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.
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