Burning off is the low-profile airing of otherwise-abandoned unaired television programs, usually by scheduling in far less important time slots or on less important sister stations. Abandoned programs may be burned off because they have to air to meet contractual or legal requirements, or because their use as "filler" is perceived as slightly more profitable than other fillers.
Up through the 1990s, this often meant the airing of pilots for shows that were not going to be picked up, such as The Art of Being Nick, Seinfeld, and Barney Miller. In the latter two cases, the pilot proved popular enough that a series was eventually commissioned. The anthology series Love, American Style was devoted to many such failed pilots.
Since the late 1990s, episodes of long-running shows that are no longer hits and have been taken off the schedule have been burned off. The Drew Carey Show is an example of a series whose last episodes were burned off. In many cases, instead of airing the episodes during the regular season, the episodes are held back and presented in summer to fulfill the network's obligation to air them and to produce a return on their investment. Some programs may not air in even this form; in 2010 the final unaired episodes of the little-promoted ABC comedy Better Off Ted were to be used solely as a filler just in case the 2010 NBA Finals were over after five games. However, the Finals were a full seven-game series, and the remaining episodes of Better Off Ted were shelved.
Other examples include in television syndication, having a station pick up one program solely to air another, as was the case in 2009 when a syndicator offered stripped repeats of MTV's Laguna Beach which were of little interest to viewers or the stations themselves, but eventually led into the more popular MTV series The Hills, which was part of the same package. (The idea of bundling related series into one syndication package is not always considered burning off; shows such as The Golden Girls and Three's Company have had their spin-offs bundled together due to the strong continuity between the original series and the spin-off.)
Often, the program is moved to a sister cable network into low-profile time slots to mute collateral damage to the main broadcast's schedule as much as possible. Such was the case with NBC's broadcast airing of Quarterlife, the ABC pagent reality series All American Girl, and ABC's Greg Behrendt's Wake Up Call. In these cases, Quarterlife aired in one-day marathon form on NBC's Bravo, while All American Girl was quickly placed on ABC Family. In the case of Wake Up Call, the show never aired on ABC due to several factors, including the failure of Berhendt's self-titled talk show in the same season, and a reality glut in the 2006–07 summer season. The program was held until January 2009, when it had a short run on ABC's SoapNet. Fox similarly dumped canceled comedy Running Wilde on sister station FX, which consigned the show to four different time slots during the burn off.
Another case was on cable, when the final five episodes of SyFy's Caprica were burned off on January 4, 2011 after the network determined that it would neither renew the series nor be able to support a traditional finale due to scheduling factors.