You don't have to restrict yourself to watching "old" TV shows, you just need to get away from broadcast TV and its restrictions. Ever watched Stranger Things on Netflix?
So do I. Today, if I want to watch political incorrectness, I'm restricted to watching myself in the mirror!
It does matter... This is what I remember from his summer replacement show for Kraft Music Hall... "Edward G. Robinson, Edward G. Robinson, Edward G. Robinson..." I was 10 when this bit was on NBC-TV and have never forgotten it... Enjoy! Des O'Connor sings about the Movie Stars of the past
Grand_Ennui wrote the following as part of a post: For a long time a TV season consisted of 24 episodes. This allowed each episode to be run twice in a season, with space for holidays specials (like Christmas) and special events (like The Oscars). I think reasons for the trend in the reduction of the number of episodes are: Cable Programming: Non-networks tend to order few episodes of a series for each season. This may have been influenced by anime where 13 episodes is often the episode count for an entire series. An example of this The Big O which ran for 13 episodes and was popular enough in the U. S. to picked up for another 13 episodes. Less Concern For Reruns: Used to be a series had to have a minimum number of episodes for syndication (I think the number was 60, which allowed for a minimum of 12 weeks of reruns). This was the reason for the way that the anime series Robotech came about. The original anime (Macross) only had 48 episodes which was not enough for syndication. To increase the number of episodes, they took two unrelated series of 12 episodes each and via dubbing and editing they fused the three series into one called that was called Robotech. I've compared the process of making Robotech comparable to taking Star Trek, Space 1999, and Buck Rogers In The 25th Century and fusing them into one series. Less of a Commitment to a Series: This is related to the Summer Replacement Series. A Network might be willing to take a risk on a small number of episodes but not on an old-style TV season. If it is a hit it can be renewed, and if it is a flop there was less at risk. The Miniseries: This came about in the 1970s. Before then, TV basically consisted of series, movies, news, and cartoons that could run for seasons if the rating warranted. In the 1970s, you saw the rise of the miniseries, where they intentionally limited it to a number of episodes with no intention of continuing the series (although sometimes this occurred, see Twin Peaks and Mancuso FBI [a continuation of the Favorite Son miniseries]). It was just supposed to tell one story, and that was it. Sheer Amount Of Broadcast Space: In the three-network (with possibly one or two independent station) days there were a limited number of hours for programming. Now, there are dozens of channels with a need for programming to fill that space. Now there is room for even a series with a small number of episodes. I'm sure there are other factors, but these are the ones that came to my mind.
What will be the future of re-runs? Many shows now burn out fast or are just limited. There is (or at least was) so much money to be made in syndication but there will be fewer options in the future if shows only run a few seasons with just 10-13 eps per season plus if these shows stay on - their respective network/platform- Amazon, Peacock, etc. and not allowed to be syndicated are we just going to be keep seeing non-stop Seinfeld, Everybody Love Raymond, Friends and nothing really new?
I think it will depend on the ratings. If the rating are good the show will remain on the air, if not it will be dropped. In my hometown (Cleveland OH) they ran an hour-long block of Hogan's Heroes one summer. It was so popular that the block remained for years.
That was one of those fluky situations where the show was filmed (and an early one in color) for the 1965-1966 season. It had been slotted to start in September of 1965, but CBS had gotten a lot of flack for cancelling SLATTERY'S PEOPLE with Richard Crenna. As a last-minute decision, they shelved CORONET BLUE and ran SLATTERY'S PEOPLE for another season. By the time they DID air CORONET BLUE in the summer of 1967, Frank Converse had already signed on to be a regular in the ABC show N.Y.P.D. So even though CORONET BLUE had garnered pretty good ratings in the summer of 1967, it just was not able to continue. I remember watching CORONET BLUE with my dad that summer. We both liked it a lot - it gave is something new to look forward to instead of reruns. That was the summer that THE FUGITIVE ended its run with the finale in August/September - and in Philly was pushed back to later in the night by Phillies baseball games! I was really happy to get the DVDs of CORONET BLUE. Never thought I'd see that.
I meant that facetiously. I remembered O’Connor because I’d never heard of him (and my sister and I would imitate his or his announcer’s accent), and it generally seemed to me that they were giving summer variety shows to many people I hadn’t heard of. He was our poster child for the summer replacement host. It wasn’t like he was Dean Martin.
Something I miss from an OLD MOVIE that I don't see anymore - the movie THE EIGER SANCTION starring Clint Eastwood..... George Kennedy pats a bikini clad lady in the buttocks.... Clint mimics the voice of a gay man..... An overly extroverted gay man in the movie has a small dog named F_GG_T.... The movie was made in 1975 ... "political correctness" back then was a politician getting something right.
I miss late night music video shows. The shows that mixed up the popular with some more obscure vids. Kind of like 120 Minutes. Hell, we used to stay up all night watching MTV back in the original VJ days.
I now add columbo to that list for locations. I was watching season 2 episode 1 with the the john cavettes episode. It was a Hollywood bowl tour which i had seen 10 years ago.
"EEE-Yeeeeeeeeesssss? The booming voice of the late, great Frank Nelson as he turned around to reveal himself to some unsuspecting foil. You knew his victim - be it Jack Benny, Lucille Ball or Redd Foxx, to name but a few - was in for a few minutes of true suffering via his trademark dripping sarcasm and thinly-veiled disdain. Often imitated (looking at you, Simpsons), never duplicated, he provided decades of iconic comedy gold on countless TV shows.
I finally got around to watching The Eiger Sanction last year. There is some hilarious, yet un-PC stuff in this film that would make a wokester’s head explode. As soon as the end credits rolled, I went online and ordered the Blu-ray. At the rate things are going, films like this will likely end up either being banned or edited.
The original, opinionated, chauvinistic, misinformed, bigoted, ignorant, jingoistic, know-it-all American blowhard, Archie Bunker:
And yet, no one seems to want to ban or censor it for some reason. Maybe because it is making fun of offensiveness, not being offensive. There is a difference. And people using "woke" as an insult is hilarious. You might as well go on the game show "It pays to be ignorant".
It's a crying shame that more people don't get this. The joke is on them. You have a standing appointment to be the host of your up-and-coming game show. I'll watch!
Very early on, some series had as many as 39 episodes per season, regardless of whether they're 30-minute or 1-hour shows: The Honeymooners Gunsmoke (from 1955-60) Have Gun - Will Travel (from 1957-60) Perry Mason (season 1, 1957-58) The trend for nearly 40 episodes per season lasted until the all-color era was in full swing in the 1966-67 season. ~Ben
I never realized this. Now I understand why I noticed that there were more rerun episodes than I was previously aware of. Before, you would watch a show and discover that it was a rerun, here and there. But suddenly it seemed that after not all that many shows, the rest of the year (TV season year) was nothing but reruns!
What got into the minds of television network executives that they needed to show reruns even before the season was over (in essence, defining the end of the season as when they wanted it to end, not in the way we grew up to understand the end of a season)?
