In memory of the television rerun, my cultural lifeline
The theme song to HBO’s Succession may as well be a funeral dirge.
Netflix delivers a smirking eulogy. Hulu and Disney Plus and Amazon Prime cover the pews in crocodile tears, knowing that they contributed to the dead’s demise.
In the center of this ceremonial burial, the one who will be six feet under by the end of the hour, is the rerun.
The rerun: the television show that comes on when there’s nothing new. The syndicated sitcoms running in the dead of night. Last night’s premiere this afternoon, in case your kid’s soccer practice ran late or you had a meeting during primetime.
The death of the rerun is collateral damage from the new wave of cord-cutting. Pew Research Center reports that 56 percent of the United States had cable or satellite television in 2021, compared to 76 percent in 2015.
Just as cable transformed broadcast, and satellite replaced cable, streaming has metamorphosed our viewing habits. Instead of channel surfing, we binge. Instead of tuning into a channel and watching whatever comes your way, we can carefully curate our viewing habits so as to never see anything unfamiliar.
Eulogizing the rerun isn’t to say that older shows are disappearing; if this were the case, Netflix wouldn’t have paid more than $500 million to own the rights to Seinfeld for five years. But with streaming, time isn’t randomized; it’s mostly linear.
The rerun started with a redhead. In 1955, I Love Lucy became the first show to be re-aired, since Lucille Ball and then-husband Desi Arnaz cut their salaries to use 35mm film, which allowed high-quality hard copies of the show to be saved and reused by CBS.
Reruns became Television with a capital T in the following decades as film became more popular, and Americans built the cultural lexicon past Shakespeare and Mark Twain and into the likes of The Twilight Zone and The Dick Van Dyke Show. Just tuning in on your first TV set in the 1960s? No worries, you’ll catch up. Just tuning in as a teenager in the 2010s? No worries: you will never catch up, but the most important things have Wikipedia pages.
My first memories of reruns come from watching children’s networks, particularly thanks to Nickelodeon’s family-friendly after-dinner programming, Nick at Nite. Nickelodeon acquires the rights to a show and airs episodes at the same time every night, a few episodes at a time. It was so popular that a spin-off channel, TV Land, was created.
In 2009, Nick at Nite began promoting their new acquisition, and I began watching one of my future favorite shows.
CBS’s The Nanny aired four years before I was born. In watching the show out of order, I was thrust into the highest heights of the show. I saw Fran at her wittiest, at her best-dressed, at her most flirtatious with Maxwell Sheffield. She was cemented in my mind forever.
Last year, I began watching the show after it came to HBOMax. It’s still as endearing as I remembered, but it felt easy to spend hours running out the clock. I was worried I was watching it too quickly, with too little space between episodes, and for too long. Once I finished the fifth season in a matter of weeks, I made the decision to take a break.
I could watch random episodes, but that’s not how streaming works: finishing the show is the top priority, then you can rewatch your favorite episodes or start again.
We live in a world where every cultural artifact is given an expiration date. It’s a world where Saturday Night Live jokes are stale by airtime, because our internet-infected brains have been hearing better versions of that same joke for days beforehand.
In spite of the speed, our cultural memory is no longer persistent. We forget things in the weeks and months, especially now, in quarantine. In a world with cable reruns, new shows at their best might provide some comfort. But for now, we’re watching everything, in order, letting our cultural artifacts explode instead of fading away.
