On the Declining Use of Reruns

Maybe you like reruns. Maybe you hate them. Maybe you are indifferent to them. Maybe you care if you do and don’t if you don’t. Maybe you have mixed feelings. Maybe you like them only if you haven’t seen them before. But talking about primetime alone, you realize that reruns are starting to become a thing of the past.

You know how nowadays, you typically see one show go on hiatus to be replaced by some other show in the meantime? That helps get rid of reruns since there wouldn’t have been any time to show them at. If there weren’t an alternative show shown during the hiatus of another, then this wouldn’t be an issue. But it is and that means less reruns if there are any at all.

Typically, the summer was the only time that you’d see reruns of shows. This is still the case with some lucky shows. But it is not the case with all shows. And it is not the case with all networks either. I don’t know if there is anything that NBC reruns during the summer outside of whatever summer shows they might air. Tons of shows that are renewed for next season don’t even rerun during the summer in favor of new episodes of new shows.

While syndicated repeats will always be a thing, they are not in primetime where reruns used to be a more regular thing. Now sometimes you’ll see a network abandon a timeslot to air reruns of a show or various other shows in that place instead. That doesn’t happen too much, but it does happen enough that it is worth pointing out that reruns do still air. But like I said, this only happened when new shows have been cancelled and any real replacement has been abandoned for however so long in favor of this encore programming.

I don’t know if there’s anything else worth mentioning in this post. Reruns are becoming less common in the primetime hours of the day at least. They still show up occasionally, but they still can get replaced by various specials or other strange things. I guess we’ll see if reruns stop happening in primetime except for rare occasions when nothing would make sense in that timeslot.