The producers of I Love Lucy shifted away from a new-episode-a-week format and instead filmed 39 episodes per season with a 13 week period of popular episode repeats in the summer time.
#SOAP TV SHOW WHAT YEARS IN DID THEY SHOW RERUNS SERIES#
One of the first television shows to do so was none other than iconic comedy series I Love Lucy. Once they saw the benefit of recording the original live performance for rebroadcasting later in the day, the utility of recording the whole thing in advance of the actual air date became quite apparent. I’ve watched pretty much every ‘big’ episode of EastEnders since 1985 on platforms like Dailtmotion and watched hundreds of old episodes/have a well rounded knowledge on the history of the show so even I find myself looking back nostalgically when I wasn’t even a regular. This changed when East Coast studios started recording the performances to broadcast shows in their regular time slot for West Coast viewers. As a younger viewer who started watching the soaps around 2005/2006, I’ve always been interested in this question. In the early decades of television most shows were performed live and in many cases were never even recorded. Series creators Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David both own a stake in the show. Viewers haven’t always enjoyed this kind of catch-it-again television experience, however. Since it went off the air in 1998, 'Seinfeld' has generated 3.1 billion. Today you can still watch old episodes on iTunes, Netflix, and Amazon Instant Video. As late as 2008 the show as still being regularly aired in the U.S. Missed an episode of a popular show like Cheers the first time it aired back in the 1980s? No problem not only did they rerun early episodes while it was still on the air, but it went into syndication and was rerun in 38 countries and 179 American television markets.
PBS aired reruns of The Paper Chase for a few years following its departure from CBS and, in the first case of its kind, the pay-cable television service. Reruns are something modern television consumers take for granted. Despite being hailed by critics as the most praiseworthy new series of the 1978-1979 season, The Paper Chase never attracted a competitive audience and was canceled at the end of the year.