resinrats

With all the recent BTTF threads, I remembered I always wondered about. In the movie, Marty mentions TV reruns & his family has no idea what a rerun is. I was born well after shows were rerun so they've always been around for me.

So how did TV shows go before reruns. I know some older shows have more episodes per season than today but none seem to have enough to always have a new ep every week. Did they put other shows on in the timeslots? Figure a few weeks could be taken up by Holiday related specials but that still leaves a lot of weeks to fill.

Or am I just thinking too much into this line. I know Marty's family had just got their first TV but they didn't seem like they had never seen it before so reruns shouldn't have been unknown.


If there were no reruns before, when did networks begin reruns or at least reruns as we know them today.

Travis McClain

You know, I've always meant to look into this myself. I assumed that a certain amount of programming time was occupied by sporting events and live coverage of political events like conventions and such, the same as today. Networks didn't expand to a full 24 hours of broadcasting for a while, so that accounts for some of the spacing out of programming. A side question: when did they first begin airing movies on TV? What about the advent of the mini-series format? The late night talk shows?

JuryDuty

networks didn't expand to 24 hours programming until the 80's, I think. And in fact (I think you even see this on BTTF), when TV began, many networks showed nothing until the show they wanted to broadcast aired. It was just dead air around it and you tuned in around the time the show was to start and waited for the signal.

Chew

If you look at the broadcast schedule for I Love Lucy throughout it's run, the only time you see more than a week gap is around Christmas. For the most part, they went straight from Sep/Oct to May/June.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of..._Lucy_episodes

DJariya

Easy answer. Programming was much cheaper before. It didn't cost $4-5M an episode to produce 1 hour of scripted TV. TV programming is really expensive nowadays for 1 hour dramas and even 30 minute comedies and they simply can't afford to program for 36 weeks (1 broadcast season) Hence we get 22-24 weeks with repeats. Plus, the point of repeats is to help the network recoup production costs for these shows, obviously it happens more times with procedurals than serial shows like Grey's Anatomy, which got horrible numbers in reruns.

Networks are also taking into account periods when noone is watching TV like the Holidays, the beginning of the new year or even early spring. And of course there is sports like MLB postseason, NBA Finals, Stanley Cup that also fills time.

Travis McClain

This reminds me, there's a song Johnny Cash recorded called "The Night Hank Williams Came to Town." In the spirit of the Back to the Future inspiration for this thread, I thought I'd share some notes about the song. It was written by Bobby Braddock & Charlie Williams, and it's about a night that Hank Williams put on a concert in a small town. One of the lines in the song is, "I Love Lucy debuted on TV/that was one big event we didn't see." That aired on 15 September 1951. Later in the song, we're told that "On and on he sang into the night/'Jambalaya,' 'Cheatin' Heart,' 'I Saw the Light'." Only "Jambalaya" and "Your Cheatin' Heart" weren't recorded until 1952. It's possible that he performed them in concert before recording them, but not likely.

Not sure what question this is an "easy answer" to, but it's not the one the OP asked. He asked when reruns began to air. Your remarks seem to be more about when syndication became lucrative. And remember, even though golden age episodes weren't produced on a $4-5 million budget, they were expensive for their era and in the early days they were produced live--with all the hassle and constraints inherently involved with such a project.

There was a lot at stake for everyone from the manufacturers of TV sets to the networks; it's not as though they began production on the cheap with the foreknowledge that subsequent eras would advance the medium. So even if you accounted for inflation and determined that the cost of an episode was still a lot less then, the potential for success or failure was much greater.

But, again, this is off topic. The OP isn't after a "why," but rather a "when."

Count Dooku

As previously posted, back in the 1950s TV shows would produce 39 episodes to run continuously for the entire TV season (Sept - May) and then take the 13 weeks of summer off, when they would be replaced by special "summer" shows like a live variety series. Even as late as the mid-60s, series would produce more than 30 episodes a year.

Keep in mind that coming up with programming to fill schedules was pretty easy with just 3 or 4 networks in existence [And only the largest cities got all the networks. The vast majority of the US received just CBS and/or NBC.] And a lot of prime-time programming was sports, game shows, variety --not just sitcoms and dramas.

With regard to BTTF, which took place on Nov 12, 1955.

I Love Lucy was the most popular show on TV, and reruns of Lucy had been run on CBS in the summer of 1955. Lucy was special case both because of the show's incredible popularity and the fact that the production quality was so high [the show was filmed] and copies could be made.
It seems really strange to think that most shows were not produced with the expectation that anyone would want to watch them again or would want a copy, but that was the case in the early 1950s.

On a note of trivia, the Honeymooners episode that Marty sees being broadcast for the first time (in Nov 55) was actually broadcast 12/31/55 --New Year's Eve, and (yes) they also broadcast a new episode the week before on Xmas Eve.

klemsaba

Interesting... I always thought Marty was referring to syndication 're-runs'.

Travis McClain

Really? I knew even in the 80s before I paid attention to such terms as "syndication" that the joke in that scene rested on the fact that in the 1950s, no one would have given any thought to an episode being aired a second time later.

rw2516

Most of the U.S. didn't get any network tv. In fact when The Honeymooners aired in 1955 I doubt the network even reached the western U.S. where BTTF takes place. For quite awhile the you had to live within broadcast range of New York City to get network tv. The earliest issues of TV GUIDE only cover the New York area. The networks expanded west bit by bit and TV GUIDE began opening regional printing centers and publishing regional editions. By the early 60s CBS and NBC were countrywide. ABC, the newer network, didn't complete constuction until the early 60s when they got west of the Mississippi. Those of us around in the 70s went through the same thing with cable. Parts of your town would have it, others wouldn't. Block by block the cable companies would expand out. You just had to wait until they got to your street.

Kevin M. Dean

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rerun

Groucho

Count Dooku

By 1949, all four of the TV networks (NBC, CBS, ABC, Dumont) had stations in LA.

In 1949, ABC had affiliates in NYC, Philadelphia, Washington DC, Detroit, Chicago, San Francisco and LA. Broadcasting in these seven cities gave ABC access to more than 25% of the US TV viewing audience at the time.

This is a map of Dumont network stations in the US in 1949.