Runs and reruns

On his board Matt Ottinger makes an interesting point about those pesky reruns: "Since game show reruns were an almost unheard-of concept in the 70s and even 80s, there were probably no provisions for them in the standard contracts the artists signed back then."

Hm, I wonder. An entire network devoted to game show reruns probably was a far-fetched idea in the 1970s, though less so in the 1980s as cable began its rise to prominence. But was the entire idea of ever rerunning a game show considered so wacky?

Sure, lots of game show producers wiped the tapes of old episodes right up into the seventies, which meant they saw no future for the shows in repeats. But Goodson-Todman and a few others kept tapes dating all the way back to the fifties. Somebody must have had an inkling that all this product would one day find another use, or re-use.

Like everybody else, I've whined and whimpered about rerun abuse of old game shows on GSN. The grind really gets annoying with short-run shows like Million Dollar Password. But a show can sometimes still pull acceptable numbers even after horrendous rerun cycles. And niche networks like GSN have to pinch every penny. Maybe I'll just have to reconcile myself to that odd concept of rerunning game shows...and even rerunning them into the ground.

UPDATE: Happened to catch Who Wants to Be a Millionaire today. Sure enough, it was a Memorial Day rerun: Jeremy Blais' quarter-million win from February sweeps. Everything gets rerun in the 500-channel universe.