When do reruns start

Print Subscriptions. Deseret News homepage. Filed under: Television Entertainment. Reddit Pocket Email Linkedin. Jeopardy August 15, Sign up for the newsletter Morning Edition Start your day with the top stories you missed while you were sleeping. Thanks for signing up! The tradition on British TV is for shorter seasons, so they rarely, if ever, meet the episode mark.

For example, smash-hit Britcoms like "Fawlty Towers" and "Mr. Bean" each produced fewer than 20 episodes in total. Interestingly, "The Prisoner" could technically clear the episode bar if you believe a little conspiracy theory advanced by some of the show's more obsessive fans.

Taken together, the shows produced a total of episodes. In "Danger Man," McGoohan played a spy. That show ended when "The Prisoner" began, and on "The Prisoner" he played a spy who was trying to retire but was captured by a mysterious agency that held him captive.

A number of smaller parallels between the two shows further fed the speculation. Have a question? Often, programs are not economical until they are sold for syndication. Unfortunately since local television stations often need to sell more commercial airtime than network affiliates, syndicated shows are usually cut to make room for extra commercials. Often about episodes four seasons' worth are required for a weekly series to be rerun on a daily schedule at least four times a week.

Very popular series running more than four seasons may start daily reruns of the first seasons, while production and airings continue of current seasons episodes. No-one anticipated the long life that a popular television series would eventually see in syndication, so most performers signed contracts that limited residual payments to about six repeats.

This situation went unchanged until the mids, when contracts for new shows extended residual payments for the performers, regardless of the number of reruns. TV Guide originally used the term rerun, but abruptly changed to repeat in the early s, apparently as rerun had developed a negative connotation.

Other TV listings services and publications, including local newspapers, would often indicate reruns as " R "; since the earlys, many listing services now only provide a notation only if an episode is new " N " , with reruns getting no notation. In the United Kingdom, most drama and comedy series run for shorter seasons - typically 6, 7 or 13 episodes - and are then replaced by others.

An exception is soap operas which are either on all year round for example EastEnders and Coronation Street , or are on for a season similar to the American system. As in the US, fewer new episodes are made in summer. Until recently it was also common practice for the BBC, ITV and Channel 4 to repeat classic shows from their archives, but this has more or less dried up in favour of newer and cheaper formats like reality shows, except on the BBC where older BBC shows, especially sitcoms like Dad's Army and Fawlty Towers , are frequently repeated.

Syndication did not exist as such in Britain until the arrival of satellite, cable and later, from on, digital television, although it could be argued that many ITV programmes up to the early s, particularly imported programming was syndicated in the sense that each ITV region bought in some programmes independently of the ITV Network, and in particular many programmes out of primetime made by smaller ITV stations were "part-networked" where some regions would show them and others would not.

Some of these channels, like their US counterparts, make commercial timing cuts; others get around this by running shows in longer time slots, and critics of timing cuts see no reason why all channels should not do the same.

Early on in the history of British television, agreements with the actors' union Equity and other trade bodies limited the number of times a single programme could be broadcast, usually only twice, and these showings were limited to within a set time period such as five years.