by L.A. Mood Comics and Games

By Dan Brown

The word “rerun” as it applies to a repeated episode of a network TV show is quickly disappearing from the English language.

Yet viewers have never watched more reruns, meaning old content. There are entire channels now devoted to repeats. 

There was a time, in the 1970s, when viewers hated them.

Cast your mind back to an era before streaming, before satellite TV, before cable, when the schedule for network sitcoms and dramas ran roughly parallel to the school calendar. The new season of a show would debut in September, there would be a Christmas episode, things would wrap up in May as summer approached. 

This was my childhood.

Shows didn’t just start up any old time. There were no full seasons dumped at once. 

Back then, the unspoken contract the networks had with the audience at home was, there would be a new episode every week of a series like, say, Happy Days.

For whatever reason, sometimes a new episode wouldn’t be available. Production delays was the most common excuse. One of the options available to programmers was to broadcast an episode that had previously aired. 

But they did so at their peril.

That’s because viewers hated, hated, hated when this happened. The refrain you would hear is, “I’ve already seen this episode! I know what happens!” No one wanted to see the Fonz date the same girl twice. 

I do realize all of this must sound like an ancient-history lesson to younger readers who can’t imagine a time when repeated episodes were a big problem. That’s likely because the idea of appointment viewing isn’t a thing anymore, except for some reality shows. 

This was a period when your favourite show was on at the same time, same day, every week. And you had to be home in front of your boob tube to see it.

Then a strange thing happened in the 1990s when specialty cable channels proliferated. They needed a cheap way to fill out their schedules. Suddenly, there were entire channels devoted to nothing except reruns – Three’s Company, Soap, the Simpsons, you name it. 

I joked at the time that we only hated reruns when they were free. Once we had to pay for them, they became a legit viewing choice.

Fast-forward through the eras of grey-market satellite dishes, legal satellite dishes, and now streaming and YouTube. In a sense, everything we watch is a rerun of one stripe or another.

Some of the most popular shows are old, whether it’s Breaking Bad or the Sopranos or Mad Men.

The difference is, programs such as these were made with a radically dissimilar mindset. In the network-dominated television world of the 1970s, any single episode was an ephemeral thing, expected to live only for a week in the public’s imagination. These shows were made as cheaply as possible.

But just look at a typical episode of, say, the Sopranos. The production values aren’t the same as when Gilligan’s Island first aired, no, the way the Sopranos was shot has more in common with a feature film than a series of old. 

That stems from today’s producers understanding their creations will automatically have an afterlife, even on a format or channel or service that doesn’t exist yet. 

I don’t know what comes after streaming. In his graphic novel The Private Eye (which L.A. Mood’s Graphic Novel Group is discussing this Saturday), set decades from now, writer Brian K. Vaughan anticipates a future format of ceiling-to-floor television called tee vee. And sure enough, in one scene there are characters watching an old episode of The Big Bang Theory on the tee vee.

Maybe holograms are the future? If that turns out to be the case, be prepared to watch a lot of holograms of old shows you’ve seen many times before.

Dan Brown has covered pop culture for more than 33 years as a journalist and also moderates L.A. Mood’s monthly Graphic-Novel Group book club.