100 episodes
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100 episodes is considered to be the general threshold at which point a television series produced for the United States becomes viable for syndication. Although much depends on the length of a show's seasons, this point is usually reached during a prime time series' fifth season.
The 100-episode mark is frequently cited in entertainment industry and popular media as a key number for enabling a series to enter syndication. [1][2][3]
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[edit] Successes and exceptions
Syndication is often a profitable enterprise, due to the fact that series can run for decades after they stop production. In this way, many shows that do not gain much profit during their first run will still prove to be viable to the network if they can last 100 episodes.
There are many exceptions to the 100 episode rule. Shows of fewer episodes have become syndication successes. The most notable of these is the original Star Trek series which had only 79 episodes available when it ended in 1969, but subsequently spawned ten movies and four spin-off series. What's Happening!! did much better than in its first run on television, despite only having produced 65 episodes, ending up with a later syndicated reincarnation in the mid-1980s, What's Happening Now!! An extreme example is the spy series The Prisoner which has been successfully syndicated for more than 30 years despite having only 17 episodes produced. (Hondo, also with only 17 episodes, was also successfully syndicated.) Most recently, Clueless has been more successful in syndication than during its network run even though only 62 episodes had been produced by the time the series ended in 1999. In 2006, Arrested Development was picked up in syndication by G4, HDNet and CBC Television, despite it only lasting 53 episodes. The original 1978 series Battlestar Galactica produced a mere 21 episodes, and yet still airs to this day after nearly 30 years of continuous syndication. There have also been examples of recent series picked up for rebroadcast despite airing only about a dozen episodes, such as Wonderfalls and Firefly. The U.S. version of The Office has also been picked up by TBS. The show only had at the time 51 episodes over three seasons.
[edit] Lower expectations and disappointments
On the other hand, a 100-episode series may be syndicated, but aired in inconvenient or odd time slots such as early morning, mid-afternoon or late at night, if the show wasn't critically acclaimed during its network run or was a show under the radar and doesn't warrant a prime timeslot; examples include The Parent Hood, Grace Under Fire, My Wife and Kids, Still Standing, The George Lopez Show and Yes, Dear.
There are also cases, such as Mad About You and Newsradio, where a series is expected to do well in syndication but ends up with disappointing ratings and revenue. Reasons include dated references in early seasons, or plotlines in later seasons that fall flat, causing the series to end up being defined by that one plotline or season rather than as a whole, changing the audience's perception.
The South Park episode "Cancelled", which was the 100th episode produced for the series, makes reference to the 100 episodes concept. The episode begins almost identically to the very first South Park episode, "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe", until the characters realize that everything happening had happened before, which leads to them concluding that they are stuck in a repeat. It's revealed that Earth is actually the set of an alien-run reality television program, also called Earth, but now that the earthlings have become aware they're going to "cancel the show," meaning that they plan to blow up the earth. When the kids protest, the aliens tell them that they should feel good, because Earth had made it to 100 episodes, and tell them that shows have a tendency to become too outlandish after 100 episodes.
[edit] Reality television
In particular, reality shows that have reached the 100 episode milestone have found syndication problematic. With the serial episodic nature of the shows, along with the game show elements that come with competitive reality programs, and the "event" nature of first-run reality shows to have unique elements to them to appeal to audiences on their first runs on networks, these factors hamper their attempts to have the programs have a second life in syndication. Previous seasons of The Amazing Race, for example ran on GSN starting in 2005 nightly; however the factor that the winning team at the end of each season was already known and the loss of the unexpected drama within each episode didn't draw many viewers to the second-run episodes, and subsequently by the beginning of 2006, GSN decided to show the repeats only in a late overnight slot. MTV's The Real World also failed to generate much audience interest in a three-year syndicated run when offered to local stations, as MTV's tactic to marathon entire seasons of the show often on the network reduced the value of the episodes to be more of a filler than as a series. However, these marathon events, where networks such as MTV or VH1 have shown an entire season of a reality program in a block, have been successful enough for them to become common on the networks: in 2008, both channels have frequently broadcast a season of America's Next Top Model in this fashion, airing all of the episodes in order in a single day.
Additionally, NBC's Fear Factor was promoted by that network's syndication division as "repeat-proof" when the show was sold into syndication to local broadcast networks and FX in 2004, with some stations showing the program twice a day [4]. After a strong start though, and as NBC began to use Fear Factor to plug weaknesses within its schedule, the ratings for the show's repeats fell, and by the beginning of 2006, FX had stopped airing Fear Factor (though it began to air in mid-morning again in the fall of 2006), and the show's syndicated run ended quietly in mid-September 2006.
