Entering its twenty-third season and rapidly on pace to celebrate 500 episodes, The Simpsons is one of tv’s longest running shows.
But could there be enough of the animated family to devote an entire channel to them?
News Corp. Chief Operating Officer Chase Carey thinks there could be. Carey suggest the idea at the the Bank of America Merrill Lynch Media Communications & Entertainment Conference in Beverly Hills earlier this week saying the animated series shows “no signs of slowing down.” Carey says there have been internal discussions about how to create greater revenues for the animated series beyond syndicated repeats and DVD sales.
However, before you start calling your content provider to demand the all Homer network, consider that an all-Simpsons channel is still several years away at the earliest. The show is still in production and will have to meet the syndication deals established by its current order. Once the show eventually ceases production second cycle sales of repeat episodes can be sold and that’s when such a channel could become a possibility.
Carey said there have been a “number of meetings” to determine how to capitalize on its library of episodes of The Simpsons and he mentioned a digital channel featuring nothing but Homer and the gang as being a possibility. Carey said it is incumbent on the company to take advantage of a show that is “unique in television with a volume too that is unprecedented.”
500 episodes @ 30 minutes each is only 250 hours of programming.
That’s only 10.4 days worth of content.
They would need to resort to tactics like repeating the same 4 episodes every two hours… or similar (staggering the seasons in different time slots, etc.)
Add in some marathons “All Homer Saturday” (episodes that feature Homer), “Marathon Marge Monday”, “Krusty Sundy”, etc. to break it up…
Do we really need another cable channel dedicated entirely to cartoons & animation? I don’t think so. Perhaps what is needed is a real science fiction channel for a change. Now that would be a novelty.
OK, my only take on this is the same one my wife does. On Fox Sundays, they can’t seem to find anything but the episodes that were just recently played. We typically spend Sunday nights watching the Simpsons as a family. I still find that odd since I can remember when they were right up there as one of the worst family shows on TV. But, when they run repeat episodes, it seems like they replay the ones that were just on a few weeks prior. With over 20 years of episodes, you’d think they’d have some to show that aren’t “so new”.