Much appreciated KM. This stuff fascinates me.
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Packaged TV Shows
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When Cheers reruns came to Memphis they were carried on WREG CBS 3, and Family Ties reruns were carried on either WPTY 24 or WLMT 30. So I don't think they were sold as a package.
My source for the info on the Rockford/Quincy deal is "The Last Mogul," by Dennis McDougal; comprehensive both as a bio of Lew Wasserman and a history of MCA. The Washington station that blew the lid had been told by MCA that they "couldn't have one without the other." It's possible that Rockford may have been paired with some other show elsewhere; at any rate, that type of block selling of shows was apparently illegal in itself and so was not something MCA would ever have advertised. That may have changed since, seems anything big business wants to do is legal now...
K
K.M. Richards
Guest
That does clear it up nicely, Jeff. Thanks.
...interestingly, WFAA-TV/8 Dallas also aired Branded and The Guns of Will Sonnett in an hour block for years, buried at 3:30 AM Sunday mornings. Apart from the plotline parallel of both series' lead characters drifting from one Old West town to another each week, there were no other similarities between them. I suspect King World mainly wanted to simply get both series into circulation as much as was possible, even if they were dumped onto weekend stopgap slots...
Right about that. There was one station here when I was a kid that practiced what I call the "Back up the truck, Harry!" school of program buying. In the black and white days, they bought almost everything from Screen Gems (first and second-run series, feature movies which at that time included Universal's pre-1948 backlog, and a particularly creaky cartoon package made up of Columbia's Krazy Kat and Pathe's early-talkie "Aesop's Fables.")
When they switched to color, they also switched to Universal, which was about the only company that had a lot of color reruns available; so we got The Virginian, Run For Your Life, (Kraft) Suspense Theatre, the color Dragnets, and Universal feature movies. (Unfortunately, they gave up on the idea of doing kid shows about then, so we never got the Walter Lantz cartoons, which would've been great...)
It seems like I can remember seeing that The Jeffersons was sold as a package at one time, possibly at about the same time as Bewitched and I Dream of Jeannie, and possibly with another Learcom to local stations, and they were carried by one of the Memphis area stations. does anyone know what the other show would have been? Thanks!
Another pair of shows that may have not been a package but get shown together is Lost in Space and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and sometimes The Time Tunnel was included as well, since they were all Irwin Allen sci-fi shows. They were together on ALN when it existed, and now on Me TV, minus The Time Tunnel.
Another pair of shows that may have not been a package but get shown together is Lost in Space and Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, and sometimes The Time Tunnel was included as well, since they were all Irwin Allen sci-fi shows. They were together on ALN when it existed, and now on Me TV, minus The Time Tunnel.
K
K.M. Richards
Guest
Once again, as I have pointed out and other have posted comments leaning toward ...
With very few exceptions, off-network series are never packaged together.
Let me try again to explain the Bewitched/I Dream Of Jeannie deal, because that wasn't really a "package" as we have defined it for purposes of this discussion. A package is two or more series -- nearly always first-run -- which are sold together by syndicators so that both shows air on the same station in each market. In the case of Xena/Hercules, which we have used as an example, if you dig deep enough into your memory banks, you may remember that each episode of either series always contained a promo spot for the other in one of the breaks. That was the real advantage ... cross-promotion of two series with similar demographic appeal. You couldn't do it if the two shows were on different stations, because what station manager was going to promote something airing on his competitor?
Back to Samantha and Jeannie: Again, if you go back to when those two shows were always running back-to-back on the same station (under the banner "Screen Gems Network" ... a two-program network?) there were certain national ads that always ran every day, in the same breaks, week in and week out. That made this a barter deal, not a package. The stations got the shows free of charge but were contractually required to run them together in a one-hour time slot and carry the few minutes of national ads in exchange for having a certain amount of local minutes to sell.
The Learcoms can be explained without even attempting to prove "packaging". Norman Lear could almost do no wrong through the mid-1970s to mid-1980s. He had a string of hits -- All In The Family (208 episodes, originally airing from 1973 to 1979, plus 97 episodes of Archie Bunker's Place from 1979 to 1983), Good Times (133, '74-'79), Maude (141, '72-'78), The Jeffersons (253, '75-'85), Mary Hartman/Fernwood 2Night (366, '76-'77), Sanford and Son (135, '72-'77), and One Day At A Time (209, '75-'84) -- and they remained durable as reruns long past their network runs. Lucky was the program director who had the budget to acquire as many of these as possible ... there was never a need to sell them as a package because they were extremely desirable to independent stations through the years.
I will close by reminding one and all that shows were not "packaged" simply because they appeared together in a syndicator's advertisements in trade publications. It was (and still is) common practice to market all of a company's offerings at once.
With very few exceptions, off-network series are never packaged together.
Let me try again to explain the Bewitched/I Dream Of Jeannie deal, because that wasn't really a "package" as we have defined it for purposes of this discussion. A package is two or more series -- nearly always first-run -- which are sold together by syndicators so that both shows air on the same station in each market. In the case of Xena/Hercules, which we have used as an example, if you dig deep enough into your memory banks, you may remember that each episode of either series always contained a promo spot for the other in one of the breaks. That was the real advantage ... cross-promotion of two series with similar demographic appeal. You couldn't do it if the two shows were on different stations, because what station manager was going to promote something airing on his competitor?
Back to Samantha and Jeannie: Again, if you go back to when those two shows were always running back-to-back on the same station (under the banner "Screen Gems Network" ... a two-program network?) there were certain national ads that always ran every day, in the same breaks, week in and week out. That made this a barter deal, not a package. The stations got the shows free of charge but were contractually required to run them together in a one-hour time slot and carry the few minutes of national ads in exchange for having a certain amount of local minutes to sell.
The Learcoms can be explained without even attempting to prove "packaging". Norman Lear could almost do no wrong through the mid-1970s to mid-1980s. He had a string of hits -- All In The Family (208 episodes, originally airing from 1973 to 1979, plus 97 episodes of Archie Bunker's Place from 1979 to 1983), Good Times (133, '74-'79), Maude (141, '72-'78), The Jeffersons (253, '75-'85), Mary Hartman/Fernwood 2Night (366, '76-'77), Sanford and Son (135, '72-'77), and One Day At A Time (209, '75-'84) -- and they remained durable as reruns long past their network runs. Lucky was the program director who had the budget to acquire as many of these as possible ... there was never a need to sell them as a package because they were extremely desirable to independent stations through the years.
I will close by reminding one and all that shows were not "packaged" simply because they appeared together in a syndicator's advertisements in trade publications. It was (and still is) common practice to market all of a company's offerings at once.
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Actually, All In The Family began in 1971, during the second half of the 1970-71 season (midseason).
Actually, All In The Family began in 1971, during the second half of the 1970-71 season (midseason).
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K
K.M. Richards
Guest
You try transcribing data from IMdB without making the occasional mistake.
Actually, I got it from Wikipedia.
Diff'rent Strokes, its spin-off The Facts of Life, Who's The Boss? and Married... with Children, although originally made by Embassy/ELP Communications, home of the ''Learcoms'', weren't produced by Norman Lear.
K
K.M. Richards
Guest
I was referring to my attempt to transcribe from IMdB. The correction was accurate, regardless of where you got it.
Why are you bringing up those later shows? They aren't part of the answer to the question I was answering, and it takes us even further away from the original topic. Or is there some connection to the original topic that I'm not seeing?
Why are you bringing up those later shows? They aren't part of the answer to the question I was answering, and it takes us even further away from the original topic. Or is there some connection to the original topic that I'm not seeing?
What I'm meaning is that those shows I mentioned, even though they aren't ''Learcoms'', also aired on syndication, packaged or not packaged, I guess.
K
K.M. Richards
Guest
Here's something for you to consider the next time something like that occurs to you ... once any sitcom has 100 episodes "in the can" it is probably going to go to syndication. By that measure, I could tie up page after page on this board with lists of shows that have been in syndication at some point.
Could we please go back on topic now, if we haven't all lost interest during this trip down a side track?
Could we please go back on topic now, if we haven't all lost interest during this trip down a side track?
Or just close this thread?
Sorry, my bad. Guess I went too far from the topic. I wanted to try to link something to the subject we're discussing. I'm going to try to follow your suggestion.
And of course I want this topic to keep going on if you wish, in fact, I got another packaged shows to discuss later.
K
K.M. Richards
Guest
Keeping in mind that first-run syndication is much more likely to have been packaged than are/were off-network reruns, there are probably several packages we haven't touched upon. If the shows you have in mind aren't old sitcoms (in which case I can say with better than 90% certainty the answer is "no") and you think they may have been packaged at some point, I think those would be legitimate to ask about.
I only ask to you keep in mind that programs may have been sold to the same station, by the same syndicator, but were not packaged together. You cannot presume that just because Program A and Program B both aired on Station X and came from Syndicator Z they were a package; in fact, they probably weren't, unless they were shows like Hercules/Xena or Wheel/Jeopardy which were/are not reruns of programs originally aired on the networks.
So when Star Trek: The Next Generation and Deep Space Nine were both running in first run syndication, would they have been packaged together?
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K
K.M. Richards
Guest
Yes, sort of ... but mostly no.
TNG entered syndication in September, 1987 and had a 5½ year run before DS9 came along in January, 1993. When Paramount introduced the latter into syndication, stations running TNG had first crack at it.
DS9 ended first-run episodes in June, 1999 ... five years after TNG ended its run. So that means the two were airing concurrently for only a year and a half. So while they certainly were sold together to virtually every station that ran them, there really wasn't much overlap time for a traditional "package" to be marketed. But if you're counting sales of both series to the same station (which is the "sort of") then yes.
And, of course, in the midst of it all was Voyager, which launched the UPN network in January, 1995 (about six months after TNG finished its run), which was responsible for pretty much every independent station running DS9 becoming a charter affiliate of that network. Voyager lasted until May, 2001 and Enterprise premiered that September, running for all of three seasons before expiring.
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