Why don't we see "Desperate Housewives" in syndication (A THEORY)?
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Archived from the IMDb Discussion Forums — Desperate Housewives
TMC-4 — 9 years ago(August 20, 2016 10:16 PM)
Desperate Housewives
had a very good, and generally hilarious, first year and then fell off the wagon in subsequent years. It largely dropped the black humor, which made the first year so good and got into various social scenarios which most viewers probably didn't find attractive (more "
Dallas
-ie" if you want to put it another way).
Also, dramas with story arcs usually don't do well in reruns anyway. I'm guessing people don't want to be tied down to having to watch a show every day, they prefer to watch something where they can miss an episode and not be lost the next day.
The one thing that is becoming a new platform for syndication, and it may be the way for
Desperate Housewives
, is On Demand through Hulu and Netflix. On Demand TV has potential for being more profitable than local syndication. It has the additional benefit of being low cost, and so not dependent on a certain number of episodes or attracting a large number of affiliated stations. -
Hulkus — 9 years ago(August 21, 2016 07:00 AM)
I don't watch cable TV anymore. Syndication butchers shows to the point where they don't make sense watching them. I remember a TV channel called Ion airing an old sitcom called Alice years ago. Generally Alice is a 25 minute show. Ion butchered it to 19 to 20 minutes for commercials and some episodes did not make sense watching because they cut out important scenes. Nowadays sitcoms like CBS's Mom is 18 to 19 minutes an episode. How will syndication cut that show down for their commercials? Plus TV channels have these annoying animated pop up ads on the screen during the show that is too distracting. Everything I watch is from portable external hard drives plugged into my Blu Ray player or TV like my own personal DVR box. I convert the DVDs I buy to MP4 or MKV file format and watch my shows uncut and ad free. I have quite the collection and thankfully they're making these portable hard drives up to 4 TB in size. I find this the best way to watch TV nowadays.
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desertdude1953 — 9 years ago(August 21, 2016 07:33 AM)
It was in syndication for a long period of time. Lifetime showed reruns of Desperate Housewives every afternoon; it was on Netflix until last January; and it is currently on Hulu. It was taken off Lifetime when ABC/Cherry Productions licensed it to Netflix and Hulu.
Netflix rotates shows in and out of the lineup in an attempt to save space on their servers. Undoubtedly, it will return to the Netflix lineup again in the future.
Desperate Housewives was never a drama, it was classified as a dramedy. -
iminheatlikeacat — 9 years ago(September 30, 2016 02:58 AM)
In the UK they used to have this on reruns on a channel called E4 BUT they would only show Season's 6-8 which was bizarre and I thought they were the weaker seasons anyway so didn't bother watching.