TV Programs: Syndication and Reruns (1949–89)

In “Back to the Future”, one resident of Hill Valley, California in 1955 is puzzled by a word that Marty McFly uses. “What's a rerun?”, she asks. Like much of the film, it's a witty exaggeration. Television viewers of the mid-Fifties were just beginning to see reruns show up in morning and afternoon TV time slots.

But if you go back only a few years before that, Bob Gale's BTTF joke is literal truth; at the beginning of the Fifties there were, for all practical purposes, no reruns, because there was no market in old TV shows yet. At that time, programs were still owned by their sponsor and/or their major broadcasting network. Radio shows, even with the biggest stars, had never been worth a lot of money years after they'd gone off the air, and there seemed no reason to think TV would be any different.

So suppose you're running one of the pioneering American TV stations described in the first chapter of this history series. What do you fill the time with? If you're one of those lucky network affiliates, your evenings are taken care of, but you've still got daytime and late night to program. Plenty of stations are not big enough, or in big enough cities to go network, and they've got the whole day to program. Old movies, from the few studios small and hungry enough to run Hollywood's undeclared blockade against television, are plentiful and cheap. You can get all the East Side Kids, Roy Rogers, and Mr. Moto you want. Local sports are cheap or free. But in those days, there weren't many places where you could buy affordable, ready-made TV shows that were nearly as good as what you'd see on NBC or CBS. (At this time, ABC was in the major leagues but just barely. Same with the slowly expiring Du Mont network.)

One of the busiest, most prosperous places you could go would be the Hollywood offices of producer and entrepreneur Frederick Ziv, who immodestly but accurately called himself “The George Washington of TV Syndication”. This was originally a legal and business structure, a joint venture of Ziv and the stations who signed on to the syndicate, a limited partnership to produce and air a specific show.

Since the word “syndication” has changed over the years to mean, simply, “a library of old TV shows”, it overlaps with “rerun”. We'll get back to reruns later. In the Fifties, syndication also meant original production, and it could produce memorable TV: “Highway Patrol”, “Sergeant Preston of the Yukon”, “The Cisco Kid”, “I Led 3 Lives”, “You Asked for It”, “Whirlybirds”--none of them were on the networks. Fred Ziv was something of a training academy for directors and writers like Robert Altman and Gene Roddenberry. Ziv's shows were first run on local, non-network stations.

Gradually, rising network “production values”--expense that (supposedly) shows on screen—made it tough for independent producers to manufacture similar TV shows at a reasonable price. So one popular option was buying British and Canadian TV. Shows with British subjects, like “Robin Hood” and “The Invisible Man”, were followed by the transatlantic popular antics of “Thunderbirds Are Go”, and “The Saint”. Our northern neighbors sent us “Cannonball”, a low budget Fifties highway adventure about a pair of Ontario truckers that could have been filmed anywhere in North America.

TV reruns can have cultural staying power that casts a shadow far into the future. In 1951, when Desi Arnaz negotiated a deal for his wife's TV show, he offered CBS and the sponsor, Philip Morris, a break: They'd sell them the rights to the first broadcasts of the shows below the price of producing them; but in return, Lucy and Desi would own the shows, and the rights to the reruns forever. That's been the business model for TV ever since. To protect the value of their investment, Desilu Studios filmed “I Love Lucy” on sharp, durable 35mm film with multiple cameras, just like a live TV show. Jackie Gleason would do the same with “The Honeymooners”. It would be an incredibly smart investment.

In 2000, many people laughed when Rush Limbaugh's radio show staged a call with former actor Ken Osmond, who played eternally insincere suck-up and con-man Eddie Haskell on “Leave It to Beaver”. He was, he said, seething with indignation at hearing Eddie Haskell compared to Al Gore. More than forty years after “Leave It to Beaver” went off the air, generations of people who know nothing about it still had a vague idea who Eddie Haskell was. They still do. A few of the TV shows of my childhood were so well known that even people born many years after me are familiar with their names and basic premises: “The Honeymooners”, “I Love Lucy”, “Dragnet”, “The Twilight Zone”, “The Untouchables”.

Given how much time has elapsed since then, it's not surprising that some big time network shows that were equally famous in their day have gradually faded from mass consciousness over the decades—“Peter Gunn”, “Bat Masterson”, “Route 66”, “The Defenders”, “Have Gun Will Travel”. Even if you can't remember actually having seen an episode of any of those shows, major hits of the era, you just might recognize the names. (One of my all-time favorites, “Sergeant Bilko”, falls somewhere in between; a number one hit for years, remembered for generations, but perhaps faded by now.)

All eleven shows that we've listed so far were in black and white, greatly limiting their sale-ability once American TV fully went over to color in the mid-to-late Sixties. As superficial as it may sound, program buyers for TV stations learned early on that color's a big deal for TV reruns because audiences regard black and white as another, earlier world. Okay, it's not exactly like the difference between silent and sound films, but to TV audiences, it's still a pretty profound barrier. Color is one reason why even 50-year-old network shows like “Mission: Impossible” and “Mannix” get by as reruns. Yeah, they use wireline phones, play LPs on record players, and their TVs come in boxy shapes, but they're more or less in our world.

Reruns came to dominate syndication early on, once there were enough hit shows with enduring appeal. By the end of the Sixties, even shows that were still in production and aired on a network would buy ads in Variety, whetting TV station appetites: “Can't Keep 'Em Much Longer! 'Hogan's Heroes' Escapes Soon! 142 30-minute color episodes!”

Reruns are predictable moneymakers. Mind you, they aren't all big moneymakers, but to a degree unusual in the entertainment business, a smart team can forecast earnings potential of even a medium hit for the next dozen years. Barring freakish luck, good or bad, Warner Bros. Television knows already what “The Big Bang Theory” will earn in each after market, worldwide, through the early 2030s. That's why we had a Nineties civil war in the entertainment business over an obscure issue called “fin/syn”; studios were sick and tired of having their sensitive parts trapped in a network vise, and networks were sick and tired of spending a fortune to develop and publicize shows that they didn't have a piece of.

No entertainment property is ever really rated as zero potential value, though. Until then, the forgotten TV program waits in storage, like Woody Allen in “Sleeper”. Just maybe the untapped possibilities of 1978's “Manimal” or “Supertrain” will someday tickle the fancy of some mid-21st century retro-mogul.

Oh, and how did I get into this week's topic? A couple of months ago, while researching material for a Ricochet Silent Radio story, I was surprised to see episodes of “I Led 3 Lives” on YouTube. Surprised, because the show hasn't been rerun for nearly sixty years. It was one of my favorites when I was a little kid. Creepy as it sounds, it was also Lee Harvey Oswald's favorite, and you can see why: it's full of fantasy and Marxist conspiracy right here in everyday, workaday America, taking place under the Coca-Cola sign at the local Piggly-Wiggly's. “I Led 3 Lives” was one of the best-known TV programs of its day, and it never appeared on a network. If TV historians remember it at all, it's to condemn it as a relic of the McCarthy era. Once Gene Roddenberry became The Great Bird of the Galaxy, he disowned the modest start that “I Led 3 Lives” gave him as a new TV writer. But, looking at it again, it's really not a bad show.

There's a small backstory here. In radio days, Frederick Ziv produced a thriller called “I Was a Communist for the FBI”, with many of the same premises and ideas. It seemed to fit the mood of the times very well. But the author of that series, Matt Cvetic, was a drinker who'd been kicked out of the FBI. He wrote a colorful, fanciful tale that J. Edgar Hoover and the FBI disliked. So Fred Ziv got hold of the memoirs of another, more sober FBI infiltrator, Herbert Philbrick, enabling him to create a show that the Bureau approved of. An anonymous internet commenter accurately compared the two shows to “Dick Tracy” and “Dragnet”. “I Led 3 Lives” was a procedural; the actual work of tracking Communists generally involved going to people's apartments and listening to political arguments, not de-fusing atom bombs.