Friday Five – Long Running TV Shows

The general measure for a successful TV show, at least from the TV Executives side, is that the show ends up getting syndicated. These days, to be syndicated, a show has to have about 100 episodes, or around 4 seasons. Some shows shoot just for that number and call it quits. Two examples of this are Til Death and Anger Management. Til Death was cancelled by Fox during its third season because it was truly terrible, but then Sony offered to reduce their cut of the profits if Fox would renew it for another year and syndicated it, which would be more profitable overall for everyone. This lead to almost all involved not giving a shit, which meant all kinds of insane story lines ala Get A Life, like one of the characters realized they were on a canceled sitcom and his wife was played by 4 actresses. It got really weird because it didn’t matter what went on the air, just as long as they had enough episodes to sell to syndication. After Charlie Sheen’s new show Anger Management did well in its first 10 episodes, FX pulled an unprecedented 90 episode back pickup, leading to an order of 100 episodes, specifically to syndicate, even though it too is terrible television.

Other shows however, tend to overstay their welcome. The sweet spot for a good show seems to be the seventh season. That’s just long enough to grow to love a group of characters, but not so long that things begin to drag on. Most of the Star Trek spin offs bowed out in their seventh season. 30 Rock will be coming to an end after this, its seventh, season. Buffy survived a network switch, and closed up shop after season 7. Even though it continues without him, Steve Carell left The Office after the seventh, and it’s been all downhill from there. The same with The X-Files, which continued for two more seasons without David Duchovny. How I Met Your Mother had a fantastic season last year, but it’s about time we finally meet this eponymous Mother. Larry David left Seinfeld after the seventh season, and the show was never the same without him. Charlie Sheen was fired from Two and a Half Men after seven seasons.

So for this weeks topic, I picked my favorite shows that made it through 100 episodes and into syndication, or continued all the way through their seventh season.

1. Star Trek: Deep Space Nine – Knew exactly when to call it quits. Tied up enough loose ends to be satisfying and left enough dangling to leave room and desire for more (a lot of which is covered in the book relaunch, which is pretty good as well).

 

2. The Office – Season 8 was an atrocious mess, but if you ignore that and jump right to Season 9, it seems like they got their groove back on the way to the finish line.

 

3. How I Met Your Mother – This show has had it’s ups and downs, with Season 6 being pretty forgetful, but Season 7 was such a huge upturn in quality and ratings (from a 3.4 in demo for Season 6 to a 4.1 for Season 7), it earned the show two more years.

 

4. South Park – They’ve been giving us 7 new episodes every 6 months for over 16 years now, with only a few duds a year, and even those are pretty good compared to most other television.

 

5. WWE Raw – As of next Monday, they will have had a new scripted episode every week for the last 20 years, for over 1000 episodes, which is just insane. Sure, its not high theater, but that’s still an awful lot of work to do nonstop week in and week out.

JohnScott is the proud owner of a life size replica Captain Kirk Chair. He is a hoarder of Comic Books, Transformers, and Star Trek action figures. He attended Space Camp as an adult. He has taken vacations to the closing of the Star Trek Experience and the final night Shuttle launch. He has been known to yell at his television when the kids can't put together the damn statue in the Shrine of the Silver Monkey. When not writing for InsufficientScotty, he is a Software Engineer for a major healthcare communications company. You can Email or follow on Twitter @NotEnoughScotty or Facebook