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Comment by ascagnel_ | Hacker News Reader

This is incredibly common with TV shows produced before the rise of DVD box-sets (early/mid-00s). Shows had a defined lifecycle: they'd premiere (and make back most of the production cost), re-run the following summer (assuming the show was popular enough to not get cancelled), and then if the show reached ~100 episodes, it would be picked up for syndication. All but the most popular shows would essentially cease to exist 10-15 years after their initial run ended, so it was cheaper to license third-party elements (music, this French film) on a time-limited basis to keep costs down.

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I had forgotten about summer reruns. That's a blast from the past.

I daresay a good part of the readership here would have trouble imaging that to watch non-live TV shows you had to be sitting in front of a TV at a particular time and if you missed it, that might be it.

Just one reason you mostly couldn't do heavily serialized TV. You could pull it off for a heavily promoted miniseries or limited run series. But, by and large, shows where missing an episode meant you were lost, just wouldn't fly in general.

I feel like TiVo actually opened up a lot of this and the nascent streaming available at the time (hulu/youtube?) is what kicked off the rise of actually serialized and episodic TV.

It is very funny having to explain to people why shows like "star trek: the next generation" basically had to reset everything by the end of the episode back into it's original state in order for syndication to work (episodes are basically played in any order aside from the few 2-parter episodes).

Yes, I assume that Lost--for whatever its problems--was essentially a child of Internet discussions plus TiVo/DVRs. Babylon 5 was even earlier but it was pretty niche and many fans (like myself) were content to timeshift on VCRs by then.

And, yes, syndication was a significant revenue stream that basically didn't work unless you could randomly drop into a Law and Order episode or pretty much any sitcom.

Not just TV shows, but movies too. I saw Star Wars in the theater. I didn’t see it again (there was no way to see it again) until years later when it was shown on TV.

Or second-run/revival theaters. I used to be very involved with a film group undergrad. We could get weekend audiences for a thousand people or more for relatively recent (but no longer still in theaters) movies and hundreds for older films.

These days, whatever preferences some people may have for seeing films in a theater with an audience, attendance has dwindled to very few.

With the rise of home video and better home-viewing experiences, second-run showings aren't really worth it. Most movies are available on home video by the time their theatrical run ends (and if they're really popular, they may still be in their theatrical run). A digital rental will typically be about the same price ($4USD) as my local second-run theater, only it's far more convenient.

Movie buffs, especially in big cities, will still have repertory/revival showings of old films. But that's a different market -- they're not looking to see an old movie, they're looking to see that movie in a communal environment, and sometimes with additional features like a discussion panel afterwards.

> Just one reason you mostly couldn't do heavily serialized TV. You could pull it off for a heavily promoted miniseries or limited run series. But, by and large, shows where missing an episode meant you were lost, just wouldn't fly in general.

Soap Operas had been managing to do this for decades before B5 showed up (although yeah, B5 did it a lot better)

Well, soap operas mostly had a very specific audience who could be counted on to watch most days and didn’t have a lot of intricate plotting.

Soap Opera plots are crazy complicated! They just advance very, very slowly.

And to a related point, there are TV series like Northern Exposure where the music was pretty integral to the show but don't have the rights to, so apparently the DVD releases are pretty compromised.

That's a good example. Another is Beavis and Butthead. My understanding is that when the shows originally aired they were relying on MTV's rights to air the videos featured in the episodes. So now any episodes (streaming or disc) only show the fully animated segments, and not the interludes where the two are sitting on the couch. Sadly, those are some of the best moments of the show...

wkrp in cincinnati suffers from the same issue. Too many great songs as part of dialogue or plot.

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