Hello, I have a couple questions about syndication that hopefully someone can answer. In my local market (Philadelphia), The Simpons is shown twice per night. However, over the last few months, the number of episodes in their cycle has dropped like a rock. Half the episodes are "The Simpsons are Going To X", and the rest of the time it's "tomacco". So my question is, will I ever see classic episodes again? Is it just that my local affiliate only bought the last three seasons? Do other markets go further back and show Seasons 1-5 on a regular basis? Thanks!
So I guess the question is if Fox is really just clueless, or if they really get more viewers by airing more recent episodes. Perhaps the general population is more likely to tune in if it's a lame episode that is still vaguely familiar from its original airdate, rather than something that first aired 10 years ago. If only they knew!
I'll field this one...(don't worry, the rest of that sentence doesn't apply here) I'm from Philadelphia but I go to school in Cleveland and noticed that in both it seemed like seasons 10 and up were the only ones getting air time (in Philly it looked even worse...11 and up?) - by butting heads with the programming department at WUAB (the station in Cleveland that shows reruns), I finally managed to figure out that (as you may know, but I think is stupid) the stations buy a license to show each episode a certain number of times, and once those are used up they can't show the episode again until they buy more runs. Out here, I was told that the popularity of the earlier seasons led to slightly more airplay, so eventually they were used up and left with a bunch of ABFs (ha...well, also 5f19-22). Based on a previous cryptic email reply, I thought that she meant the distributor was only sending out seasons 10 and up and any time I saw a station airing an early one it was just to finish out the license (since they seemed sporadic...like 2 7Gs, 3 7Fs...in fact, mixed in with the season 11 and 12 stuff, Philly got a random airing of 4F15 yesterday I think), but she corrected me and said that they're all still available to buy. So until I verify that there's no sort of "mom policy" (you have to eat all your season 12s until you get dessert!) where they can't buy more early seasons until they finish these out, I would hypothesize that the stations are just being lazy and waiting until they actually need to order more (and hopefully ordering a higher proportion of earlier stuff), which might even mean they'll end up doing something like season 11-12-13...12-13...13...1. Anyway, my advice is to find WTXF's director of programming and make sure he or she knows you want a decent amount of (let's be fair and say) all seasons.
Probably they were saving that one for St Patrick's day
he
seasons.
I wonder it they charge more to air early episodes since people tend to agree they are a lot better. Anyway, thanks for the info. I'm pretty sure all they are showing nowadays is 11-12-13. For a while, Fox was showing a recent episode at 6:30, and an older one at 7:00. This was great, since the contrast made me appreciate the older ones even more!
I doubt it. Here in Canada, the CBC and Global have been airing quite a few season 6 episodes lately, and before that I saw some earlier ones. I really don't think these Canadian networks have much money to spare.
Matt's explanation is right on the money. In Boston, we were in the same situation until very recently. These days, the early airing (7:30 pm) tends to have the more recent episodes, while the late airing (11:30 pm) has the classics. They've run through most of the season 1-4 episodes at this point, and now we're seeing some from 6-8.