I started going about my day, finishing prep for the “Slice of SciFi” shows to be recorded this week, and to get to my many other projects, when this particular tweet threw my morning off the tracks:
Q) @Gleeky_MikaBoo Why have you replaced great shows with reality tv A) We haven't. Reality primarily replaces reruns of older series.
— SYFY (@SYFY) July 31, 2013
Craig Engler’s answer caused all other thoughts in my head to come to a screeching halt, collectively turn and look at the computer screen and yell, “WHAT?!”
Forsaking reruns for “reality” programming, especially for television shows that fall into the scifi, fantasy and horror genres, seems to be a profit-slashing move, not a profit-making one. If this is truly how Syfy Channel considers reruns, maybe that’s a big factor in the disconnect between the people running Syfy and us TV addicts who want more scifi on Syfy, or any channel.
Reruns of almost any scripted programming make money, while reruns of reality shows don’t. If they didn’t generate income, we wouldn’t be inundated with endless reruns of a dozen sitcoms from the 80s and 90s. The guarantee of viewers is why you could always find a rerun of Friends, or M*A*S*H, or Angel, or something else you’d watch at 2am, but never ever see a rerun episode from Survivor Season 4 or Big Brother Season 2.
If it weren’t for reruns, TBS would have had nothing on except Atlanta Braves baseball, and maybe wrestling. If it weren’t for reruns, TNT wouldn’t have built an audience to pitch “We Know Drama” to for their excellent new scripted series over the past 6-7 years. I don’t think I can count how many times I stopped channel surfing at 1am because the movie “The Beastmaster” was airing on TBS, or at 3am because 2 episodes of Angel were about to air on TNT. As much as I enjoy the shows Face Off and Hell’s Kitchen, I am not going to do that for their reruns.
For years, many of us scifi fans wondered why Scifi Channel (now Syfy Channel) stopped airing reruns of the older shows. Why not run the classic Battlestar Galactica episodes again in conjunction with the episodes of the new version when those were airing?
Reruns created scifi fandom. Where would Star Trek be if it hadn’t found new life and new fans through reruns on different channels all over the country, the world? Would fans be clamoring for more Buffy and Angel from Joss Whedon if those shows hadn’t been consistently aired in mini-marathon blocks for the past 12 years? Why would Science Channel air reruns of Firefly and FRINGE if the fans weren’t going to sit and watch, again and again? The X-Files thrives in mainstream memory, while Babylon 5 languishes… wonder which show had a richer rerun history?
Marathons of The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits are all well and good, but those aren’t the shows that will hook fans and viewers to keep coming back to your channel. Jumping on the Twitter bandwagon and airing “Sharknado” a few extra times might be good for a short term bump, but building a better connection with an audience that wants to watch their favorite shows over and over again (we’re geeks, remember? that’s what we do) means giving them the shows they will watch over and over again. The shows they grew up with. The shows they fell in love with. The shows they’ll watch on TV with commercials even when they have the DVD sets a few feet away on a shelf.
We’re scifi fans, remember? It’s what we do. We watch those shows over and over again because we love the characters and the adventures and the humor and the pain. We obsess on what the rest of their lives and their worlds are like when we can’t see them in new episodes, and as an outlet for that, we either write up our own stories, or make up our own costumes so we can live vicariously in those worlds for a time. I believe Syfy now has a new reality show that showcases that kind of fandom passion, so I don’t think the connection is completely lost on them.
Maybe it’s just me, but I just don’t think you can build new generations of geeks who will continue to come to your door without hooking them on a passion and feeding it. That means airing reruns of the shows that connect with their particular passion, and using that to keep bringing them back home.
Those shows we love have story. Reality shows have manufactured tension. They may both be entertaining, but at the end of the day, there’s a big difference. That story is the reason why we keep coming back to those shows, and almost never give a second thought to watching the same episode of that reality show again.
Watching reruns is the heart and soul of scifi. It’s what formed the bonds that matter to us as we grow older, it’s what makes us enjoy comparing new favorite shows to old favorites, and it’s what drives us scifi geeks to want more of both. Hint: it’s why a lot of us read our favorite books over and over again, too.
Not all shows are available on DVD or for streaming, and not all reboots can be as amazing as the new BSG was. There’s an overflowing pot of gold to be uncovered, and lots of scifi fans hoping that someone will bring reruns of the old shows back to the airwaves. And maybe a few more seasons of Warehouse 13 or Sanctuary, just for good measure?
You nailed it. We watch our sci-fi shows and movies over and over again, whether they are on being shown on TV, DVDs and streaming online. It’s what we do. When I turn on the TV, I always look for a sci-fi show or movie, before anything else. Sci-fi comes first for my entertainment.
I keep all my favorite sci-fi shows and movies on my Netflix queue open for live streaming and watch them over and over and over and over….you get the idea.
While repeats are a staple of television and many shows have built their reputation on them, there are some shows that repeat better than others.
Shows that allow you to “drop in” and where the network or outlet can air them in any order they want at any time they want tend to repeat better. For example, you can drop into Big Bang Theory at any point and still enjoy the episode even if you aren’t sure where the various relationships are…same thing with Friends.
With Babylon Five or BSG, the mythology can be so dense that it serves to keep out new viewers who may feel lost or like they have to catch it all from the beginning. In the day and age of DVD and streaming, this may drive viewers to those options rather than syndicated repeats.
I think the reason Firefly repeats well is that its run was so short and its mythology wasn’t so dense (since it was a short run) that you can’t drop in and enjoy an episode or two at random.
I will say that Engler is wrong in thinking that reality will repeat well or that feeding us new reality show after new reality show will fit the bill. I’d love to see Syfy go back to the early days when we got repeats of old favorites with a new shine. It was Syfy who helped put the newly remastered classic Trek on the air with the episodes aired in tact and unedited for the first time in decades. Maybe once TNG is done with the Blu-Ray upgrade, we may get those shown somewhere….and hopefully with the syndication cuts restored.
And maybe, just maybe the Beeb could see fit to lower the syndication price for classic Dr Who so that a cable outlet or local PBS stations could show it again!
FINALLY! someone gets it! It’d be NICE if the Morons @ Syfy or as I like to call em’ “Sy FAKE” would come to the same conclusion. If U didn’t know any better U would think Syfy had never heard of Star Trek DS9 or VOY or the “re-mastered TOS, “WTF?”. As far as they’re concerned the “only” Star Trek is Next-Gen & Enterprise. Reruns are what drive Sci-fi. Babylon-5, Battlestar Galactica (old & new) Farscape, Seaquest DSV, Knight Rider, Streethawk, Buck Rodgers, Space Rangers. There’s 10yrs of Smallville waiting to be rerun. Bring back some of the “oldies” to be rediscovered, Space-1999, The Six-Million-Dollar-Man, Man from Atlantis, Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea, Lost in Space, Land of the Giants, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, The Invaders. There’s no way in the world “Cosplay”, “Ghost”-this or that, “Blackout” and all the other “reality” trash would be more popular. anybody agree?
I think the real problem here is that TPTB are just plain cheap. They are hoarding as much of the profit as possible instead of putting it back into programming. Reality TV and crappy movies like “Sharknado” are very cheap.
“See, I’m a man of simple tastes. I like dynamite and gunpowder and gasoline. Do you know what all these things have in common? They’re cheap.”
NBC Universal has a veritable cornucopia of older and newer scifi series in their vault, if they wanted to keep the money in house: Chuck, Heroes, Surface, Quantum Leap, Sliders, Buck Rogers (the Gil Gerard version), The Incredible Hulk (the Bill Bixby version), and for crying out loud, they even have the original Knight Rider, and Airwolf. You could put The Event, The Cape and Grimm on that list, and if the licensing disputes are settled, you might even be able to put the original Six Million Dollar Man and Bionic Woman on there, too. I think the original V miniseries was an NBC thing, too, wasn’t it?
That’s not even touching all the old Scifi Channel originals, including Invisible Man, First Wave, and a list of other shows.
If keeping things cheap means not even moving the money around in house, we’re doomed.
I think we are seeing further evidence why NBC is in the last place among the four big networks…
This from the network group that in the 80’s had a whole week in the summer devoted to Quantum Leap and the best repeats from the season were showcased to win new fans.
Surely, now everyone must know what the acronym NBC means in the 21st Century —
NO-BODY-CARES! Oh, and don’t call me surely.
Here we say all those nasty things about SyFy & parent co. NBC but I turn it on and right now they are running an all-nite Stargate SG1 marathon. Can we give a little love?
w00t!! Syfy Love!!!
and technically, I don’t think I was being nasty. I simply had to express my confusion at Mr Ensler’s answer to that question, and my heartfelt disagreement with it, from a scifi geek’s POV. I almost want to ask if he’d want to come on the show and just do an episode talking about this topic. I would love to know what the profit breakdown is for scripted shows, reality shows, and wrestling. I don’t need real numbers, but I’d love to get at least a real comparison on ratings between the three, not just on a daily basis, but how they stack up weekly, monthly and yearly, and what goes into deciding where the cut off level is for a scripted series that gets it canceled (Eureka, W13), versus what goes into greenlighting a new unscripted series.
Robot Combat League and Face Off I like, Ghost Hunters and Haunted Collector, not so much. Shoot, give me more Destination Truth or Stranded, or come up with another competition show similar to Face Off, not another Swamp Ghost Stories series.
Summer, getting Ensler for the show would be a fantastic idea. It would give him the opportunity to clear up in an indepth way what he failed to do in print form. I hope we reach out and try to get him. As far as ratings go it saddens me to say that the wrassling hour is one of SyFy’s most watched. What SyFy doesn’t realize though is those to-the-mat fans do not stick around to watch the quality sci-fi programming, like Continuum, Warehouse 13, et al. They only get them for 1hr a week and then they are gone, gone, gone. Not a good programming strategy.
If your productivity at work sucks most of the time but every once and a while you choose to do well that doesn’t mean you are turning things around. All it means is you are feeling a lot of heat from your boss and in order to keep the heat off you work really hard until goes away. Basically, this is appeasement from the syfy channel. When they start becoming the sci-fi channel of old again on a consistent basis then I’ll applaud. However, I’m not holding my breath on that.
Sy(fake) dosen’t get a pass for one night of a SG-1 marathon (how bout SGA or Farscape. BSG would be NICE!) However, I will give them credit for showing “Contact” & “Red Planet” of late. More “main-stream” movies and less “B-movie-of-the-week” They still have a loooooooooooong way to go to win-back the loyalty of sci-fi fans. A good start would to give “Next-Gen” & give “DS9 & VOY” a shot. Babylon-5 still has a great fan base. I think it would bring in better numbers than “Blackout” & “Hot Set”. That’s just my humble opinion….
Typo: Give Next-GEN a rest! Some deserved “time-off”
They have a long way to go before anyone can ever take them seriously.
If I’m not mistaken I think that BBC America bought exclusive rights to re-air BSG (remake). But I have to agree with the article…there are a lot of sci-fi programs that would make me stop and watch SyFy while channel surfing if they would just run them….Farscape for one…they took it off Netflix.
While I agree with the premise that reality tv is a poor substitute for sci-fi reruns, the problem is this: Why would I watch reruns of a show on TV, and have to sit through commercials, when I have the series on DVD, or stream it on Netflix? In the past, reruns on TV were the only ways to see some of these older shows, but now people are opting out because we can choose when, how and which episode to watch.
As someone who has watched reruns of episodes for shows I already own on DVD, sometimes you don’t feel like breaking out the DVDs, or watching the entire episode, or accidentally starting a DVD marathon when all you wanted was to have one or two episodes on in the background while you were doing something else (thus the commercials don’t matter). I did it all the time with the Angel reruns on TNT (back when I had cable/satellite).
There’s also the situation where someone might like a show, but not enough to spend the money to buy the entire series on DVD or Blu-ray. There are even a few series out there that aren’t available on home video or streaming, so what options other than reruns exist for those shows?
I can tell you right now that I would love to be able to watch Fox’s “Strange Luck” again, but it doesn’t exist on DVD and has never been available for streaming. Same for CBS’ “The Others”, and until just a few years ago, “American Gothic” wasn’t available, and I’m pretty sure none of those series were ever streamed.
And any Firefly fan who hasn’t sat down and watched a rerun even though they may have more than one copy of the DVD isn’t living up to the moniker “Browncoat” 🙂
Fair point. I still watch old episodes of Journeyman that I purchased from iTunes. And I’ve watched more than a couple Firefly marathons on TV. 🙂