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Rerun
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A rerun or repeat is a re-airing of an episode of a radio or television broadcast. The invention of the rerun is generally credited to Desi Arnaz. Some viewers find reruns annoying, although many viewers appreciate the opportunity to re-watch a program they enjoyed or watch one they missed the first time round. There are two types of reruns—those that occur during a hiatus, and those that occur when a program is syndicated.
In the UK, the word "repeat" refers only to a single episode; "rerun" or "rerunning" is the preferred term for an entire series/season.
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Encyclopedia
A rerun or repeat is a re-airing of an episode of a radio or television broadcast. The invention of the rerun is generally credited to Desi Arnaz. Some viewers find reruns annoying, although many viewers appreciate the opportunity to re-watch a program they enjoyed or watch one they missed the first time round. There are two types of reruns—those that occur during a hiatus, and those that occur when a program is syndicated.
In the UK, the word "repeat" refers only to a single episode; "rerun" or "rerunning" is the preferred term for an entire series/season. "Repeat" is also used to refer to programs shown less than a week after the original broadcast, before the next episode of the series.
Reruns in the United States
In the United States, most television shows from the late 1940s and early 1950s were performed live, and in many cases they were never recorded. However, television networks in the United States began making kinescope recordings of shows broadcast live from the East Coast. This allowed the show to be broadcast a few hours later for the West Coast. These kinescopes, along with pre-filmed shows, and later, videotape, paved the way for extensive reruns of syndicated television series.
During hiatus
In the United States, currently running shows will rerun older episodes from the same season in order to fill the time slot with the same program. This is often done for headliner shows because the length of the year (52 weeks) is far more than the length of a pick-up (13 weeks) or a full season (around 24 weeks). Shows will tend to start re-running episodes around November and show only reruns from mid-December until Sweeps Week in February (where a show will return to new episodes in order to spike their ratings). This winter phase is often used to trial new shows in order to see if they deserve a 13-episode run. Headliners will return from February Sweeps until May Sweeps, with only limited reruns used. These are more frequently referred to as repeats, with reruns the term more commonly used for syndicated programs.
Television specials
Often, if a television special such as Peter Pan or a network TV showing of a classic film like The Wizard of Oz is especially well-received, it will be rerun from time to time. Before the VCR era, this would be the only opportunity audiences had of seeing an especially beloved special program more than once.
Seasonal programming such as The Grinch Who Stole Christmas or A Christmas Carol would normally be re-shown once each year, in the appropriate timeframe, every year.
Syndication
A television program goes into syndication when many episodes of the program are sold as a package for a large sum of money. Generally the buyer is either a cable company or a host of local television stations. Often, programs are not particularly profitable until they are sold for syndication. 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 100 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. After that, the actors received nothing and the production company would keep 100% of any income. This situation went unchanged until the mid-1970s, when contracts for new shows extended residual payments for the performers, regardless of the number of reruns.
Classic television
With the growing availability of satellite television channels or terrestrial digital subchannels, a handful of specialty channels have been built solely or primarily to run former network programming with otherwise would no longer be in syndication. Branded as "classic television", these often carry re-runs of programming dating back to the monochrome television era and are promoted as nostalgia. The corresponding radio format would be that of an oldies station.
On satellite, these channels include TVLand and the Hallmark Channel; on terrestrial digital television otherwise-vacant subchannels may be used to carry Retro Television Network, Variety Television Network, MeTV or This TV. Equity Media Holdings had been using low-power TV stations to carry RTN in various markets; those stations are now being moved to This TV.
DVD retail
With the rise of the DVD video format, box sets featuring season or series runs of television series have become an increasingly important retail item. Some view this development as a rising new idea in the industry of reruns as an increasingly major revenue source in themselves instead of the standard business model as a draw for audiences for advertising. While there were videotape releases of television series before DVD, the format's limited content capacity made it impractical as a widespread retail item.
TV listings
TV Guide originally used the term rerun, but abruptly changed to repeat in the early 1970s, 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 early-2000s, many listing services now only provide a notation only if an episode is new ("(N)"), with reruns getting no notation.
Repeats in the United Kingdom
In the United Kingdom, most drama and comedy series run for shorter seasons—typically six, seven or thirteen 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 U.S., 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 favor 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 1998 on, digital television, although it could be argued that many ITV programs up to the early 1990s, particularly imported programming was syndicated in the sense that each ITV region bought in some programs independently of the ITV Network, and in particular many programs out of prime time made by smaller ITV stations were "part-networked" where some regions would show them and others would not. Nowadays the UK has many channels (for example UKTV Gold) which repackage and rebroadcast "classic" programming from both sides of the Atlantic. 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 program could be broadcast, usually only twice, and these showings were limited to within a set time period such as five years. This was due to the unions' fear that the channels filling their schedules with repeats could put actors and other production staff out of work as fewer new shows would be made. It also had the unintentional side effect of causing many programs to be junked after their repeat rights had expired, as they were considered to be of no further use by the broadcasters. Although these agreements changed during the 1980s and beyond, it is still expensive to repeat archive television series on British terrestrial television, as new contracts have to be drawn up and payments made to the artists concerned. Repeats on multi-channel television are cheaper, as are re-showings of newer programs covered by less strict repeat clauses. However, programs are no longer destroyed, as the historical and cultural reasons for keeping them have now been seen, even if the programs have little or no repeat value.
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