Classic Shows That Were Ratings-Challenged

[All My Shadows]

Not really. Dukes of Hazzard was a hit for several seasons, and then everything they put on before Dallas after the Dukes were cancelled bombed in first-run and saw little to no life in reruns at all.

[Soapsuds]

I forgot the Dukes…also The Incredible Hulk and Wonder Woman and what was the show Beauty and the Beast and Scarecrow and Mrs. King...

[Eric83]

Dukes weren't ratings challenged they were a consistent top ten show until Bo and Luke were written off that one season.

[Soapsuds]

Punky Brewster

[applcin]

I think maybe one reason for that popular perception is that the shows had longer seasons back then....2 seasons of The Munsters is like 70-something episodes, The Addams Family had over 60. If you're a kid watching these reruns in the 70s most afternoons like I was, you don't really much care when episodes repeat. The shows were just always there and you felt like they were still making them.

Incidentally, both of those shows ran the same 2 seasons. The Munsters ratings were mediocre and those of The Addams Family were apparently even worse.

[VirginiaHamilton]

Funny you guys mention seemingly-long runs of classic shows because I was also surprised to learn later in life that The Odd Couple was on the air for only 5 years. All those reruns had me fooled...lol

[All My Shadows]

Yes! Whenever we first got the Internet years ago and I started to learn more about these shows, I was shocked at all the 5-seasons-or-less shows that were in reruns for years. Gilligan's Island with its 3 seasons, The Partridge Family with its 5, I Love Lucy with its 6. And then the opposite was true. When I discovered Alice on TNN, I thought it was an obscure, somewhat short-lived show that was just seeing the light of the day for the first time in years -- never realized until much later that it made 9 seasons and over 200 episodes.

[Cheap21]

Arrested Development

[applcin]

One thing that was so cool to me about watching tv in the 70s was that, even with a limited number of stations, we not only got the current programming but also were getting the reruns from the 50s and 60s. I mean, the majority of my viewing was, on the one hand, the current Norman Lear and Quinn Martin shows, and on the other hand, the reruns from shows that were on 10-15-20 years earlier. When you weren't watching the soaps on ABC, CBS or NBC during the day or whatever was on the major networks later in the afternoons/early evenings, you had on the stations playing the reruns. In my case, my family didn't even own a color tv back then, so everything I watched was in black and white and I still enjoyed the heck out of it all. It was a long time before I saw my beloved Star Trek in glorious color. Nowadays, you have to have niche stations for the older stuff.

[SoapDope]

When I was a kid in the 80's, we got one of the big Satellite dishes where you could move it to various transponders. There would be tons of reruns of classic shows and movies. WTBS, USA, WGN, CBN, TNN, DISNEY, Nickelodeon etc......loved having blocks of older programming.

USA would run short lived shows like Temperature's Rising (with Joan Van Ark), The Girl With Something Extra (with Sally Field) etc....

WTBS loved showing old shows and would do movies like the Gidget & Beach Party films in the summer.

CBN which was owned by Pat Robertson and later became the Family Channel had a ton of classic shows, some that you don't see much anymore like The Farmers Daughter and The Doris Day Show.

Disney reran classic Disney Films and cartoons and the Mickey Mouse Club (the one with Annette).

Nickelodeon with it's Nick at Nite

A lot of TV movies and Game show blocks were reran back then on various channels.

There were also a bunch of BRAND NEW first run syndicated shows like It's A Living (starring Ann Jillian & Crystal Bernard), Mama's Family (starring Vicki Lawrence), Check It Out (starring Don Adams), The New Gidget (starring Caryn Richman, Dean Butler, Sydney Penny), 9 to 5 (starring Sally Struthers) etc.....some shows like Living and Mama started out as networks shows that got cancelled, but were brought back into production in syndication.

TV today sucks. There are very few channels that don't follow the same format that programming execs have forced upon networks.