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
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)
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