Adored By The Network / Live-Action TV

Examples with their own pages:

• Disney
• Nickelodeon
• PBS Kids

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• The Big Bang Theory:
  • It rapidly became this for CBS: promos and bumps for the show can be seen in stores like GameStop (on GameStop TV), and was signed to do three more seasons (making the total six thus far) just as reruns were headed into the syndication market, and from there...
  • TBS shot scores of new promos (including a five-minute one for National Cinemedia, one of the movie theatre preshow companies) with the cast to promote the reruns. Three days a week they air three hour blocks of the show. They're not above Lampshading the show's ubiquity in its ads.
  • Its Canadian home, CTV regularly airs syndicated reruns of Big Bang Theory as one would see in the U.S. on local affiliates, and also will air reruns in primetime to fill spaces in their primetime schedule where they have no new programming to air.
  • If you're watching E4, then you're probably watching Big Bang Theory. You're not?! Don't worry, another episode will be along in a minute. (This seems to be E4's way of dealing with the loss of Friends, to which it formerly gave this treatment).
  • This treatment was given to the spin-off Young Sheldon before it even aired. CBS tried to use any opportunity they can to hype it up, from promos at the end of ad breaks and Comic-Con.
• Reality TV quickly became this for pretty much every network out there. Every entertainment or lifestyle network has a low-cost, high-profit reality show to function as the reliable network tentpole. In fact, the really successful U.S networks have two, with CBS and Fox having a "summer series" (Big Brother and So You Think You Can Dance, alongside Survivor and American Idol, respectively) to hold viewers during the lean summer months. (In fact, one industry professional has said part of NBC's troubles at the turn of The New '10s might be their not having one, with The Voice still being fairly new at the time. 30 Rock, being a critically-acclaimed low-rating scripted NBC series with a penchant for Biting-the-Hand Humor, frequently made jokes about how reality shows were just awful but also big moneymakers and yet and how NBC still couldn't find a winning one).
• Big Brother on Channel 4. At one point there were seven hours of footage every day. A mix of Meddling Executives and ironically, Screwed by the Network; Endemol got a "Live Feed Every Year" clause into the contract. So, in the later years at least, C4 put the live feed on between midnight and 6AM. There was no such clause in C5's contract.
  • In January 2012, Channel 5 showed an "entirely reasonable" 3 hours a day of coverage. However, that might just fit the trope even more, since then-channel owner Richard Desmond mandated endless coverage of Big Brother in the various newspapers he owned, making it a network favorite across multiple media.
  • Around the time BB was completed at the end of summer 2010, Come Dine With Me was primed to become Four's most adored.
• There have been times, no matter which station plays it, when The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air will be on morning, noon, and night. As of this writing, TBS still plays it in the mornings. Since the show is available for barter, when a station sells ad time in exchange for the show, cable and local stations get Will Smith for free. (TBS did the same thing with Married... with Children.)
• It was big news in the UK in 2011 when Channel 4 announced it would no longer show Friends. E4 aired it as much as 7 or 8 times a day. Friends achieved something few American Long-Runners manage in Britain, with every episode being shown, and in Prime Time — unlike many of its compatriots. In the end, Comedy Central took up the Friends slack.
  • It has also tried to use Scrubs, and later The Big Bang Theory, to the same degree, although they didn't get quite the same level of coverage as Friends did.
  • Averted, surprisingly, with Glee (to which E4 had the rights to run episodes from the first two seasons), How I Met Your Mother, Desperate Housewives and several other high-profile American shows. E4's business model largely revolves around buying up the rights to American shows before they're popular and hoping they turn into smash hits.
  • Channel 4's breakfast/early morning schedule revolves around re-running entire series of recent American sitcom classics. Between seven and eleven every morning, Will & Grace, The King of Queens and Frasier are all in perpetual rerun. C4 also loves Raymond possibly more than Marie Barone does. Apart from two episodes shelved because of Watershed concerns, 208 out of 210 episodes are in permanent re-run from first to last and have been continually cycled for over six years in a six-days-a-week morning slot. Sporadically, According to Jim is added to the mix.
• Fox has aired American Idol TOGETHER with Glee, at least before the latter went into syndication.
• There's a Russian Reality Show called House-2. Its concept involves a bunch of people locked in a big house and "trying to create love". It is very successful (licenses are sold to several countries), has a huge fanbase, and the typical Hype Backlash-induced hatedom. There was a time when it was aired almost 24/7 until the network lost a major lawsuit regarding sexual content and was forced to move it to a strict late-evening slot.
• When they aren't running a new episode of WWE Raw, Burn Notice, Psych, Covert Affairs, or any of the original shows on the network, USA Network is pretty much known as "The Law & Order: Special Victims Unit and NCIS channel."
  • USA is really bad with their SVU marathons as well, to the point where marathons were sometimes shown for three days in a row. EVERY WEEK. For the most part, they'll have a decent way to tie all the episodes together - for example, episodes showing the relationship between Elliot and Olivia, an "Olivia's Greatest Hits" marathon on Mariska Hargitay's birthday, and a "No More Excuses" marathon concerning domestic and sexual violence. At one point, there was a marathon of episodes where the criminals were blonde women.
  • Incredibly, USA's weekly marathons of NCIS was a huge factor in the show gaining viewers over eight (and counting) seasons, a practically unheard-of feat in a TV landscape of a show's ratings starting high and falling or steadying from there. The show has broken its own highest ratings mark every year, with its record high set on a regular, midseason Season 8 episode (helped by a blizzard that kept most of the Eastern Seaboard indoors).
  • If a show's season just ended or went into a mid-season break, expect USA to show a marathon. Burn Notice got two days to show various episodes, and White Collar got two days in the same week to do the same thing.
  • They were really guilty of doing this with Modern Family and House as well.
  • In the mid-to-late 1990s, it seemed like the USA Network was pretty much "The Wings Channel".
• Like USA above, the UK channel 5USA seems to exist solely to show CSI (nearly always Seasons 10 and 11, the Langston years), NCIS and all of their associated spin-off shows. They did eventually stop running them with Law & Order and Law & Order: Special Victims Unit taking up the slack.
• Showcase holds the title of "The NCIS Channel" in Canada, with blocks of the main series frequently occupying its weekday lineup (particularly the main series; the spin-offs and other CBS crime dramas occupy the schedule of sister network Crime & Investigation). Before that it was CSI, which at least has a rational explanation as Alliance Atlantis (the channel's owners at the time) were one of the show's producers, making it essentially free for Showcase to run and rerun and rerun it again. As of 2023, FBI has also become part of the mix, in some cases displacing timeslots that were previously used for NCIS reruns.
• Portuguese channel TVI aired Inspector Max on weekend mornings for years, to the extent that you don't even have to watch an episode to know what happens in it. It's one of the most popular shows of its era, though it had to endure some audience fatigue in later years... which wasn't enough to stop TVI from bringing it back for a new, updated third season on weekend afternoons.
• Top Gear (UK) on Dave. Each episode is an hour long, and it's not uncommon for it to be broadcast in six slots per day. This is routinely lampshaded on the programme itself, and even Dave's programming mentions it.
  • Top Gear on BBC America had nine-hour marathons every Monday for a while; five-or-more-hour-long marathons on Saturday mornings/afternoons were not uncommon either. This dropped off significantly from 2016 onward, however.
  • Just about every BBC Panel Show gets this on Dave; Have I Got News for You, Mock the Week, QI and Would I Lie to You? have all been repeated to death. The former two regularly lampshade this fact.
• Besides Top Gear, BBC America is quite fond of multi-hour blocks of Star Trek: The Next Generation, which are played frequently almost every day. In late 2016 Star Trek: The Original Series started getting this treatment too, and the following January brought Star Trek: Voyager along with CSI: Miami.
  • Kitchen Nightmares got at least two hours every weekday and as many as eight until late 2016.
  • Doctor Who is the flagship import, getting new episodes day-and-date with the BBC premieres across the pond — in extended time slots if need be so they can run uncut (though reruns are often trimmed). The only other show that has ever warranted this treatment is Top Gear. At least two Who episodes were rerun every weekday for years. The weeks before and during the premiere run of Series 9 (2015) saw more reruns (including Tom Baker-era serials!) and marathons on the schedule, culminating in a "Who Year's Eve" marathon on December 31. The typical rerun schedule since 2016 is a block of two-to-six episodes run Mondays-through-Thursdays (Fridays have been turned over to all things Star Trek). It's worth noting that these reruns are periodically discontinued for months at a time, but this is probably because it has far fewer episodes than the above-mentioned shows, Series 1 is (very) rarely rerun, and some extra-length episodes/specials past David Tennant's tenure as lead are skipped rather than edited. But it always comes back.
  • The Beeb's various nature documentary series (Planet Earth, et.al.) also serve as all-purpose daytime/weekend filler, especially when Doctor Who reruns are on hiatus.
• M*A*S*H was the darling of the Hallmark Channel — it aired approximately twice every four hours on the channel until the Martha Stewart combine overran the channel's daytime schedule at the end of 2010, leading to a M*A*S*H-free Hallmark. What followed was a whiplash inversion of the trope when nearly half of the Stewart-controlled seven-hour block was converted into Little House on the Prairie space barely a month after launch. Hallmark also relentlessly dedicates itself to reminding the world of The Waltons' existence.
  • M*A*S*H also used to be this for FX, taking up anywhere from a third to nearly half a day of programming. This was before FX started getting its own original shows like The Shield. Without its own original programming, the channel was mainly movies and re-runs, and M*A*S*H had so many episodes it was easy to fill lots and lots of air time.
  • Similar to the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air example above, M*A*S*H* was such a syndication darling in the late 90's and early 2000's that for a stretch of time you could go a full day watching nothing but M*A*S*H* simply by switching between the various channels that carried it.
  • Hallmark could just as easily be called The Frasier Crane Network—it airs 8-10 Frasier episodes, in addition to more reasonably paced Cheers repeats, every day.
  • The Hallmark Channel has a sort of affair with The Good Witch, a Made-for-TV Movie starring Catherine Bell in the title role. As one of their most popular original movies, Hallmark has given it five sequels and is constantly playing all the movies in marathons. It even got picked up as a series.
  • However none of the above examples even come close to Christmas movies as Hallmark REALLY loves Christmas movies^note which makes sense, considering it's owned by a greeting card company that sells Christmas decorations like ornaments - which the network gleefully shills. Not only do they air nothing BUT Christmas movies during November-December, but they take the phrase "Christmas in July" very seriously — that month most shows are replaced with Christmas movies, Golden Girls, Frasier, Cheers and I Love Lucy being the sole exceptions^note sadly, the shows don't stand a chance the actual holiday season. They start their "Countdown to Christmas" in October and start airing Christmas movies. (It doesn't help that most of these movies have virtually identical plots.)
    • Hallmark even aired reruns of their Christmas movies every Friday night throughout 2019 to honor the 10th Anniversary of "Countdown to Christmas"! Time will tell if this ends up backfiring in their faces.
    • In 2020, Christmas came early in Hallmark Land; March, to be exact. Justified in that a massive pandemic was forcing people inside and the channel thought airing Christmas movies constantly would cheer people up.
  • The spinoff channel Hallmark Movies & Mysteries basically spends the entire afternoon playing Monk. However, it falls victim to the Christmas movie adoration alongside its parent network.
• Jay Leno is an example of this happening with a person instead of a show. In 1992, NBC picked him to host The Tonight Show over David Letterman when Johnny Carson retired. In 2009/2010, after an abortive shot at a Prime Time Variety Show and some serious Executive Meddling, he returned to The Tonight Show at the expense of Conan O'Brien. This was followed by a major uproar.
• The Biggest Loser seems to have become this for NBC. It seems right after one season ends, the next one is on 2 weeks later. It doesn't help it's a 2-hour show, and it's on for several weeks at best. (NBC's adoration of The Biggest Loser was something of a Running Gag on 30 Rock, which loved to poke fun at NBC and its corporate parents (GE at first, then Comcast).)
• In New Zealand, Two and a Half Men is played at least once a day on TVNZ 2, and Friends was at one time airing at 3 different time slots at 3 different points in the series, with all 3 playing in the same 2-hour block.
• In Australia, the Nine Network used to have a spectacular case of this for Two and a Half Men. Every weeknight immediately after the news and A Current Affair, in the filler timeslot once taken up by many a game show, Two and a Half Men played for years (except in regional areas, where a half-hour of local news continued to use this timeslot).
  • Hamish and Andy did a Take That! to the tacit in their first Gap Year TV series during one of Ryan Shelton’s “100 Second New York Lessonds”, which was actually broadcast on Nine. Ryan claims that Two and a Half Men was based on an extremely-popular Broadway troop called “Almost Three Chaps”^note which also contains two guys and a young boy, who ran for over 20 years and had shows repeated 30 times a week, much like Nine’s treatment of the show.
  • Following Charlie Sheen's swan dive off the deep end, Nine seems to have shifted this treatment and its former daily timeslots to The Big Bang Theory; there is nary a glimpse of Two and a Half Men anywhere on the network anymore. They shifted it over to their secondary channel 'GO!', and even then it runs comparatively infrequently. Meanwhile, Top Gear (UK) also seems to have become a similar object of Nine's affection, until the familiar hosts quit the show.
• At one point, at any given hour of the day, Law & Order was guaranteed to be on TNT, sapped for or followed by Bones. They have since replaced by The Mentalist and Supernatural.
  • Castle now seems to be a favorite, airing Monday through Thursday evenings.
• When the Canadian counterpart to Comedy Central, The Comedy Network, wants to fill Canadian Content quotas, they mainly air episodes of their Just for Laughs-related programs (mainly the eponymous series and the more recent Just for Laughs: All Access, which are compilations of highlights from the Just for Laughs comedy festival in Montreal. Justified, as it is a major event that attracts big names in stand-up, so it's not a bad thing to build a comedy channel around. They also air their co-branded hidden camera series Just for Laughs: Gags) and its version of Match Game. In the past, they just aired a bunch of old episodes of SCTV and The Kids in the Hall among others (the "classic" programs have since moved to sister network Comedy Gold, formerly TV Land Canada). Anything else that gets aired excessively can be assumed to be this trope.
  • Corner Gas, as one of their sister broadcast network's most prominent originals, was also adored by Comedy.
  • They also gave eight seasons to the universally-hated Open Mike With Mike Bullard. When the network first debuted, its schedule essentially consisted of the few things they had the rights to — Just For Laughs programming, Whose Line Is It Anyway?, Saturday Night Live, assorted British programming, and Open Mike. At points, they would air both an episode of Open Mike, and The Best Of Open Mike on the same day, despite the show only having been on the air for a couple months.
  • When they're not fulfilling their CanCon quotas, The Big Bang Theory, and for a time, Community, were their standbys. Then, they moved South Park, The Simpsons (though it still aired at 8pm for a while), Conan, and several other low-brow Comedy Central shows to MuchMusic just to free up more timeslots for reruns of said shows in primetime (although, this also came after the CRTC rejected a request by Bell to allow it to air more animated programming; the restriction is meant to protect Teletoon). The Simpsons did return to a traditional weeknight slot on Comedy, however.
• On a related note, Comedy's sister broadcast network CTV promoted Hiccups and Dan for Mayor — two new sitcoms featuring alumni from Corner Gas, quite hard. Only one managed to make it to a second season, though.
• Disney Channel programming in Canada:
  • Any Disney Channel Original Series that's live-action. On Family Channel in Canada, The Suite Life and Hannah Montana have been played many, many times over; it's pretty much hell to anyone that hates Disney Channel's live-action shows. Oh, and Lizzie McGuire and That's So Raven were still being aired in the dead-hours until circa fall 2012, and began reairing them occasionally in 2015. (Those two shows were never reaired again in the US before 2013, save for 2010, where it aired all its episodes for a while.)
  • Eventually, even Lab Rats has gotten the marathon treatment, despite already airing on the Canadian Disney XD, even Pair of Kings (until moving to Disney XD) was given the royal treatment on Family, while Kick Buttowski didn't air in Canada until Disney XD became available. Meanwhile, Fish Hooks was fully removed from Family.
  • As Disney Channel's former de facto Canadian outlet, Family Channel shared many of the same fixations, although joined by Canadian-made KidComs of their own (such as The Latest Buzz and Wingin' It) and continuing reruns of Life with Derek (although Derek was quite popular to begin with). Another original series, The Next Step, has also been quite popular: following DHX's purchase of the channel and Family ditching its rights to Disney programming, the network's slate seems to have been increasingly filled with music-related teen dramas that ride off The Next Step.
• Over-the-air broadcast syndication is likely to do this with either the darling network show of the moment (How I Met Your Mother in the Fall 2010 syndication blocks, The Big Bang Theory in 2011's) and/or court shows (since there are plenty of them out there). Likely justified, as local affiliates — and especially their sister stations — don't have the same budget as the major networks and need material that they can air on the cheap. Big networks like NBC, ABC, or CBS don't directly own the local stations (except for those in larger markets such as New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago), but won't have a problem with affiliates running its own syndicated reruns.
  • The same case with stations that air locally-produced "daytime shows" which are barely disguised Infomercials for local businesses and fully scripted. Literally only the person in the station's control room may be watching, but the station gets the money from the sponsor even if the show has no ratings to speak of, so the rest of the station's market has to suffer through it because it gives said businesses "exposure".
    • This is, of course, the exact same reason that those stations also run infomercials in the dead of night.
    • If anyone in San Antonio, TX, wants a 30-minute education on diamonds, they can just do a quick scan of some local TV channels for any of the myriad airings of the Americus Diamond (local jewelry megastore) infomercial, which will teach you more than what you cared to know about diamonds.
    • In the two weeks before a house flipping seminar comes to the local Days Inn Airport ballroom, expect to see nothing but Armando Montelongo, the Yanceys, or that one guy from the failed Spike TV house flipping show in every infomercial slot until then trying to lure viewers down there, as they bulk-buy every slot possible in a local market to saturate viewers with their house flipping seminars.
• In a cross-over with Network Decay, Syfy does this a lot. For a while, the fixation was Ghost Hunters. No matter the time of day, chances are that 4.5 out of 5 times they'll be airing an episode of either it or its spinoff Ghost Hunters International. Consider that Syfy already has a stable of shows (the Stargate franchise, Farscape, etc.), but you have to actually HUNT those down.
  • This is interesting considering Australia's Syfy is usually chock-a-block full of Stargate and its spinoffs.
• MTV has lived and breathed this trope throughout its entire existence — after all, it used to focus just on music videos for hours on end. Those who recall the endless The Real World/Road Rules marathons from the '90s might find their later The Hills spin-off marathons warmly nostalgic.
  • Before reality shows came to dominate the channel, from about 1991-93 MTV would truck out the bulk of Michael Jackson's videos, The Making of Michael Jackson's Thriller, and the movie Moonwalker for a "Michael Jackson Weekend" every few months. They did some similar marathons in 1995 when HIStory was released. VH1 took up the gauntlet at the Turn of the Millennium.
  • As of July 2020, MTV has essentially become the Ridiculousness channel. Towards the end of the 2010s MTV has grown fond of the show, that by 2019, MTV's weekend schedule was bombarded by Ridiculousness reruns. Then it only grew from there; according to a Variety article, in late-June 2020, a staggering 113 hours a week (out of 168) of MTV's schedule consisted of Ridiculousness. While Variety suspected that MTV's Ridiculousness overexposure is a response to increased cord-cutting and competition from streaming networks, the channel denied this. Not even the 40th anniversary date of MTV (8/1/2021) was safe, they aired an all-day marathon of Ridiculousness with no mention of the milestone.
  • In their bid to unionize, the writers of Ridiculousness actually asked MTV to order more shows, presumably due to workload the writers have in creating the only show MTV airs regularly.
• Local news on most TV stations around the world. Justified in that TV stations have to run public service programming in order to get a broadcast license from the local government's communications authority. It also benefits them in that it's cheaper to produce news than pay for syndicated programming, and it can earn the station some respect if it's high quality. Moreover, larger markets are huge metropolitan areas with a lot going on that demands coverage. Some of the smaller markets, not so much. In a city, the size of, say, Madison, Wisconsin, or Des Moines, Iowa, 3-4 hours of news programming tends to get you a lot of "public service" pieces (which usually means cooking segments or visits from the local Humane Society).
  • Las Vegas's NBC affiliate was planning to take this to its obvious conclusion; when its contracts to Wheel of Fortune and Jeopardy! expired, they just replaced it with the news. When they lost Dr. Phil, it was going to be replaced with the news. In fact, replacing all non-network programming with news was the station's ultimate plan if it wasn't clear enough. Though Sinclair's purchase of the station following the death of its owner threw a wrench into that ambition.
• GSN previously did this with Deal or No Deal; on any given day, it likely filled every third-time slot. Nowadays, it's Family Feud reruns, and especially the Steve Harvey version. So much so that GSN barely airs any of the previous eras of the show anymore. In fact, many successful, recent GSN originals still get more airtime than actual classic shows nowadays.
  • The Newlywed Game has gotten this treatment, first the classic Bob Eubanks version and then their own revival.
  • The '70s Match Game was also all over the schedule for a long time, even into the late 2000s, plus it came in at #1 on their 2006 50 Greatest Game Show of All Time countdown. It's now getting similarly extensive airings on Buzzr, in addition to the daily hour it still gets on GSN.
• In Australia, Network Ten spares no expense in promoting whichever long-running reality show it has going at the time - over the years, this role has been filled by the likes of Australian Idol, Big Brother and currently MasterChef. All of these ran in some form at least once a day for an hour, and in the case of Big Brother received no end of supplementary programming at all hours. Though Big Brother eventually died off, the network tried everything they could to keep the audience and heavily promoted it. Not that it worked, but at that point, it had enjoyed a solid run for eight or nine years.
• Spike TV seems to feel that there's no such thing as too many all-day CSI marathons.
  • Not to forget Star Trek! Two hours of Star Trek: The Next Generation and two hours of Deep Space Nine 5 days a week for a while there.
  • Then it was Walker, Texas Ranger.
  • They also must want viewers to see all 1000 Ways to Die in one sitting, as the show gets lengthy marathons at least once a week.
  • Can these stack? Because it seems that if you turn on Spike at any given time, you'll stumble across a UFC fight.
  • Pretty much anything that airs on Spike is seen in a day-long marathon, without exception. This includes CSI, CSI: NY, 1000 Ways to Die, Bar Rescue, Auction Hunters, Jail, or the Star Wars series.
  • In Season 3 Spike would air the previous episode of "Deadliest Warrior", the new episode twice, then an episode from season 1 or 2 as a capper.
  • COPS is to Spike what The Simpsons is to FXX, ever since they acquired the rights to the show and had it do a Channel Hop from Fox. Its low production costs, steady ratings, and deep episode library means it's the spackle they use to fill holes in their schedule. Their overnight schedule seems to frequently be a marathon of alternating episodes of COPS and Jail.
• When Caprica first began, Syfy showed it nonstop. Think about that. Yes, multiple marathons per week at times of a series that had yet to air ten episodes. Enjoy it while you can, Caprica.^note Syfy will advertise a show to death and even screw other shows in favor of it early in its run, but once the shiny new wears off, it will be killed at the height of its popularity for "not attracting the right demographic," regardless of which demographic that is.
  • You called it. Caprica has been canceled after a year and a half.
• The UK's Channel One regularly aired five or six episodes of Star Trek (The Next Generation, Deep Space Nine, Voyager and Enterprise) on a typical day, with one or two being repeats. The catch-ups they did on Saturdays meant each episode of Voyager was broadcast on three occasions. Since then, the channel slot is Sky Atlantic, and it's still filling the daytime schedule with Star Trek.
  • In addition to Sky Atlantic, both Syfy and CBS Action have also picked up the rights to various Trek series, meaning that there are now three channels showing several episodes each every day of the week.
• A&E's line up these days consist of running one specific show constantly from 2pm to 2am every day. The show in question varies between Duck Dynasty, The First 48, Storage Wars, Shipping Wars, or whatever their flavor of the month is this week. Other A&E shows are so rarely ever seen, you would be forgiven for knowing the channel airs anything else.
• Degrassi and MuchMusic. When a new season starts, all day is given over to the runup to the premiere. This makes a little more sense for them - Degrassi and Epitome's other current production The L.A. Complex are Much's flagship original dramas.
• Before it was replaced by a 24-hour version of The N, Nick GAS would air almost nothing but Legends of the Hidden Temple, Nick Arcade, and the Double Dare shows. By the time it was shut down, the channel was, by all accounts, running on autopilot, having dwindled down to just those shows.
• Comedy Central
  • The channel loves Tosh.0, to the point where other shows have been cancelled or moved to crappy spots simply because they aren't as cheap to produce. (This is often lampshaded by the host: "We'll be right back with more John Benjamin Has a Van!")
  • To many in the world, the very average 1986 comedy film Stewardess School was just another film. Up until 2002, Comedy Central would caulk many empty hours of time with many airings of Stewardess School.
  • For the longest time, old (~1980-1995) episodes of Saturday Night Live (edited down to an hour) was the caulk of Comedy Central's highly porous daily schedule. In the mid-2000s, SNL was replaced as such by MADtv (1995) once they lost the SNL rights. Then they lost the rights to MADtv (1995) (after it being off their schedule for several months) and now it's been reruns of Scrubs, Futurama, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, Tosh.0, Key and Peele, South Park, and snippets of Comedy Central Presents (or The Half Hour Comedy Special).
  • Back in the early days of the network, Mystery Science Theater 3000 was the network darling and cornerstone of their programming.
  • In the wake of Charlie Sheen's rather public meltdown, Comedy Central UK has started broadcasting a lot more episodes of Two and a Half Men, along with peppering Chuck Lorre-style vanity cards in the advert breaks.
  • Also, at night (from about 12 AM-7 AM EST) all they usually ran was Comedy Central Presents, replaced by the Secret Stash on weekends: fully uncensored comedy specials and mostly uncensored movies. As of 2012, Comedy Central U.S. shows only infomercials from 4:30-7:00 AM EST, and a maximum of about 3-4 uncensored programs a week.
  • The network still airs Chappelle's Show during primetime, more than five years after the series officially ended.
  • Up until about a few years ago, it wasn't surprising if you found Kevin James' comedy special Sweat the Small Stuff on the CC schedule at least once a month.
  • Their afternoon and evening line-up seems to be dominated by The Office (US) nowadays.
  • The UK and Irish incarnation of the channel took over the rights to Friends since Channel 4 lost them. Since then, Friends'' marathons are effectively their entire daytime lineup. Friends Fest is a non stop marathon of friends which lasts for a week. This event happens at least once every other month on top of the already heavy rotation of friends on a normal day. When Friends isn't on the UK and Irish Comedy Central then it's usually Impractical Jokers taking up what ever slots there is left.
• In 2008, Discovery Channel was obsessed with Deadliest Catch, using any excuse to run a marathon. This wouldn't be so bad, except they only had three seasons worth of coverage, and they showed at least four hours of the show a day. By the end of the week, you were all caught up if you were a new viewer. They have gotten better, though, at least moving on from Deadliest Catch to other new favorite shows. Like Dirty Jobs and Cash Cab.
  • In a strange case of a network becoming infatuated with a U.S. state rather than a show, Discovery's parent company has recently been milking Alaska for reality show material, thus resulting in shows like Gold Rush Alaska and Flying Wild Alaska. Discovery is no stranger to paying tribute to the blue-collar lifestyle (see the aforementioned Dirty Jobs and Deadliest Catch), but not until late 2010 did they focus this much attention on Alaska specifically.
  • Recently Discovery has been ramping up their MythBusters airings. The show has always been a fairly strong standby of the network (with various marathons happening for one reason or another) but since the beginning of the fall 2010 season, MythBusters weekend marathons have become a regular occurrence (including a Christmas and New Year's marathon running on back-to-back weekends).
• [adult swim]
  • Their favorite was (during its run) Childrens Hospital, as they practically have saved at least one Ad Bumper each week for that show. With the Season 5 premiere of Robot Chicken, [adult swim] scheduled the shows so that reruns of Children's Hospital would come on at the half hour, and new episodes of Robot Chicken at the :45.
  • It had started as nothing special though with pretty average, if not low, ratings...until it won them a Primetime Emmy (first for the network). From that point forward [adult swim], taking notes from critical darlings with low ratings (just around that time Arrested Development was picked up by Netflix) was whoring them like there's no tomorrow, plugging them anywhere they could and even berating everyone in viewer bumps who dared to write it sucks. In a way, it worked; show was a success and ended on their own terms.
  • They also seem to like Delocated.
  • If Tim & Eric so much as sneeze on something, AS will pick it up for a three-season run. It helps that a large segment of their target demographic tends to be drunk and/or stoned when they tend to air Tim and Eric's stuff (in the 10:00-11:00 PM range), given that Tim and Eric's target seems to be "People who are habitually drunk and/or stoned. Especially stoned."
    • This was also why The Room (2003) became their go-to April Fools' Day broadcast - Tim and Eric are fans of it.
    • Rumor is this is why Million Dollar Extreme Presents: World Peace got cancelled. Creator Sam Hyde has said it got good ratings, but Tim didn't like it and complained to Adult Swim.
• ITV and its reality programming, specifically, The X Factor and Britain's Got Talent. Both shows are repeated frequently, have their own spin-off shows (The Xtra Factor and Britain's Got More Talent) aired on the sister channel, ITV 2, and have so much advertising and promotional material it's hard not to go anywhere in the UK without seeing something to do with The X Factor. Not to mention the numerous specials and reality shows based on prominent faces of either programme (Cheryl Cole, Dannii Minogue, and Piers Morgan in particular). No new episodes being broadcast yet? No problem, they have plenty of hour-long highlights shows to air during the rest of the year.
  • To a lesser extent, The Only Way Is Essex, on ITV2 at least. Advertisements run at every opportunity plus cast members frequently appear on other ITV shows.
• The History Channel:
  • For the longest time, The History Channel was The Modern Marvels Channel: Guaranteed No Historical Documentaries (or we'll give you a free DVD set of Modern Marvels!) Viewers who remember this period couldn't begin to imagine how badly Marvels ended up getting Screwed by the Network during it's final (original) season.
  • Before that it was Secrets of World War II Channel. Before that, it was Battleships of WWII.
  • History International loves History's Mysteries, usually playing it three or four times a day.
  • And in general subjects, History Channel had gone through various "Adoring a single topic in history" — first the Civil War, then WWII, then just Hitler. And for about a year, they were constantly playing documentaries about the Freemasons and Knights Templar, then it was disasters (specifically Seconds from Disaster).
  • A&E was joked about being "The Hitler Channel" until they spun off The History Channel, which kept a large amount of Hitler-centric programming until very recently.
  • At the moment, thanks to the popularity of Pawn Stars, The History Channel has constantly been playing that show and shows like it (just flip to the channel at any given moment and nine times out of ten you'll find either that show or American Pickers on, the latter especially in primetime). Other TV networks have also jumped on the "reality show where guys buy and sell things" bandwagon. Due to the 2012 Apocalypse craze, the station also aired a lot of "Armageddon" and conspiracy theory shows. Aliens in particular have been a popular topic.
  • The History Channel always runs a Band of Brothers marathon about every four months or so. Quite often it coincides with anniversaries of events from WWII but unless it's D-Day the episodes have almost nothing to do with what it's commemorating.
• Animax Latin America had Distraction, a 16-episode live-action game show (one of the first signs of the channel's Network Decay), which, up until its rebranding to Sony Spin in 2011, still aired there despite the short amount of episodes.
• ION's entire weekday schedule is basically one or two shows (such as Ghost Whisperer, Without a Trace, and Criminal Minds) on weekdays. That's it. Outside of WWE Main Event on Wednesdays, before ION stopped airing it, the remaining hours are paid, religious, or children's programming.
  • As of March 2014, ION fills almost its entire schedule with Law & Order: Criminal Intent, Without a Trace, and Criminal Minds marathons.
  • By the end of Summer 2015, ION mutated into the Ghost Whisperer channel, as the show makes up most of the weekday morning and afternoon schedule.
• How It's Made and variations thereupon for The Science Channel. Probably because it's dirt cheap to film and write, and has been going long enough that they can fill timeslots or even entire afternoons with random episodes without getting too many repeats.
  • As well as "Survivorman" (and similar programs) and "Mythbusters" reruns.
  • How It’s Made is more adored in the United Kingdom, where it airs on FOUR different Discovery-owned channels (Discovery Channel, Discovery Science, DMAX, and free-to-Air channel Quest).
• NBC had Dateline fell victim to this about ten years ago. It seemed that every night, except Thursday, you could find an airing of the show on NBC. Now, it and 48 Hours are adored by ID.
• Until recently, the only secular shows the Christian-owned INSP (Inspiration Network) showed was Our House, Highway to Heaven, The Waltons, and Wind at My Back. The Waltons was adored the most, marathons of it were frequent, but then again, it was obviously the most popular show on the lineup. Then they bought more programming, mostly retro family sitcoms such as Happy Days and The Brady Bunch, so INSP is no longer the Waltons lovefest network they once were.
• Reality Shows in general are officially the Creator's Pet in Italy^note there actually are people who like them, which makes this more of a case of Broken Audience.. Spanish-Italian showgirl Natalia Estrada explicitly stated that she would return on TV only at the end — if any^note  The latest edition of Big Brother even had padding and lasted roughly two more months than previous seasons. Go figure. - of the current reality show craze.
  • Much of this is the influence of one Silvio Berlusconi, a media mogul who happens to have had the longest term as Prime Minister of Italy since World War II. The man's populist and rather crude tastes (this is the fellow who gave the Spanish Foreign Minister the sign of the horns, said a Social Democratic German MEP would "make a good concentration camp guard", called Angela Merkel "an unfuckable lard-arse", threw naked sex-parties on his private island, drafted showgirls as political candidates, allegedly hired a teenage prostitute, pursued disastrous economic policies that reward the lazy and well-connected, and has probably been using his political position as a means to avoid prosecution for twenty years) show up in his "creations".
• At one point, HGTV was almost entirely made up of House Hunters, House Hunters International, and House Hunters Renovations. These days, whenever HGTV isn't airing episodes of House Hunters, My First House, or Property Brothers, they're airing Love It or List It.
• NBC's flagging Saturday Morning schedule was propped up by Saved by the Bell. They loved its ratings so much that they had Peter Engel create another show with the same basic premise with a twist. When that got good ratings, they cancelled every cartoon on the schedule, gave half of Saturday mornings to its other favorite show (Today), and gave the other half to Engel and friends.
• HBO produced seven seasons of Arli$$ despite its consistently low ratings and reviews well below the station's standard. HBO believed that it targeted a niche audience that otherwise would not have subscribed to the channel.
• Despite falling ratings that have now dipped below a million viewers per episode, HBO still puts a lion's share of advertising behind Girls. Thanks to its polarizing lightning-rod creator/star Lena Dunham, her penchant for nudity, and the show's memetic Cringe Comedy sex scenes, it only trails Game of Thrones in terms of the network's social media buzz.
• Showtime loved Weeds so much that they couldn't seem to imagine a world without them running it, as they'd renewed it to run several more seasons than it was supposed to (the plan was to run it for four seasons, it ran for eight). Showtime even had a deal with producer Lionsgate to run the show...and only that show.
• Does WE (a rival network to Lifetime, basically Oxygen with a lower budget) run anything that isn't named Bridezillas?
  • Ghost Whisperer.
  • Ever since their Network Decay, WE now airs Law & Order and CSI: Miami and won't let you forget it. Also stuff with David Tutera.
• TNT seems to really love Franklin & Bash as it probably gets promoted more than any other show on that network (even Rizzoli & Isles and Leverage).
• At a certain point in the late 2010s, the Latin American version of TCM was airing four or more episodes of Lost a day, while every other old series had at most two. Analysts claimed it was made to propel decaying ratings.
• The Brazilian People+Arts (now renamed Liv) at a certain point broadcast American Chopper at least 4 times a day.
• The Real Housewives of [any wealthy city] is extremely common on Bravo.
• Italian network Rai4 seems to really love Charmed; it is rarely absent from its schedule.
• Australia's SBS has a love affair with Inspector Rex, which they pretty much admit on their special Inspector Rex website. As of this writing, the show has more-or-less been slotted in at 7.30pm on Thursday since 1997, and marathons are not uncommon.
• Parodied on Royal Canadian Air Farce with a TV guide describing extra channels for cable. Seinfeld was listed at least once per channel, even on the science fiction channels or other specialty channels where it's otherwise unsuitable. The skit finished with the Seinfeld channel - which was filled with the Seinfeld show.
• Back in 2009 TV Land got the rights to Roseanne and Married... with Children and one could tell they were quite enthusiastic about it because every night featured a three-hour block of Roseanne followed by a three-hour block of Married... With Children or vice versa.
  • Even worse with Everybody Loves Raymond. When TV Land first purchased the syndication rights, they not only ran Raymond in daily blocks like the above shows, they would regularly air marathons (especially on weekends) for little discernible reason. This meant that TV Land would run through the entire series (which lasted nine seasons) in a matter of weeks.
  • As of 2014 they REALLY love Hot in Cleveland. A lot. There are promos for it every 10 minutes, episodes aired often and it even has a planned animated series in the works.
  • As of May 2016, TV Land's weekends are entirely comprised of reruns of Reba.
• Cartoon Network:
  • For a while it was Dude, What Would Happen?. This wasn't the first time the station tried to put over a live-action show, but it was definitely the show they put the most effort into trying to become popular. As with anything related to CN Real, it went over about as well as you would think. Even after dropping the block, the network still tried to put over Dude What Would Happen, and continued airing it for two years despite horrible ratings and overwhelming negative viewer response before finally dropping it.
  • Cartoon Network also heavily hyped Level Up, first the movie and then the series. The show got ads big in number and in length, and you would have been hard-pressed to go through a commercial break that didn't have an ad for the show. After the show started, they've rerun it every weeknight even though only one episode had premiered. Plus, the second episode aired commercial-free, as well as the third.
• There was a time where if you flipped over to G4 at any given time, you could expect to find reruns of COPS or Cheaters. In some cases, they've even played the exact same episode twice in a row. According to Kevin Pereira, the shows are an easy way for the network to fund its original programming, despite having almost nothing in common demographically.
  • There was also their obsession with Olivia Munn and whatever stunt she would do on the latest Attack of the Show!.
• At first, TruTV was more or less obsessed with Operation Repo, and many of its other programs could be described as being either Operation Repo "in an X" or "People Just as Trashy as the Operation Repo Cast Doing Similar Things."
  • They also seem fond of Wipeout (2008), airing blocks of it constantly.
  • When Impractical Jokers premiered, it quickly became the new darling: not only did they start running marathons of this show while the first season was still running, but entire night blocks were devoted to this show. The show was such a success that the network threw the "actuality" idea in the trash and just shifted to comedic reality shows in general.
  • As of 2021 it seems that Tacoma FD is the new darling of the channel.
• Animal Planet:
  • Like The History Channel, Animal Planet has jumped on the "regular/redneck guys doing jobs that vaguely relate to our station content" and has been giving a ton of ads and air time to shows like Call of the Wildman and Pit Boss. Lately they've also been obsessed with Finding Bigfoot.
  • At the height of its popularity, The Crocodile Hunter was adored by Animal Planet, though since Steve Irwin's death, reruns are shown very rarely.
  • Recently, River Monsters is adored by the network. Fortunately, much like MythBusters and The Crocodile Hunter, it's one of those shows that deserves to be adored.
  • Shows about pets, like It's Me or the Dog and its ilk are also adored. Naturally, given that Animal Planet's viewer base is now mostly composed of pet owners who like watching shows about pwecious widdle puppies, this move makes sense. The older viewer base, who grew up with Jeff Corwin, Steve Irwin, and such, are none too fond of these shows.
  • Animal Planet seems to have gotten hooked up on reality shows about people catching animals and pest control, cute animals people probably already own, and people stopping poaching (which kind of makes sense). If you want to learn about animals? You're better off watching National Geographic's animal network, Nat Geo Wild.
  • As of August 2014, the network airs Dirty Jobs marathons practically every other day.
  • For a good sum in the 2000s the channel adored Animal Planet Heroes shows. They had several series running at least one episode per day.
  • Not a show within itself but certain types of documentaries are traditionally liked by Animal Planet. They tend to show documentaries about crocodiles, wolves, sharks, dogs, and especially lions.
• Bravo adores Top Chef, especially when it has new episodes.
  • To contrast, Top Chef: Texas began airing when fellow Bravo reality-competition show Work Of Art was a little over halfway through. Before, WoA would air at 9pm then repeat at 11pm, with something in between. When TC:T started, WoA aired at 10... and repeated at 11... and again at 12. If you missed WoA, you had to wait 3 hours before seeing it again. Then the following week, leading up to new WoA episodes would be... however many of the new TC episodes they had leading up to the newest one of those.
    • Their latest adoration is anything Real Housewives. Besides developing spinoffs of the original, they are now doing spinoffs of the spinoffs.
• Food Network:
  • On a similar reality-competition front, Food Network quickly morphed into the Iron Chef and anything like it network. Cupcake Wars, Chopped and Restaurant: Impossible repeats seem to appear all day everyday. You now have to go the their sister network Cooking Channel to see actual instructional cooking. That or tune in pre-afternoon.
  • Then there is Diners, Drive-ins and Dives — and anything featuring Guy Fieri for that matter — which can air anywhere between 5 to 16 times a day.
  • Cooking Channel got in on the fun too, frustrating any attempts by cooking fans to avoid it. Said cooking shows have returned to the Food Network, albeit in diminished quantity and only during weekday afternoons, however.
  • As of 2014, Restaurant: Impossible seems to have been reduced down to Wednesdays, allowing more room for Chopped and Diners, Drive-Ins, and Dives, in addition to Mystery Diners, which is getting far more air-time than its parent show Restaurant Stakeout.
  • During the month of December, they will pre-empt their Chopped block on weekday evenings for holiday episodes of their programming, as well as episodes of Cake Wars.
• TLC (and to a lesser extent, Discovery Health) used to show nothing but A Baby Story and other birth-related shows on weekdays from about 9 AM-4 PM. The weird thing is, they seemed to only show old repeats, which means that some of these babies being born would have been in middle school around their peak.
  • For a while it was known as "The Midget Channel" thanks to their overhyping of Little People Big World and its spinoffs.
  • After moving away from babies, TLC became hung up on Jersey Shore-style reality shows, such as Honey Boo Boo, and more recently, Gypsy Sisters and Welcome To Myrtle Manor.
  • In 2010, at least, they were inordinately fond of Cake Boss, as one Cracked article was stupefied by.
  "16 full hours of Cake Boss. I checked online, there are only 30 half-hour episodes of the show, including the newest episode which aired just last week. Do you know how many hours that is? 15. 15 hours. How the fuck did you run a 16-hour marathon of 15 hours' worth of show, The Learning Channel?"
• During both shows' heyday, YTV completely adored iCarly and Mr. Young, to a point where listings for both shows (especially the latter, an in-house production) were shown in tiny text during ads for other shows, alongside the listings for the show being advertised.
  • YTV's method as of 2012, similar to the case with Family Channel, is that animated series get all but screwed over, since iCarly, Victorious, and any original or Nickelodeon-produced live-action series gets all the love. Unless the show happens to be Spongebob Squarepants, The Fairly OddParents!, or any of the original Canadian cartoons, literally no other Nicktoons have a ghost of a chance of airing on YTV. Happily, this seems to have subsided with the advent of The Legend of Korra and Breadwinners.
• Ever since Comedy Central UK picked up the rights to Friends' they've been using any excuse to air it as much as possible. It started out as daily double-bills that are repeated at night...and then the compilations started...
  Top 50 Episodes?

  Fair enough.
  The A-Z of Friends?

  Fine.
  The Best of Ross/Monica/Chandler/Phoebe/Rachel/Joey?

  'kay.
  The Friends Guide to Work/Dating/Leisure?

  Okay...I guess.
  Compilation of The Christmas & Thanksgiving Episodes?

  ...Um, it's March.
  The Best of Gunther?

  What?! OH COME ON!!! Gunther?! Really?! GUNTHER?!
• In New York City, Seinfeld is aired at least 6 times a day between TBS and the local FOX affiliate.
• Currently it´s a great time for German Star Trek fans. ZDFneo shows the classic series (even with the previously banned Nazi planet episode) daily for years now and Tele 5 gives us from morning till primetime Deep Space Nine and The Next Generation in an endless loop that only manages to be broken up by equally spammed Stargate reruns. To round up the package Voyager gets shown in the primetime on Thursday.
• Scrubs rose in popularity in Germany during the late Zeroes. ProSieben used this to completely rework their daytime programming of scripted reality shows to sitcom reruns and showed the new episodes in the primetime instead of Saturday afternoon. The block started around 12am and showed double to quadruple episodes of 3 to four shows. AND because of last days episodes being rerun in the morning hours this sometimes resulted in 8 episodes of Scrubs per day (10 when they aired new ones in the primetime). Ratings for the retooled / Post-Script Season were the best of the entire shows run over here; if ProSieben had any word in it they wouldn´t have cancelled Scrubs.
• Home and Away and Neighbours used to be shown at least twice a day on Channel 5, once at around lunchtime, and again (normally the same episodes of both) between 5:30 and 6:30.
• Despite the fact that ratings weren't very good and it's perhaps the most hated show on the Big Four networks, NBC seemed to have an unnatural obsession with Whitney to give it two seasons to build an audience and put it in strong time slots. In fairness, the fact that the show had no big stars and was shot in a multiple-camera format did make it cheap enough to produce as to offset ratings that, while weaker than some shows that got canceled, do at least remain consistent. And, more importantly, it received great demographics. Its 18–49 numbers were competitive with The Middle, its timeslot competitor, whose overall ratings are generally at least twice Whitney's. Not to mention the latter show skews a lot younger. On May 9, 2013, the Peacock and Whitney broke up after a two-season whirlwind romance.
• VH-1 is fond of showing the 1992 TV miniseries The Jacksons: An American Dream any time they have a gap in their schedule (with commercials, it fills five hours of airtime). A similar thing used to happen during the holidays with A Diva's Christmas Carol, which was an in-house production.
  • The franchise of I Love the Exties shows that launched in 2002 with I Love the '80s not only yielded a total of eight ten-hour productions (plus the five-hour I Love Toys) but was kept in near-constant weekend and holiday rotation on the channel through 2009. Averted with I Love The Holidays, which hasn't been seen since 2005, and I Love Toys, which was also rarely rerun; both have been reduced to Keep Circulating the Tapes status.
• NBC and its sister networks are so in love with the Law & Order franchise that even when it started to die off (around 2005, with the death of Jerry Orbach and the cancellation of Trial By Jury), NBC refused to kill it. Even when Law and Order: Los Angeles (which was picked up by NBC despite a weak pilot because of its name) was declared the Franchise Killer, NBC and USA continued to keep its spinoffs around since it was filling time slots and was still bringing audiences in on the latter (while the ratings on NBC had been in decline for years).

We hope you're loving the love sause of American Dad!

If not, why not have some Law & Order on USA.

Or Law & Order on TNT.

Or maybe Law & Order on Bravo.

That's some genius programming right there.

— [adult swim] bump, 2005

• In a weird sense, The Weather Channel has gotten absolutely hooked on Discovery-style reality shows about roughnecks doing blue-collar jobs, such as Iceberg Hunters, Iron Men, Pyros, Reef Wranglers, and a new show about mining, many of which have very little if anything to do with weather.
• Friday Night Lights was adored by NBC (as well as viewers), which constantly saved it from cancellation.
• For Virgin customers they introduced CBS Drama and, as of 2014, literally all that is on is Judge Judy. Despite all adverts showing Dallas as the show.
• Cloo (an NBC-owned cable channel for crime shows) seems to exist for the sole reason of airing reruns of Burn Notice.
• AMC seems to unable to shut up about Small Town Security.
  • Same for Low Winter Sun. With the added hype surrounding the last episodes of the final season of Breaking Bad, AMC opted to try to draw interest to their new show by airing it immediately after Bad, which has seen its highest ratings ever. This would normally be a smart practice, but the problem is that AMC hyped LWS to absurd degrees, billed it as the new Breaking Bad, constantly promoted the show in every other advertisement, and gave the show half an hour of commercial-free interruption (which of course, Breaking Bad does not benefit from). The most absurd move was forcing viewers to wait over half an hour for the pilot of LWS to get a promo for the next episode of Bad which was not even 30 seconds long. And the hype didn't even work; LWS was canceled after one season.
• National Geographic Channel spinoff, and Animal Planet rival, Nat Geo Wild likes to run Incredible Dr. Pol (or just vet shows period) and Cesar Milan shows a lot. Despite his controversial nature, Cesar has at least two different shows—Ceasar 911 and Dog Whisperer - that air frequently. Unlike Animal Planet though, the channel does still air documentaries often (Again, they seem to enjoy specific animals more than others, such as lions and tigers).
• More4 loves Time Team. At least two hours a day, every day regardless of what else is in the schedule.
• British kids channel Kix (later renamed as Pop Max) loves Power Rangers so much that they named their now-defunct second channel (Kix Power) in its honour, and that channel's first six weeks' schedules were non-stop Power Rangers. Nothing else.
• The BBC is practically married to Dad's Army. It finished in 1977, and it seems there hasn't been a week since that it hasn't been in the schedule.
• Likewise, Channel 4 and/or More4 always seem to have Father Ted somewhere in their schedules.
• Gold and Only Fools and Horses. There will be at minimum one or two episodes a day. On the most extreme days? What seems like nonstop episodes from about dawn to dusk, to the point you could probably use the channel as an alternative to the DVD box set.
• The Golden Girls was like this for Lifetime in the early-2000s. To the point where it was the only non-9/11 related program in The Onion's TV programming here.
  • Whenever this show happens to move to a new channel, expect said channel to promote the crap out of it and air almost non-stop marathons of it for a good while. This happened when Lifetime lost the syndication rights in 2009 to the Hallmark Channel and W Etv, and later when the latter gave up the program to TVLand and Logo.
• Justifiably, Willow, an American channel airing nothing but Cricket, will air nothing but taped cricket when a live event isn't on. Most of the time this is the Indian Premier League, which happens for a month, but will have their 70-ish matches re-aired for months and months until the new season, especially in the fallow months between national team tours since live cricket can only fill so much time, and the sad status of the American game has it in the same class as the Winnetka quidditch league in that even hardcore networks such as Willow don't care about it.
• Although it's not a TV channel, Netflix absolutely adores its exclusives. Sometimes it feels like you can't even boot up the website without an advert for House of Cards (US) or Orange Is the New Black, even if you've given those shows a low rating. Unlike most of the other examples on here, it at least makes some sort of business sense; your subscription fee is divided between the makers of the shows you watch, so it makes sense that Netflix will want as much money going back into their website as possible. It doesn't matter to Netflix how many people watch a show — it only matters that enough people will re-up their subscription to keep watching the show. Thus a show with a small but loyal fanbase can be profitable: if you can say that, for example, 100,000 viewers (a tiny number) will keep their subscriptions just in order to keep watching OITNB, then that's nearly $10 million per year for that show (because $8/month for 12 months=$96/year and $96 times 100,000 subscribers is $9.6 million). The real economics are more complicated, of course, but the end result is the same.
• Sesame Street: Australian network ABC Kids loves it and its spinoffs so much that they (as of 2015) even have a phase of taking down Sesame clips on YouTube, claiming that they are "The Real Sesame Street".
  • Surprisingly, after the Sesame/HBO deal, the HBO Family channel isn't doing this with Sesame reruns, instead usually having one or two airings in the morning, while the afternoon is used for the family-friendly movies airing on the HBO networks. This trope was however played straight with Once Upon A Sesame Street Christmas, as it was aired once a day for the whole month of December, with some days having two airings.
• While at first it may not look like fitting that trope (mainly due to airing only 2 or 3 times during every day), for Ketnet it probably is the news show Karrewiet. This is noticeable because on their website, the show has a special section dedicated to all the news facts that would be discussed on that show, which is on the main index that also includes a place where you can see all of the programming on the show.
• TLC's weekday mornings, as of February 2015, are comprised of nothing but What Not to Wear.
• HLN absolutely adores Forensic Files, to the point of comissioning a revival of it.
• One FOX station's whole Saturday morning line-up was entirely comprised of Wimzie's House, led off by an airing of Amazing Adventures.
• New York's MyNetworkTV station, WWOR, plays nothing but the TV series based off Are We There Yet? every afternoon and morning. There have been some occasions where six-hour marathons of the show are played.
• The Lifestyle Channel in Australia seems to really love rerunning Gogglebox Australia as of late, at least showing it about once or twice every day.
• The CW affiliate in New York City, WPIX, shows nothing but Just for Laughs: Gags from 11AM to 3PM on Sundays.
• Over 2012-2015, primetime Saturday slots on the BBC — where they put their most treasured and popular shows — were inevitably and unsurprisingly occupied by Strictly Come Dancing, Doctor Who, and CASUAL+Y, one after the other during the autumn months when all three were airing new episodes at once. As same-day Doctor Who ratings slipped, however, the debut of Series 10 was moved to Spring 2017, partially so it wouldn't have to compete with sporting events, The X Factor, etc. But it's still on Saturdays.
• In Spain, the most notable case of a show adored by the network is Telecinco's La que se avecina. Telecinco is operated by Mediaset España, which also owns fiction-centered channel Factoría De Ficción (or simply FDF), whose lineup has relied heavily on LQSA reruns for quite a long time now. And rightfully so: said reruns are the favorite thing to watch for FDF viewers, to the point legend has it that the constant re-runnings helped boost the new episodes' ratings on Telecinco when the show found itself on the verge of getting cancelled.
• Canadian media company Corus Entertainment really enjoys using Just for Laughs: Gags to plug holes in schedules on their family-oriented channels, presumably to fulfill the mandated quota of Canadian-produced programming that all channels must broadcast. Perhaps that is why they have seemingly spammed it across at least six different channels, including those where it doesn't fit with the rest of the channel's offerings, such as W Movies (a channel that usually just aired movies for women - thankfully its replacement, Cooking Channel, does not air the show) and Disney Channel.
• National Geographic Channel loves drug-related series (To Catch A Smuggler, Drugs Inc.), fish-catching series (Big Tuna, Big Fish, Texas), police-esque shows (Alaska State Troopers, Wild Troopers, Rocky Mountain Law), and reality shows about people living in rough environments (Life Below Zero). They rarely even air traditional documentaries anymore, even less so now that they put the animal shows onto spinoff channel Nat Geo Wild.
• Telemundo tends to space its news programs, talk shows, and telenovelas rather evenly; however, Caso Cerrado has become a mild example of this. It aired three times a day in 2016, but it was later dialed back.
• Parks and Recreation used to be this for Esquire Network. Now its Parks And Recreation, CSI, AND NCIS: Los Angeles. The channel was actually dropped from Dish Network, Direc TV, and AT&T's U-Verse in 2016 because of this since the latter two shows were already airing on USA Network.
  • When Parks isn't on Esquire Network, it's on FXX.
• NBC Universal's rerun farm Cozi TV is pretty fickle with who they adore from month to month. During late 2016, for example, they were in love with Frasier, and had a two-hour block of it on weekdays. Little House on the Prairie also received heavy marketing during this period. As of 2019, their marketing and primetime schedules focus primarily on mini-marathons of Frasier, The Nanny, Will & Grace, and The Office (US).
  • Baywatch was rerun heavily every weekday during the spring and summer of 2016, and the network cross-promoted it with Knight Rider by airing commercials starring David Hasselhoff and his daughter. Both shows eventually lost all marketing, were rescheduled to later hours, then removed completely.
  • Miami Vice, The Six Million Dollar Man, and The Bionic Woman appeared each weeknight around 2014 in prime time, with the latter show even getting its own Mother's Day marathon. Lindsay Wagner also appeared in network commercials poking fun at her role. Nowadays, Miami Vice is completely gone, and the latter two shows only air once a week, on Saturday afternoons.
  • Magnum, P.I. and The A-Team seem to fall in and out of favor fairly regularly.
• Discovery Family loves Cake Boss, as well as its' spin-off Kitchen Boss and similar shows about cakes. Aside from airing three hours of reruns of Cake Boss a day, they will show all-afternoon long marathons when a holiday occurs or a special event is on another channel.
  • As of January 2018, they also give a lot of air time to Something Borrowed, Something New and What Not To Wear.
• NBC has a nasty habit of doing this, keeping low-rated shows in prime timeslots in the hope that they will build an audience. (The reasoning is probably that they made it work with Cheers). For example, Good Morning Miami held a slot in the Must See TV lineup on Thursdays despite dismal ratings. Nowadays, it's so obscure that it isn't even mentioned in Warren Littlefield's book Top of The Rock.
• From the late '90s to the early 2000s, Canadians couldn't turn on a TV during the morning without seeing The Noddy Shop on more than one channel, since the series was shown up to five times a day on three different channels for the sole purpose of filling CanCon requirements.
  • On the other side of the pond, there was a time when CBBC aired this show twice a day every day of the week.
• Salvage Hunters is by far the most popular original show on UK network Quest, and they really milk it, showing it practically every day. On the rare evenings it's not showing an episode or two (or more), it's probably showing American Pickers, the show that Salvage Hunters is the Transatlantic Equivalent of.
• UK Game Show channel Challenge has been really bad at this since Sky acquired the station in 2011.
  • Challenge used to over-adore Bullseye (UK), Pointless, and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? in the mid 2010's, where both shows would air for at least 4 hours a day. Nowadays, they are averted as Pointless only gets a single airing on weekdays (sometimes none at all), and the other two shows air in the graveyard slot.
  • When Challenge started airing The Chase in 2014, the show aired one or two episodes a day, but since 2016, Challengeairs the show for at least 8 hours a day and is always the show of choice for marathons.
  • In the mid-2000s, their favourite show was Series/Takeshi’sCastle , which aired for several hours a day, and continued to be reran in good slots for many years.
• The fledgling Pop Network knew it had something good with its 2015 flagship show Schitt's Creek even before the show took off via a Netflix bump. Pop spend a huge portion of its small marketing budget on the show, frequently advertised the show on the reruns of better known shows that it aired and when programming failed, it replaced that programming with Schitt's Creek reruns.
• UKTV channel W loves Tipping Point as much as the show's host Ben Shephard does. W airs the show for at least 3-5 hours a day, and an 8-hour marathon of the show normally airs on Saturdays.
• Buzzr is obsessed with Match Game and Supermarket Sweep on weekdays, airing both shows multiple times each day and airing promos for the latter during almost every commercial break. On weekends, they love airing Super Password and Concentration.
  • Being that it's an incarnation of one of their already-adored series, The Match Game-Hollywood Squares Hour got this treatment. Months before its' official premiere, a marathon was shown on President's Day and an episode featuring Howie Mandel played during their annual "Lost and Found" event, held a day before the regular premiere. Then, when the show premiered, they would play promos for it during every commercial break on the channel. After this effort, reruns replaced other shows on the network seemingly out of nowhere, usually replacing the slots that belonged to their former network darling Supermarket Sweep. For instance, in spring 2020, an hour of regular Match Game on weekday mornings was replaced by this show.
• As of May 2020, Laff TV's schedule is comprised of Night Court, That '70s Show, Home Improvement, World's Funniest Videos, Grace Under Fire and According to Jim and nothing else. Night Court seems to get this treatment the most, to the point where they'll use any excuse to run a marathon of it.
  • Even after the addition of How I Met Your Mother and The Bernie Mac Show in September, the situation hasn't gotten better. Grace Under Fire and The Bernie Mac Show only air for one hour on weekdays, while the other shows get at least 2-3 hours. They also don't air movies on weekends anymore, presumably so they can air more of these shows.
  • From 2017 until late 2019, their schedule was similar, except for Home Improvement, Grace Under Fire and According to Jim being swapped out for Spin City, The Drew Carey Show and Ellen.
• Viacom just loves to air Friends across its' various networks, often scheduling it in blocks that last two hours or more. Some of the many networks that have given the show this treatment that are owned by the company include Nick at Nite, TV Land and Paramount Network.
  • When Bell Media got the Canadian rights to Friends to stream on their in-house streaming service Crave, they played endless marathons of it on the CTV Comedy Channel, as they already had before, and the entire Christmas season of 2020 on MuchMusic was Friends reruns. Even on Bell-owned channels that didn't air the show, endless promos for its availability on Crave played, and it got to the point where during the World Juniors hockey tournament, which aired on the Bell-owned sports channel TSN, ads for Friends appeared as tickers on the bottom of the screen.
• Ever since the late 90's, TBS would air The Wizard of Oz and various Dr. Seuss specials on the week of Thanksgiving like clockwork. The adoration still continues to this day, but only How the Grinch Stole Christmas! and The Wizard of Oz air to this day, with the other specials not having been seen since 2009.
• Sky Witness is very fond of Nothing to Declare. It airs for 5 hours on weekdays, and takes up about a third of the weekend schedule.
• BBC One gave heavy promotion for the UK reboot of Survivor upon it's launch in October 2023, with £30million of public money going towards it's production and endless advertising on all BBC channels. It was also given the prime Saturday and Sunday night slot after Strictly Come Dancing, itself following Doctor Who on Saturday. When the BBC launched it's Christmas idents in 2023, Survivor was the first show to be introduced with them. The final two episodes will air at 6pm and 9pm on the same night, with the 2-hour Strictly final at 7pm.
  • Despite the extreme promotion and leading out from two of the BBC's flagship series, it was hit with very poor ratings and a disappointing reception from critics and viewers alike, beaten in the ratings by The Voice on ITV and even Antiques Roadshow on BBC Two, which was moved from BBC One's Sunday 8pm slot to the same time on BBC Two just for Survivor.
• Channel One Russia has once had a great fondness of Evgenii Petrosyan, prolific Soviet-Russian comedian, and his specials. One time on New Year's Eve they were airing 18 hours of specials uninterrupted, to the point even Petrosyan himself stepped in and asked them to stop airing them like that, because "people had been physically sick of him". Adoration turned to hatred when Petrosyan had defected to rival channel RTR (now Russia 1). However, Channel One maliciously decided to counterprogram his new specials on RTR with ones they had in possession, which resulted in nothing but Petrosyan on two biggest Russian channels (and in some Russian regions at the time it was common to have nothing but those two channels). Years later, Petrosyan admitted the strategy had had a devastating effect on his career (Russian slang actually has "a petrosyan" noun for a hack comedian who largerly live by on very old and tired jokes), yet he is still active on Russia 1 (his core audience is old and conservative, although unlikely to expand at this point).
• When COVID-19 shuttered production around the world, the big networks started relying on game shows in primetime more than usual. Typically, any game shows would be relegated to the summer months only, but with a need for programming, many game shows were greenlit just to have something new to air. It helps that they are relatively cheap, often don't need an audience, and by their very nature can work within social distance requirements. Even with regular production starting to build back up in 2021, game shows were still in the active schedule for ABC, NBC, and Fox, with CBS being the only outlier (outside of the occasional primetime specials for The Price Is Right.
• As of 2022, KCOP (channel 13 in Los Angeles) has continued to air I Love Lucy, Bob Newhart, Mary Tyler Moore, and Dick Van Dyke's TV shows for one hour apiece on each weekday, decades after those series were removed from syndication. KCOP's sister station, KTTV (Fox 11), had been the longtime home of I Love Lucy before Fox's scheduling made the series move to Channel 13.

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