
And if they felt lost, they’d tune out, along with your ad revenue. It wasn’t a guarantee that any given audience member had seen the episode played a week before. This model evolved at a time without streaming, and where recording shows was cumbersome. Not only that, every episode had to be self-contained. 236 episodes of this playing multiple times a day in every single US market must have been a cash cow. Whatever your annual budget, you need to spread it out over a lot of shows. This was seen as the threshold for viable re-run revenue. With 100 episodes, you can be on every weekday for five weeks without repeating. If you hit 100 episodes, you can sell the show for stations to air every afternoon. The golden ticket for your television IP was simple: reach 100 episodes. They’ll sell ads against your content to make money, they’ll use the money to pay you for rights to the content. All you’ve got is broadcast television television stations. So how do you sell it to people? Back then, there’s no streaming platform to work this out for you.

If a new piece of IP really worked, it could pay you back for decades. So that initial, expensive investment? It gets paid back, many, many times over. This took work.īut! If you succeeded in making something that people fell in love with, you could sell it to them over and over and over again. You were shooting with film, editing wasn’t initially digital. The more credible your show, the more money you needed. Here’s the quick, late 20th century version. We have to start with how money shaped storytelling in the days of broadcast television. Will its fans still recognize it? Television economics What happens to a piece of culture when its formative economics undergo a seismic shift? Their discontent reveals a science experiment being enacted upon tens of millions of people.

But not all the fans engaging with Michael Chabon’s instagram are thrilled with the new series. You’d think this would be cause for universal celebration.
