Lisa's Substitute?

Is there any reason why the Dustin Hoffman -- er excuse me, Sam Etic -- episode has never been shown in syndication?

Or at least, rarely shown?

"Lionel J. Hutz, Esq." wrote in message news:[email]...

We've seen it plenty of times here in Boston in the past. But these days, a lot of local stations are focusing on showing the later episodes of the series, since they have more "runs" of these later shows left in their syndication deal than runs of earlier shows.

I'm not sure precisely how that works...you'd think by now they'd just get copies of all of them and pay for the number they play, not have to buy a season for x showings...but in either case, they might also be trying to phase out the ones that are going to DVD to boost sales...

SJB wrote:

"Matt Garvey" wrote in message news:[email]...

phase

When the show was still in its "barter" run (the show was basically free to stations in return for running national commercials), the distributor chose which episode or episodes were run each day, and beamed them to the stations via satellite. A few years ago, the show changed to a cash system: the local stations get all the commercial time for themselves, and pay the distributor cash for X number of runs of each episode of X number of years. Since they've run the earlier episodes more the the later ones, which haven't been available as long, my assumption is they're concentrating on showing the episodes that have more runs left.

That said, I wouldn't be surprised if Fox isn't selling any more runs of the earlier episodes, either to make the DVDs more "special" or even in anticipation of breaking the series into two syndication packages, with the earlier episodes going to a cable network (like FX).

Yeah, that's why it would be nice if they just said "you pay for how many you play, no matter which they are, as long as it's a reasonable distribution." But the cable option doesn't sound bad...afaik, the Critic episodes were uncut on Comedy Central (except the tail end of the pea-ness joke in Eyes on the Prize, unless that was only _ever_ seen in the clip show), and I guess their other shows are as well, since they can get some revenue from the viewers instead of just advertizers. Of course, someone would have to beat the sense into them to make them not screw up the credits...

SJB wrote:

I've seen it in syndication both on Star India and on Israeli TV. Maybe the deal is like those Japaese TV ads that American actors do -- they'll do the ad on the condition that it never air in the U.S.

----- Richard Schultz [email] Department of Chemistry, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel Opinions expressed are mine alone, and not those of Bar-Ilan University ----- If you can keep your expectations tiny You'll go through life without being so whiny. -- Matt Groening