of limitless options elsewhere, and only the most popular long running comedies exist in syndication. Of the top 10 shows in syndication today, only 3 are reruns of old shows and none of them are comedies (https://www.nielsen.com/data-center/top-ten/#television)
Syndication is selling the show for airing as re-runs. So a show airs on a major network, once a week on a set day/time, with typically 22 new episodes a season. Seasons run basically school year, like Sep – May. Typically, for a show to be viable for re-runs, it needed 100 episodes, so mid-way through season 5.
Once there are the 100 episodes, the show can be sold to air on other channels, because they’re typically run daily or even in blocks of multiple episodes a day. So when a cable channel like TBS or a local TV channel buys rights to Friends, they might run 3 episodes a day, airing at 6pm, 9pm and 11pm. Or might run 2 episodes of Seinfeld at 5pm and 5:30pm every day/every weekday.
The ability to widely resell a show means a big, new revenue stream for the production company who owns the show, as popular shows may air in perpetuity on various channels. Shows like Brady Bunch or All in the Family went off the air 40+ years ago and are still aired on TV.
Others have answered the basics, but the standard for syndication used to be 100 episodes.
Usually, this would hit somewhere around the 5 year mark.
But the 100 number isn’t set in stone. *NewsRadio*, for example, had a respectable run and was fairly popular in reruns but only had 97 episodes.
With premium cable and streaming switching to lower episode counts per season, the 100-episode rule really doesn’t apply much anymore. POpular shows like Breaking Bad only had around 60+ episodes, but AMC/FX still air it. (Roughly, half-hour sitcoms still need to be popular enough to get around 100 episodes, but hour-long dramas can go much lower.)
Traditionally with US television networks, they buy a show from a production company. The production company could have the same parent company or they could be separate.
Usually, if the network likes an idea, they give the production company enough money to create a sample show of the idea. That’s called a pilot.
If the network likes the pilot, they’ll order more episodes of the show. Usually for broadcast network TV in America (NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox, CW), that’s about half of a season, 12 more episodes for 13 total. The network will schedule the show on their calendar and promote it.
If the show does well enough with viewers watching (or the network believes in the show), the network orders more episodes to be produced; traditionally 9 – 13 more episodes to make a full season. So after the first season, the show produces 22 – 26 episodes. The network will air these episodes over the course of a broadcast year. The contract with the production company will determine how many times the network can broadcast the show in that year.
If the network is happy with the show, they’ll do what’s called a renewal. They’ll order more episodes of the next television season. Generally, it’ll be enough new shows for a full season of 22 – 26 episodes. That allows the production company to write new episodes and make sure the actors are available for producing new episodes. If the network doesn’t want the show anymore, they “cancel” it and usually the production company stops making the show.
This becomes the cycle of a series. The network pays for more episodes for new seasons.
But here’s the catch: traditionally, the network didn’t pay the production company enough money for make a profit for the series. Usually the network pays for the series at cost or below and the production company absorbs that difference. But the production company owns the show, not the broadcast network.
When the show had reached 4 seasons, traditionally that means that show has 88 – 104 episodes produced. The network might renew it for another season, which would be the fifth. The production company has episodes at this point that local stations, looking for programming, might want to show this series. If the show has 104 episodes; and local stations are planning to air the show once every weekday, that means that the show can air for almost 21 weeks without having to repeat an episode. The local stations are willing to pay for that privilege because the network show has a fanbase who want to see the old episodes the network is no longer broadcasting.
So the production company usually partners with a company who has the ability to distribute the show to all the local TV stations that want to pay to broadcast the show. That company is called a Syndicator. Usually the deals are written so that as new episodes are produced, eventually the production company will get money for those episodes when they are added to the package until the network no longer wants to pay to produce new episodes of the series (or the production company decides to stop producing the series due to a variety of reasons like the cast no longer wanting to make the show or the cost of making the show exceed the benefit of syndicating the new episodes).
This is what syndication is. Selling the show to individual shows to the stations so they’ll have content to broadcast.
In addition, some shows are produced just to be sold to individual stations without ever being on a broadcast network. Shows like Family Feud, Jeopardy, The Kelly Clarkson Show, TMZ, and Entertainment Tonight are created as original episodes and sold by the syndicators to local stations.
I wrote “traditionally” because the original model changed; first due to cable networks getting broadcast rights to these shows, and now streaming outlets buying rights too. Those models work similarly to the syndication model in that they pay for broadcast rights for the episodes, but differently because they might air the episodes a lot more than the local stations. And those outlets having the episodes make them worth less to the local stations because they aren’t the exclusive broadcast of the show in their market because viewers can see the show on cable or on-demand on a streamer.
So syndication is a lot more complicated these days than it was once upon a time when a show like Star Trek and The Brady Bunch would become a big hit in syndication after not being successful as a broadcast network show.
Also, a lot of shows, especially originals for cable and streamers only produce 8 – 13 episodes a year. That means fewer episodes produced and fewer to sell on the syndication market.
Latest Answers