Mystery Science Theater 3000 is the Trope Namer. The phrase "keep circulating the tapes" was a line in the credits from Seasons 1-4, inserted to give a winking consent to sharing tapes with others in order to popularize the show; it was removed in Season 5 for many of the legal reasons this entry concerns itself with. During the show's run, the hosts would give a Shout Out to fans in places where the series wasn't aired (including a group of tape-sharing aficionados in Paris, France during the third season). Although many of the movies shown fall into the Missing Episode category and are unlikely to see wide release due to Copyright issues, a fair number are available for purchase legally. In this case, the problem is the reproduction rights to the movies since nobody expected there to be such a market for home recordings down the line, so movie rights were only secured for the show's on-air run. Episodes are released on DVD as the rights issues are ironed out. Many episodes were uploaded by Best Brains themselves to Google Video - many others are uploaded to YouTube at random, with some having been pulled by NBCUniversal.
One of the creators has actually said "Keep circulating some of the tapes," meaning fans should buy the episodes available on DVD, but the others are fair game...which is what most of the dedicated fans do anyway. Special mention should be given to The Amazing Colossal Man and Godzilla Vs Megalon, released but quickly withdrawn due to rights issues.
Ironically, some of the films featured in MST3000 are themselves difficult or impossible to find on legal home video releases, such as the TV movie Overdrawn at the Memory Bank or Operation Kid Brother, yet these are among the episodes that are actually available on DVD.
General examples
Many TV series have been available on DVD in the past but, for whatever reason, are no longer for sale. As a result, some releases have become collector's items and tend to show up online for prices too high for the general fan, leading them to obtain copies by other methods. Examples have included Kindred: The Embraced and Black Scorpion, two series that were released to DVD, the DVDs are no longer available, and now it's not uncommon to see them for sale online for hundreds of dollars.
Occasionally, a distributor will release one or more seasons of a series, but then, either due to low sales or licensing issues, will cease. As a result, fans find themselves having to "circulate the tapes" until such a time the later seasons are released. Examples of this have included Kojak (which took many years off after the release of Season 1), and The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The world is still waiting for the final seasons of Cannon.
Just because a show or film is very popular in the country where it is released doesn't mean it will become available in your neck of the woods. There are innumerable examples of TV series that air, for example, in the UK but receive neither broadcast nor DVD release in North America (examples include the cop series Scott And Bailey, the 2005 revival of Captain Scarlet, and the later seasons of Hustle) - in this regard, the trope crosses over with No Export for You. The only way for fans to see these shows is to obtain recordings of them.
There are still many films and TV programs that were released on VHS but not, as yet, DVD (or that have never been released at all), forcing fans to take the trope literally.
In the last few years there have been a number of films and TV series that home video distributors have deemed not viable for regular retail sale (the criteria for deciding what shows fall into this category seems to be somewhat random). Instead, these shows are made available via a "manufacture on demand" scheme where the company burns DVD-Rs of the shows when they are ordered. While this has allowed some rare TV series and movies to be circulated, there are three downsides: 1. few of these DVD-R releases undergo any restoration or HD upgrading (and so it's a crapshoot how they might look on HD sets), 2. very rarely do they include any bonus features, and 3. (and the reason for this being mentioned here), not all DVD or Blu-ray players can actually play DVD-Rs. So if your favorite show ends up falling into category 3, then you still need to keep "circulating the tapes."
ABC Television
Better Off Ted has had its first season released, but physical second season DVDs are still nowhere to be found (though the episodes are streamable on Netflix and available for purchase on Amazon).
Cupid: The original, not the remake. Poor copies can be found and enjoyed, but not even the flop remake seems to have prompted anyone to put it on DVD.
Earth Star Voyager was a little-remembered but underground-circulated Disney Sunday Movie special intended as a backdoor pilot; poor ratings canned that. Disney fails to even acknowledge the film's existence these days, and other Made-for-TV Movie efforts that aired under this banner have faced the same fate.
Happy Days: While the entire series has been rerun endlessly for the past 30 years in syndication, only four seasons have to date been issued on DVD. Those that have replace the original 1950s rock songs with generic 50s music (because of copyright/royalty issues). If you don't want generic music, you can always try The Hub and INSP.
Hardy Boys Nancy Drew Mysteries Seasons 1-2? No problem; the DVDs have been available legit for years. Season 3? Forget it. This may likely be due to David Gates & Bread having their music not only all over the soundtrack, but also due to Gates & Bread playing a major role in the "Defection to Paradise" episode. Poor VHS dubs are available on the Internet.
In Justice, which has the bonus of being difficult to search for since its title is a common phrase, was a fairly well-done Law and Order-type show on ABC in 2003 with a big subversion: most of their clients didn't do the crime and were wrongfully imprisoned, so the lawyers had to unravel the clues to find the real perp and free the innocent convict. In one memorable episode, a man faced execution for a murder he probably didn't commit. A Genre Savvy viewer may be surprised by the ending: he was put to death anyway.
Aside from a few VHS releases in the 1990s, the 1991 remake of Land of the Lost has yet to see an official DVD release. Still, there's bootleg DVD sets, torrents, and YouTube.
Less Than Perfect had Seasons 1-2 released on DVD, but not 3-4. There is a bootleg DVD of the entire series (including the Season 4 episodes unaired in the U.S.), but it's over $100 and there don't appear to be any online sources. So fans are out of luck for now.
Mork and Mindy: A Season 4 episode (more importantly, part of the three-part Grand Finale) has a joke about Mork not leaving the car until he finishes singing along with the last "Na-na-na-na"s of "Hey Jude". That would be no problem on its own, if not for the fact that Mork then enters the room singing said song. Since using songs from The Beatles catalog is near-impossible these days and the scene wouldn't make sense with the joke dubbed over or cut, it's unknown whether or not Season 4 will ever see the light of day on DVD. So hold on to your recordings...or just search for "Mork & Mindy Season 4" on YouTube. And keep an eye on The Hub, which started airing reruns in April 2012.
NYPD Blue following Season 4 (of 12). Thank you, Amazon Instant Video - in HD, no less.
Season 3 of Once and Again, thanks to music licensing issues.
The Practice only a saw a release of Season 1 (and nothing else) back in 2007. This is a show that won awards every year it was on, was showcased in ABC's 50th Anniversary Celebration special, aired in the coveted post-Super Bowl spot in 1999 and spun off the highly-successful Boston Legal (which had all of its seasons released). The status of further DVD releases is unknown.
The Wonder Years, due primarily to music copyright issues. The entire series is on Netflix, though, and The Hub's giving it a rerun treatment.
While episodes of the 1960s The Green Hornet have been run on various cable channels, the series has never been commercially released on home video (aside from a cheaply-made disc featuring a compilation "movie").
A majority of shows aired by ABC during the 2010-12 seasons that have been cancelled very quickly have yet to see a DVD release. That said, Missing2012, GCB and Pan Am have DVD releases, most of the shows are available on iTunes (Pan Am once had every episode available for free!) and are still available for streaming on Hulu and ABC's website.
BBC
Blake's 7 is not available on Region 1 DVD (although it has been released in the UK).
Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe, "a show all about television", will never be released on DVD. Charlie Brooker claimed as much himself because of the licensing issues related to all the shows and music played during the course of its current six-season run. In one episode, Brooker discusses the "fair use" clause, and how the BBC can use certain assets from television and music for free. He is known to (highly unofficially) support efforts to Keep Circulating the Tapes.
David Bowie figures into two BBC productions that are stuck in video limbo.
Cracked Actor, an Omnibus documentary that followed Bowie on his 1974 tour of the U.S., has never been made available on video despite its high regard amongst fans, historians, and even the man himself (and Nicholas Roeg decided to cast Bowie in The Man Who Fell To Earth after seeing it, as Bowie had exactly the alien quality he was looking for).
The 1982 production of Bertolt Brecht's Baal featuring Bowie as the title character is another M.I.A. title. To add insult to injury, the tie-in EP with Bowie performing fully-orchestrated versions of its songs was released on vinyl and cassette tape, but only two of the five songs have made it to CD via anthologies. At least the Performance Video made for "The Drowned Girl" can be found on the "Sight & Sound" edition of The Best of David Bowie 1980/87Greatest Hits Album and at YouTube's VEVO service.
Dick And Dom In Da Bungalow; not rights issues here, as they did all the music in-house. Perhaps parents aren't keen to shell out for DVDs of anarchy and gunge? Snippets are on Youtube, and there's been a Clip Show, but most of the madness has disappeared into the ether.
There was in fact a DVD release which contained highlights from Series 3 (broadcast 2003-04), but this was released way back in Autumn 2004 and has since gone out-of-print. The 20 clip show episodes from 2009 contain a reasonable amount of highlights and such, but there is still a lot that has disappeared, particularly Series 1-2 (only shown on Digital CBBC when it was still in its infancy).
The thirtieth-anniversary Doctor Who charity Reunion Show"Dimensions In Time" will never be officially released on home video: the actors and crew all gave their time for free on the contractual agreement that it would be broadcast once and never be made available again in any form, apparently not thinking of the possibility of selling it with the proceeds going to Children In Need. Nobody actually minds much, as it's notoriously one of the most embarrassing things to ever happen in connection with the show.
Another Who example: The BBC are happy for people to openly distribute audio-plus-still image "reconstructions" of destroyed episodes, as long as they don't do it on digital formats that might get file-shared. So videotapes are fine, but not DVD/Blu-Ray, video files on CD, digital files, or (for at least one group) ticker tape.
The BBC archives have also been able to recover a number of lost episodes of Doctor Who thanks to collectors who obtained (or held onto) film copies of the episodes, and BBC Video has made use of fan copies videotaped off 1970s-era broadcasts of many Jon Pertwee-era episodes for the purposes of color reconstruction (or, in several cases, full episode recovery).
Fist Of Fun and This Morning With Richard Not Judy have vanished into the BBC archive. Given the revival in popularity of Stewart Lee and Richard Herring on the stand-up circuit and on TV, perhaps they might emerge one day...
Go Faster Stripe is your friend. Official legal DVDs of Fist of Fun Season 1 with lots of lovely special features. If it sells well, more will follow. (Herring and Lee will be selling them at their gigs so you can get them signed, too.)
The 1988 BBC-produced miniseries Game, Set, and Match, starring Ian Holm and based on a series of novels by Len Deighton, has never been officially seen since its initial airing because Deighton so despised it that he's barred any future release. High-quality bootlegs are available (for instance, a remastered DVD set), but they're not cheap. Or you could always look for a torrent.
The Goodies is seldom shown in reruns (except, apparently, in Australia). There were episodes on YouTube that have all disappeared. There are 16 episodes available on DVD in Australia, and they come with some commentary and extras too. It's not great, but it's better than fourth-generation copies...
There were some butchered reruns on UK Gold and UK Arena in the 1990s. There have been four official Region 2 DVD releases (including all of the ones made by LWT after they ChannelHopped), but that still leaves lots of BBC episodes missing. They can be found as torrent downloads, but only as individual episodes...and even then it requires a lot of time and effort to get them.
Horrible Histories, the CBBC live-action series, at least for fans outside of Region 2 DVD coding. Fairly easy to find online, though: besides an official YouTube channel with a good selection of the best sketches, full episodes are available for all of Series One & Two, part of Series Three, and the six-part Best-Of version hosted by Stephen Fry.
Only one of the three series of Monkey Dust has been released on DVD. The status of further releases is unknown.
Not the Nine O'Clock News has had two "best of" DVDs released, but will never have a full release; for various reasons including copyright issues with music, and performer Chris Langham having been convicted on child porn charges.
The Phantom of the Opera: Behind the Mask is a 2006 documentary on the original London production of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical (which had just hit its 20th anniversary). It features interviews with many of the original cast members, creative team, and otherwise on top of vintage rehearsal, show, and news footage. In the U.S., it occasionally airs on the cable channel Ovation.
Rentaghost: Only Season 1 has been released on DVD.
Robot Wars. Only one VHS and five DVDs were ever produced. The first was a guide to the First Wars, the next three were clip shows and technical information from the teams about specific popular robots (Chaos 2, Hypno-Disc, and Razer), the fourth was about the house robots, and the fifth was a release of the First World Championship, the only episode to get a commercial release. While certainly interesting to watch, it's a far cry from what should've been released.
The retrospective BBC news series The Rock 'n' Roll Years, a montage of news coverage set to popular music of the year, included hundreds of licensed music tracks that would need clearing for any kind of DVD release. It has turned up very occasionally on BBC Four.
Rutland Weekend Television, Eric Idle's post-Monty Python show. It won't get a release because of music rights issues and because Idle considers it something of an Old Shame. He's partly justified some skits are pretty dodgy, but others are quite funny, especially the musical numbers. Just look up "George Harrison (yes, him) on Rutland Weekend Television".
Any programmes featuring Jimmy Savile are very unlikely to see the light of day again, due to the can of worms opened up by revelations in the ITV documentary Exposure: The Other Side of Jimmy Savileregarding his involvement with child abuse. This includes a substantial chunk of Top of the Pops's run and the Doctor Who mini-episode "A Fix With Sontarans" (which, as with "Dimensions in Time" above, no Doctor Who fan minds much because even without the Savile scandal, it's widely seen as another embarassment to Doctor Who.).
Subverted with an episode of Tweenies featuring a Jimmy Savile impersonator. The said episode was accidentally aired by The BBC nine days after the investigation report was published, prompting complaints. An apology was made a few hours later, promising they wouldn't show that episode ever again.
Canadian Broadcasting Corporation
The Beachcombers. Aside from being one of the longest-running Canadian drama series ever made, the series basically redefined the concept of "CanCon" (Canadian-made programming). Part of the problem may be the show's length; it ran for an astounding 19 seasons (plus a pair of made-for-TV movies). The only way you can watch the series right now is via old reruns on Canadian specialty stations.
Even then, the reruns are only of the last few seasons. The first decade or so (considered by many to be the best years of the show) is still locked in the vault. The CBC has been refusing to release them for years, for unknown reasons.
Seasons 4-7 of Da Vinci's Inquest have not been released on DVD, nor the spinoff series DaVinci's City Hall or the TV movie The Quality of Life (which in itself was a victim of Executive Meddling). The only legal releases were DVD sets given out to the cast and crew. It's believed that low sales are to blame for the missing seasons, which is surprising, considering that the program was consistently the most-watched show on Canadian television for most of its run. Thankfully the syndicated rights are so cheap in the United States you can find it from a good American friend willing to record it off RTV, WGN or syndication for you.
The Edison Twins was a popular children's series that aired on the CBC (and on The Disney Channel in the US) in the 1980s. Except for a handful of episodes on VHS, the series has never seen a proper video release.
Good news: the entire run can be bought on Amazon Instant Video. Bad news: It's available only in the US, and not Canada, its country of origin.
Four on the Floor
The Friendly Giant. The show ran from 1958-85, but aside from scattered video tapings from syndicated airings, very few episodes have ever been released in their entirety. CBC doesn't have any shame in marketing merchandise based on the show (or using the puppets in lewd sketches, as evidenced by a controversial 2010 Gemini Awards broadcast), though.
While Made In Canada (aka "The Industry") is still aired on some US public television stations, only the six-episode Season 1 was made into a DVD, which is now out-of-print.
Mr. Dressup, a children's program that was to Canada what Mr. Rogers Neighborhood was to America. The series ran for almost 40 years, and inspired entire generations of Canadian children. Ernie Coombs even won several awards for his work. Yet, aside from a one-off "Tickle Treasures" collection of 4 random episodes (picked by two of the show's puppet co-hosts) and a smattering of online episodes on Youtube, the series isn't available to buy anywhere.
The landmark sketch comedy show SCTV. Seasons 1-2 (filmed in Toronto), most of Season 3 (shot in Alberta), and Season 6 (which aired on cable channels on both sides of the U.S./Canada border) still haven't been released in any way, shape or form. Seasons 4-5 (the Network 90 seasons broadcast on NBC in the U.S.) were released by Shout! Factory after a long period of music rights clearance issues, but sketches were dropped because the rights couldn't be cleared.
Sesame Park. Yes, there was a Canadian version of Sesame Street produced on CBC in 1996. The show ran for six years, and consisted of almost-entirely Canadian content with unique Muppets created specifically for the show, including Basil The Bear, Chaos, and the wheelchair-bound Katie. Despite the fact that it was a critical darling during its run, the show was unceremoniously canned and nothing has been said of it ever since.
DVD releases of This Hour Has 22 Minutes stalled after Season 2 due to unknown reasons. This could possibly be because of low sales - the show never really hit its stride until the 1996-97 season, which saw the cast start interacting in increasingly outlandish ways with Canadian politicians. This one's less painful than most, because you can still catch repeats of later seasons of the channel, but if you're looking for the famous incidents like Rick Mercer's "Doris Day" petition or Paul Martin putting Greg Thomey in a headlock, you'll have to go search it out on Youtube or try iTunes.
In the same vein, the one-off special Talking To Americans (where 22 Minutes co-host Rick Mercer travels around the United States getting random U.S. residents to verify ridiculous statements he makes, simply because he claims to be a journalist). It was the highest-rated special in the channel's history. It propelled Mercer to the big leagues. Had him making fun of future President George W. Bush and Mike Huckabee months (and years) before they would reach the national stage. Won several Gemini Awards. Got repeated in syndication for years afterwards. Online copies of the special still get tens of thousands of hits. Yet, the special still hasn't been released because Mercer feels it was in bad taste after the events of September 11, 2001. You can still watch it online, though.
To be fair to the CBC, however, one can see why 22 Minutes at least hasn't been released, as the series focuses on topical humour about issues of the day, and thus would be considered outdated and likely of limited commercial appeal (though that hasn't stopped decade-old reruns from being syndicated...), considering many of today's consumers probably don't even remember who Paul Martin is. There may be interest from a nostalgia point of view at a later date, but the show is likely considered too recent for even that.
MythQuest: Aired 13 episodes in 2001. Reruns showed up occasionally, but were few and far between. The situation got better in 2012, when Netflix picked up the show, but only for the USA.
Even though every episode of The Red Green Show has been made available on DVD at one point or another, the producers of the show have taken the (perhaps unprecedented) step of putting all 15 seasons and 300 episodes of the series on YouTube themselves.
CBS
Beakman's World is available to stream in its (almost) entirety on Netflix, but there is still no full DVD release forthcoming. I guess we're stuck with the "Best of" set made after Season 1...
Seasons 5-6 of The Bob Newhart Show are completely unavailable because of low sales for Seasons 1-4. Newhart himself has pointed out the idiocy of using a partial release to test sales when people know that there's a strong possibility that they'll never get the rest of the show on DVD.
Bob Newhart's other classic show, Newhart, has had Season 1 released on DVD, but not the rest of the show. The first season is very different in tone from the rest of the show, and also was not particularly funny, but the rest of the seasons have not been released as of yet.
Central Park West was a Prime Time Soap about a pair of siblings (Madchen Amick and John Barrowman) living it up in the world of rich, backstabbing New York socialites. The show, produced by Melrose Place co-creator Darren Star, was an attempt by CBS to cash in on that show's success at a time when they were trying to court a younger demographic, and had a name cast including Mariel Hemingway and Lauren Hutton. It floundered in the ratings, though, and disappeared without a trace after a disastrous midseason Re Tool.
If you try to buy Rodgers And Hammerstein's Cinderella on DVD, you could find the original version, with Julie Andrews, even though it only aired on TV once since its initial performance. You could also find the 1997 Wonderful World of Disney remake. What about the first remake, which starred Lesley Ann Warren and became the most popular version after numerous re-runs and VHS releases? Sony pulled the DVD out of print after a few years. Old copies at Amazon can cost as much as $70.
Close to Home was a legal drama that ran from 2005-07. And nothing has been said of it since. Fans believe that the backlash that resulted when the main character's husband was killed off resulted in the studio deciding not to put any effort into releasing it.
Cold Case used roughly five popular songs per episode. Unfortunately, removing them would ruin the flashback sequences, which are the whole point of the show.
Early Edition was a victim of this for a long time, though Seasons 1-2 have since been released. No word on the last two, though. Check TV Guide Channel for reruns as of 2012.
Forever Knight first season aired on CBS in a late-night "Crime Time After Prime Time" slot, with the odd scheduling quirk that season one aired for over a season and a half to hold the slot for Letterman. While the show was fighting for a second season, some fans asked series creator James Parriott about the tapes they'd been circulating. His reply was widely reported to be, "Be fruitful and multiply!"
Fresno, a miniseries that parodied Dallas and shows like it (it was set in Fresno on a raisin plantation), only aired once on broadcast TV and has never been released in hard copy.
He & She, the sophisticated, Emmy-winning sitcom starring Richard Benjamin and Paula Prentiss which aired for a single season in 1967-68. Considered the precursor to the more "mature" style of situation comedy of the 1970s, it has never been released to home video in any form, and has been rerun very rarely.
Lou Grant: Unavailable on DVD.
Murphy Brown. Thanks to music rights tangles (and low sales buy the season, fans!), everything after Season 1 is stalled. That's 200+ episodes sitting around collecting dust in a Warner Bros. vault. It's not in syndication, and even when it was it was usually shoehorned into horrible middle-of-the-night timeslots. The only way to have a semi-complete viewing experience is through torrents and downloads, which happen to be plagued by at least five missing episodes and the occasional removal of certain scenes for syndication (such as Mike Wallace's appearance in the Grand Finale). Since you can torrent 90% of the series, that already makes this situation better than most...but be prepared for long waits if you want to try, since the torrents rarely have seeds.
Night Heat, a Canadian police drama series (produced by CTV) that aired as part of CBS' Late Night block of drama programming, and was the first Canadian-produced drama to ever air on an American network. Even though the show was generally praised for its edgy content, and featured some early appearances by noted actors like Keanu Reeves, the series still hasn't been made available on DVD. Thankfully, it still runs in syndication on Canadian channels like TVTropolis.
Now And Again was a one-season-wonder in 1999-2000 that has been perennially around the top of the requested list for unreleased shows on the website TV Shows on DVD, but no official DVD release has yet been made.
Phyllis: Unavailable on DVD.
Rescue 911, though immensely popular in its own right, has yet to see a DVD release (likely due to the true stories involved). However, that hasn't stopped people from posting various episodes online.
Rhoda: Seasons 1-4 on DVD, Season 5 MIA. Season 4 was an online exclusive release from Shout! Factory, and all the DVDs have episodes that were Edited for Syndication. Uncut episodes of Season 1 will remain a hot item. That said, Shout! Factory deliberately delayed the release of later seasons to get as much original footage as possible.
The Gone With The Wind sequel miniseries Scarlett was a rarity even on VHS, but attaining a DVD is even more difficult. It's one of the most sought-after titles on the format.
The Sentinel: Season 1 was released on DVD around 2005, none of the remaining three seasons have been released.
Silk Stalkings after Season 5 has not been released, and the DVD releases of the first 5 seasons have gone out of print.
The Star Wars Holiday Special, quite likely the most notorious bootleg ever circulated, and even moreso for the story surrounding its creation and reception by fans. George Lucas disowned it and washed his hands off it, but at least one part of the special (the Boba Fett cartoon) is still considered canon, and characters have been made into action figures in the last few years. Whether it will ever be officially released under Disney is still unknown.
The "keep circulating the tapes" nature of this has created its own meme; the most commonly circulated version includes portions of a news update in which a reporter promotes a news story about "fighting the frizzies". The makers of South Park later utilized this version of the tape as the basis for the Season Three Christmas Episode "Mr. Hankey's Christmas Classics".
The White Shadow: Seasons 1-2 on DVD, Season 3 MIA.
Wiseguy. The second half of Season 2 was the "Dead Dog Records" arc, and of course it involved a lot of music.
WKRP in Cincinnati: Only Season 1 on DVD, with even more Home Version Soundtrack Replacement than in syndication. This is possibly the best example of music rights problems preventing the release of the show on home media. Every single episode used at least one original artist song. Many of those songs were a set-up or the punchline for a joke or skit. Taking out the song, or replacing it with a different one, weakens or ruins the joke. As one commentator put it:
"That means the choice came down to our getting the show (a) in a compromised version, (b) in a set priced too high for any reasonable business model, or (c) not at all. For years the "not at all" option reigned, but the fan clamor was loud and persistent enough that something had to be done. So here we have a three-disc set that even before it hit the streets caused a furor, and likely resulted in a large number of torrent streams and other less-than-legal options being utilized to circulate original broadcast versions f the episodes.
Channel4's cult smash As If (2001-04) has completely disappeared off the face of the earth, seemingly due to the perennial licensing rights for the soundtrack problem. They'd mostly fixed this issue by the time Skins (basically As Ifwith younger people and more MDMA, and in Bristol not London they still paid just as much attention to the soundtrack, though) happened, although there's still a few tracks where they wonked out (the replacement of Lily Allen's "The Fear" with Katy Perry's "I Kissed A Girl" in series 3 being the most egregious).
Likewise the short-lived Cultural Translation which aired on UPN. However in this case the remake was universally reviled and it's For Your Own Good that you avoid it in any form.
The only DVD products of the US Whose Line Is It Anyway? available are Season 1 Vols. 1-2 and a "Best of". For the British version, there's only one set of Series 1-2 on both sides of the Atlantic.
A&E, the company who released the Region 1 British box set, has let it run out of print and no longer acknowledges its existence. There's no legal way to watch Seasons 3-10 in America anymore, since BBC America took the show off their lineup a long time ago (and even then, they only showed Seasons 6-10 because, since the American version gained popularity, they thought nobody would want to watch Whose Line without Ryan and Colin). British fans get to watch the whole thing through 4 On Demand, but they lock out foreign IPs. And the vast majority of episodes you could find on the internet were either from Comedy Central or BBC America broadcasts, which were all edited for time and often for content (remember, these aired before South Park became popular).
Comedy Central
Battle Bots. Only two DVDs/VHS tapes were ever released, neither with actual seasons on them (one was a clip show, the other showed one of the 1999 Pay-Per-View events). Not only that, but most of the episodes were only run two or three times. Season 5 episodes were only aired once.
The Chappelle's Show DVDs are missing about half of the live music performances (probably because of rights issues). However, Comedy Central periodically reruns the episodes, so resourceful viewers can get copies of these.
Like most talk shows, you only ever see recent episodes of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report. The only DVD releases are a compilation of episodes dealing with the 2004 election and a "Best Of" collection, respectively.
Discovery Channel
Emergency Vets was a popular reality/medical series on Animal Planet that ran from 1998 to 2002 with a follow-up episode in 2005 and a special in 2006. There has never been official video/DVD release of any of it. Very few full episodes exist online.
Later, a spin-off show, E-Vet Interns, started airing in 2007. It lasted more than a whole season, with only three episodes made in the second season before production stopped. It hasn't been released either.
The 2005 Discovery Channel documentary series It Takes A Thief 2005 has this problem, as well. It was received fairly well (with the hosts making occasional rounds to various cable news channels) and lasted two seasons. Then, in 2007, it mysteriously disappeared and hasn't been released by Discovery on DVD. This is strange, as Discovery usually releases almost anything it shows on DVD. It gets stranger, as the network decided to rebroadcast the whole series in 2009...in full High Definition for both seasons.
Monster House (no, not that one) vanished off both the Discovery Channel and the Internet with little fanfare and hasn't been heard from since. Which is puzzling, given that its older-sibling series Monster Garage is available.
Junkyard Wars: Despite being the spiritual ancestor of of shows like MythBusters (and being co-hosted by one of the stars of Red Dwarf, to boot), there's been no sign of a North American DVD release of this show.
Disney
Disney is notorious for not releasing complete-season sets of recent shows. For example, Kim Possible. And in some cases - again using Kim Possible as an example - the episodes released have been edited together. Kim Possible eventually achieved full-season releases... three years after the series ended, when no one cared about it anymore. Hannah Montana is another example: to date, Disney has only released the first and final seasons as sets in North America, along with compilations of scattered episodes.
Adventures In Wonderland never got a DVD release, much to the annoyance of the fans. Currently, it can only be obtained through old VHS releases.
Bear In The Big Blue House was released heavily in the United States on both VHS and DVD, but many episodes were never given a U.S. release. Still want them? Your best bet is to try and source a DVD copy of the episodes from a foreign website.
Bunny Town, due to lack of popularity, only received one DVD release and has been off the air for a long time.
Flash Forward (not the 2009 ABC show), which starred a pre-Firefly and Space Cases Jewel Staite and Ben Foster, and featured a few guest appearances from Ryan Gosling. Not only did the Disney Channel stop rerunning episodes around 2001 when Lizzie McGuire took off, it's nigh impossible to find any clips of it anywhere online.
Gargoyles suffered from this. Disney only released Season 1 and just the first half of Season 2, refusing to put out any more volumes unless sales picked up. (Never mind that if you put out only one half of a season, most people will wait to get the entire thing.) They later uploaded the entire series run on YouTube, but only made it available in the US.
Honey, I Shrunk The Kids. While all three films have been released on DVD, the TV series never has. At least it's being shown on The HUB...
Johnny And The Sprites, a puppet/live-action hybrid featuring John Tartaglia, only ever received one DVD release and one music album. It was later picked up for repeats on Disney Junior after the change-over from Playhouse Disney.
Kids Incorporated on DVD would be a fan's nightmare every single song (barring the original ones) would have to be cut; that said, since all the songs are performed by the kids and aren't the original recordings of the songs, so it'll be easier to clear rights. There's one other issue, though the rights are split between MGM (the show itself), Disney (holders of the physical tapes), and 20th Century Fox (MGM's DVD distributor).
Out Of The Box was a Playhouse Disney classic - a live action skit show featuring a man & woman named Tony & Vivian and a group of kids who got together every day to do arts and crafts projects, story skits and musical numbers. It had a couple of VHS and very scant DVD exposure.
Most of the pre-2004 Disney Channel movies aren't available on DVD. Some of them are on video, but those are long gone.
One particular Disney Channel Original Movie stands out in this regard - it's considerably easier to hear "My Hero Is You", the song Hayden Panettiere performs over the end credits of Tiger Cruise, than to see the movie itself. Many older DCOMs are more or less out of circulation, but this one was rarely shown even when it was new (admittedly the movie, in which September 11th plays a major part, is a change in tone from its stablemates) and despite the presence of Panettiere (in the lead role), Bill Pullman and iCarly's Jennette McCurdy has never been released on DVD. Those interested have to resort to YouTube (especially those living outside the US).
The aforementioned Hannah Montana above is also prone to this, as soon as the final episode aired, they NEVER reran it again (in the US) for some unknown reason. One rumor was it was related to Billy Ray Cyrus.
FOX
The circumstances surrounding the holdup of the 1960s BatmanTV show are numerous, even compared to other works. The prints of the series are owned by 20th Century Fox, but the characters are owned by DC Comics, which is owned by competitor Time Warner. Fox went to court in 2008 to battle Warner Brothers regarding rights issues with the then-unreleased Watchmen adaptation, of which the acquisition of the rights to the Batman series was a key sticking point. That case is still tied up in court, but even if 20th Century Fox regains control of the series, they'll have to deal with many other factors. This includes clearance rights for the cameos in each episode (some of which were fictional characters from other shows like Lurch and Colonel Klink), music rights, writers' residuals, a prior lawsuit that was filed by the Dozier estate (of Charles Dozier, the creator of the series) for residuals, and copyrighted designs that were unique to the series. Things have gotten so bad that Adam West basically said "screw it" and gathered up the remaining living writers, producers, and actors in order to produce his own Behind-The-Scenes DVDs about the series in the form of roundtable discussions of each two-part episode; before that, another company issued Batmania, a 2-DVD set featuring screen test footage, interviews and other content that can only be described as "DVD box set bonus features, without the box set". The only way to see the episodes is download a torrent or watch the episodes in syndication (and even then, some broadcasters such as Canada's Teletoon Retro only have the rights to part of the first season). There are also bootleg DVDs in circulation, the modern-day equivalent of of "circulating the tapes".
MeTV airs two episodes every Saturday night as of January 2013. No idea as to whether the full run will air.
In the UK ITV4 shows frequent re-runs. Not sure if any episodes are missing, though.
Good luck finding the original Fox run of Don't Forget The Lyrics, as the only episodes airing anywhere on television are the 2010-2011 syndicated version.
Galidor: Defenders of the Outer Dimension. An oft-forgotten Saturday morning sci-fi series that aired on Fox Kids during the 2001-02 season (their final season as Fox Kids), which had a surprisingly good plot to it. Unfortunately, the show has yet to see a DVD release due to a lack of interest, because few people remember it. (The toyline from LEGO, which consisted of straight-out action figures with interchangeable parts, was canned after extreme backlash from Lego fans...so that doesn't help.)
Key West, despite an overwhelming demand for a DVD release of its only season, isn't likely to be released any time soon. The usual reason given is that Fox doesn't believe it would sell, despite the vocal demands of the fans of this show.
Much like Saturday Night Live, MA Dtv also has DVD release issues, though not because of Old Shame or music licensing issues but rather poor sales. Warner Bros. only released Season 1 and a "Best of" compilation drawn from Seasons 8-10. Despite promises of a Season 2 DVD release on the Season 1 set, it didn't arrive until 2013 — nearly ten years after the first set — and it was released by Shout! Factory instead of WB.
Music rights were cited as the reason fans of Malcolm in the Middle are unable to obtain DVDs of Season 2 onwards, with no one entertaining the possibility of simply replacing the contested music.
Models Inc., a spinoff of FOX's Melrose Place focusing on Amanda Woodward's (Heather Locklear) mother, Hilary, who ran a modeling agency. Aside from a marathon airing on E! Television, the show has never been officially released.
The 1990s hip-hop cop drama New York Undercover probably won't make it to DVD (and will take years if it does) because of music rights. Like Cold Case, they use a lot of popular songs; removing them would damage the show. NYU also featured a lot of live performances by top artists of the period (Keith Sweat, Boyz II Men, and Notorious B.I.G. among others). In most episodes, they were shown at the end once the case was solved, and so cutting those might not hurt the integrity of the show...but for episodes where the artists performed in the middle of the show, cutting them would mess things up. At least you can watch reruns on TV One....and Centric.
Saban's Masked Rider has had very few episodes released on DVD. What's surprising, though, is the lack of online availability. For a series that debuted in the mid-90s and was a spin-off of the phenomenally popular Power Rangers, the fact that a good chunk of it has only in the late 2000s seen widespread circulation is unbelievable.
So You Think You Can Dance. The legal issues surrounding the music involved make a DVD release next to impossible. Fortunately, most of the individual dances, if not full episodes, can be found on YouTube.
The Good Guys was a 2010 Buddy Cop Show made by Matt Nix, the creator of Burn Notice. Most likely due to music rights (the show was never very popular), the show will never see a DVD release. Netflix saved this one from being Lost Forever, as the music of Foghat, Queen and others contributed the atmosphere of the show.
The War At Home surprisingly got a DVD release of Season 1, but not 2, which is currently only avalible online.
Werewolf was one of the first shows the FOX network aired, and lasted two seasons. Unfortunately, it featured some popular music, and music rights are reportedly the main holdup on getting a DVD release. Airings on cable channels have included some, but not all, episodes because of this. Shout! Factory was supposed to release it on DVD, but the release was quietly cancelled.
Time of Your Life, a very obscure spin-off of Party of Five, has yet to see the light of day on DVD. However, the entire series aired on a French TV station, and a YouTube user was lucky to capture that.
The Street was a short-lived 2000 series that would probably be totally forgotten if not for the fact that it was the only TV show to feature Jennifer Connelly in the cast. Even after she won an Academy Award and became a familiar Hollywood actress, Fox never saw fit to release the series on DVD or sell rerun rights to another channel.
ITV
Art Attack. Yeah, the arts and crafts show. The show ran through more than a decade and was eventually cancelled in 2007, yet there's not much left, not even in the web. A few sporadic VHS releases (like the Top 20 Art Attack) are the only remnants of the show available. Even Disney Channel (well, it was Disney Channel Spain) confirmed that there's no such thing as Art Attack DVDs for sale. There was a short-lived magazine, a set of "games" to make different crafts, and even a room with the huge paintbrushes and other giant material in Disneyland, but no way to find the show itself.
The first 246 episodes (covering Seasons 1-6) of The Bill are available for purchase in Australia. The company that produced the DVDs folded after that, and the copyright passed over to Village Roadshow, who have decided to sit on it and do nothing. 246 episodes might sound impressive until you realise that there have been 2,422 episodes produced in 27 years. The UK releases are still ongoing, but they're moving at a much slower pace.
The DVD release rights in Australia have since been taken over by Shock DVD, who seem to be continuing with the releases. As of June 2012, series 1-8, which comprise 502 episodes, have been released.
Police, Camera, Action!, an extremely popular ITV show, has bootlegs floating around on torrent sites but has never had an official DVD release. Add the fact that fans wantall versions, including the Edited for Syndication copies, and it looks impossible, but not unlikely. Copyright of police footage comes into play here. Music rights are an often-cited theory as to why the show hasn't been released.
Police Stop!, which kicked off the police genre in The Nineties, was a VHS-only release between 1993-1995, and then aired on television 1996-2002, before returning on ITV 4 in 2008. Now, you can't get it at all unless you get the first episode via illegal downloading. Old worn VHS tapes can be found on eBay, but no digital copies.
MTV
Human Giant got a DVD release for Season 1, but Season 2 has yet to be released. It stopped being re-run quite some time ago and season 3 is in Development Hell, so the only way to watch it at all is the "sneak peek" bits on the season 1 DVD. You'd think a series that stars a veritable All-Star Cast of comedians would be a little higher up in the release queue.
Jackass currently does not have a proper release for the series. In the beginning season one was skipped in favor of season two and three being put out as two "Best of..." sets, both labelled "Best of Season Two" and "Best of Season Three" as a nod to the fact that MTV flat out refused to allow the show's creators to issue season one onto DVD uncensored (a good chunk of season one was recycled footage from earlier video project Johnny Knoxville and Bam Margera worked on co-opted for Jackass and censored for TV), as Knoxville retained veto rights over all home video release of the show. Season one didn't see a release as a "Best Of..." DVD until five-six years after the series went off the air, when the second Jackass film came out. The season one set was censored (meaning the "Self-Defense Sketch", which Knoxville wanted released uncut to include the ending, where he gets shot while wearing a bull-proof vest is cut) and moreso, the "Best of..." season two and three were re-issued with about twenty minutes of new content on them. Oh and it gets better/worse: there was also a box set containing the season one compilation and the revised season two and three sets along with an exclusive bonus set containing the uncut hour long "Gumball Rally" special and several "Where are they now" specials MTV produced to promote the first Jackass movie. For the release of Jackass 3, the creators put out a single disc DVD "The Lost Tapes" that basically serves as a end-all home for all of the unreleased segments as well as each episode's opening and closing credit segment.
The Self Defense Test segment, from a "Big Brother" Skateboard video called "Landspeed", is only available on VHS and has long been out of print; indeed, all online versions of the segment are the MV edit of it.
The Sifl and Olly Show aired from 1997-99, and has yet to see an official release. Unlike other MTV series, S&O didn't include recorded music; most of the music was original, with a few covers here and there. The only episodes to see a DVD release were the unaired Season 3, published by co-creator Liam Lynch.
NBC
227, one of NBC's hit programs of the 1980s, only had season 1 released, and it's not likely the others will come out. Fortunately the reruns are shown on GMC.
ALF is a very special case. The entire series has been released, but only the chopped-up versions that were Edited for Syndication. The producers have insisted that it would be too expensive to compile the original episodes for DVD release, but that didn't stop Europe from getting an uncut version of the series.
The Bold Ones - an NBC Universal anthology series from 1969-73, never released on DVD since it last aired in repeats on subchannel network RTV.
The Days And Nights Of Molly Dodd: A 1987 show that aired on NBC and was rescued by Lifetime when NBC cancelled it and ran till 1991. It hasn't been syndicated since 2002, and has never been released on DVD or even VHS. Even nigh impossible to find online.
Experiment in Television: The series ran for five years, and while Jim Henson's episodes The Cube and Youth '68 are fairly easy to find due to the celebrity status of the man himself, good luck tracking down anything else from the show's run.
The Jim Henson Hour exists only in bits and pieces on DVD due to the now-splintered ownership of the segments it featured. Usually, the first half of the show was a "MuppeTelevision" segment with Kermit and company, and the second half a standalone special or an episode from the first series of The Storyteller that hadn't yet aired in the U.S. The Storyteller is available in its entirety through Sony, and the specials The Song of the Cloud Forest and the full-hour special Dog City have been released by Lionsgate. But this leaves all of the MuppeTelevision segments (one of which only aired in the U.K.), Lighthouse Island, Miss Piggy's Hollywood, Monster Maker, Living with Dinosaurs, and Secrets of the Muppets (the last three full-hour specials) unavailable.
Joey, the Friends spin-off, had its first season released in the U.S., but not the second (including the episodes that never aired in the United States), which was only released in Canada. That normally wouldn't be a problem since Canadian DVD releases are Region 1 and will work on any U.S. DVD player, except for the fact that season 2 has been out of print for several years and as such is rather pricey now. However, the season 2 episodes are readily available online.
Journeyman aired its short (13 episodes) run on NBC back in 2007, got nixed by a combination of a late airtime (meaning lower ratings) and the fallout from the writers' strike, and never got released on DVD.
Only Season 1 of Mama's Family has been released on DVD, and the episodes are the cut-down syndicated versions. According to John Hamilton, the rights holder and son of the show's producer, he doesn't hold the rights to the uncut versions. TBS stopped airing the show in 2006 and ION did the same in 2008, so it looks like fans are out of luck for the time being.
Night Court fits this from Season 4 onward if your DVD player can't play DVD-Rs. (If yours can, Seasons 4-8 are available through the Warner Archive service.) The series spent most of its life as part of their legendary Thursday lineup alongside The Cosby Show and Cheers and earned John Larroquette four consecutive Emmys for Best Supporting Actor a record that still stands to this day. The problem here is that most of the show's popularity came during the middle of its run; it arguably didn't come together until Season 3 because of a LOT of early cast changes brought on by actor deaths (Selma Diamond and Florence Halop) and prior contracts (Markie Post appeared as Christine Sullivan in one Season 2 episode, but was still doing The Fall Guy and couldn't join the cast regularly until Season 3). It's a catch-22: Many of the show's fans don't care for Seasons 1-2 because half the cast they loved isn't present, but the studio won't consider releasing the rest of the series on standard DVDs until the sales for the first two DVD sets improve.
Police Woman: Only the first two seasons of this 1970s Angie Dickinson crime drama is on DVD.
Both American versions of Red Dwarf (the aired pilot episode and pitchfilm). They've been circulating for years, and master-quality clips of #1 were even used in an official DVD featurette devoted to the Americanization. #2 was available on YouTube in an edited form whose only change was cleanly removing all clips of the British cast.
Remington Steele only saw a release of Season 1 in the United Kingdom and other non-American territories.
Saturday Night Live. Season sets, as opposed to best-of compilations, finally saw the light of day in 2009, with the music rights sorted out for each episode to air uncut. However, the boxsets stalled at Season 5 — the next couple of seasons constitute Old Shame on NBC's behalf. Lionsgate released a (now sadly out-of-print) massive compilation of the best musical performances that originally aired as a quartet of specials for the show's 25th anniversary back in 1999. Ostensibly every episode is available to "Watch Instantly" at Netflix, but they are heavily edited; no musical guest segments are included, and some episodes are as short as 18 minutes.
St. Elsewhere: Only Season 1 on DVD, although this is another one that UK folks can enjoy via Channel 4 on Demand.
If you're looking for a DVD of most of the NBC's TNBC Saturday Morning lineup, you're going to be waiting awhile. While Saved by the Bell and California Dreams eventually got releases, Hang Time, City Guys and several others haven't. (It doesn't help that most of the shows were canned after one season.)
The Tonight Show, hosted by Conan O'Brien...and nearly everything he did with the network for the foreseeable future. Following the whole debacle in 2009-10, NBC has scrubbed nearly all evidence that Conan has ever been employed by the network even going so far as to replace his picture on the famous Rockefeller Plaza mural with Jay Leno. Prior to that, his Late Night run did yield two official DVD releases: the 2003 10th Anniversary Special and a Triumph the Insult Comic Dog best-of compilation.
Viper has no reruns no DVD release. The only way to find it is on YouTube. A few people have put most of the better episodes up, but they're typically in VHS quality; the presence of local-station logos may be a point of contention.
TV Nation, a 1994 TV show that mixed the prevalent news-magazine genre with humor and was hosted by Michael Moore (the show in turn influenced his later series, The Awful Truth). While the latter is available on DVD, the former only made a brief appearance as a best-of compilation on VHS (reportedly conflicts between Moore and NBC have prevented any chance of a DVD release, the Executive Meddling the show suffered also led production to cease after a single season).
Nickelodeon
Pete And Pete season 3 has yet to be released on DVD.
All That has yet to see any home release, likely due to the musical acts. Even in reruns, the K-Ci & Jojo performance was removed from its episode (and all performances are removed in The '90s Are All That airings).
Animorphs only had 12 episodes released on VHS, and nothing else. Fans have taken to uploading the rest of the series online, even though most consider it a bad show.
Are You Afraid of the Dark? was never released on DVD in the US, but did receive complete season sets on Region 1 DVD in Canada by Cookie Jar (after its initial airings on YTV). Said sets are now out of print and go for upwards of $100, so occasional late night TeenNick airings are the only way to see them without breaking the bank.
According to TV Shows On DVD, Nickelodeon and Amazon will be releasing a pair of 3-disc MOD sets. No release dates, but you can pre-order them. That's something, at least.
Attack of the Giant Vulture, a segment from Nickelodeon's Short Films by Short People that aired in the nineties has not yet seen the light of day online, despite being heavily sought after. The only confirmed existing copies are located at The Paley Center for Media (2 locations - NY and LA).
Cry Baby Lane was lost for over a decade, having only aired on Nickelodeon once and never seeing a home release. After a Reddit user found a recorded VHS of it in 2011, Nickelodeon re-aired Cry Baby Lane on Halloween and advertised it as a banned film.
The rights to The Donna Reed Show, an inescapable fixture of the early days of Nick At Nite, were partially reclaimed by the estates of Reed and onetime husband/producer Tony Owen in 2008. The Reed and Owen estates now hold the rights to the first five seasons, while seasons 6-8 are still held by Sony, making rebroadcast rights snarled enough that the series is currently unavailable to air. DVD season sets actually are starting to come out, but getting all of them isn't exactly guaranteed in the new order of things.
Vindicated somewhat; everything's been settled and Tribune's Antenna TV network began to air the series in September 2012.
After the demise of Nick GaS, most of Nickelodeon's Game Show library from the late 1980s and early 1990s has vanished from the airwaves and can only be seen on YouTube. Affected shows include Double Dare (original and Super Sloppy editions), Finders Keepers*
many episodes of the first series of which were not even broadcast on Nick GaS
Pinwheel, Nickelodeon's flagship series in its earliest years, will likely never see a legitimate DVD release if only because of the rights issues surrounding the many animated segments. A few episodes have surfaced on bootleg DVDs and YouTube.
Some of the animated segments, however, have seen full series DVD releases (just to name a few: Bod, Paddington Bear, The Rabbit with Checkered Ears, and Charlie's Climbing Tree), though seldom outside their countries of origin.
Roundhouse. The first two episodes were each on a compilation VHS with a few other Snick episodes. The rest of the series is pretty much never going to get an official DVD release.
You Can't Do That on Television, while airing on Nickelodeon and whose American distribution rights are owned by said network, has not seen any release outside a "Worst of" tape in 1989. Further compounding matters is that various changes in management at CJOH (where the show was produced) over the years have resulted in a lot of paperwork getting lost, particularly concerning which (if any) cast and/or crew members would be entitled to royalties/additional usage fees/etc. were the show released on DVD.
The final nail in the coffin of an official video release came in February 2010 with a devastating fire at the CJOH studios in Ottawa, which meant the loss of most, if not all, of the surviving master tapes.
PBS
3-2-1 Contact. Broadcasters actually encouraged taping of the show. A handful of episodes were commercially released on VHS, but they're very expensive now. Worse, the first season is older than VHS, so many of its episodes, especially those that weren't rebroadcast later, have been lost forever.
Bill Nye the Science Guy continues to be a much-beloved science show that is still played in classrooms across the world, yet it has never received a proper commercial DVD release. Nye's own website doesn't sell it, there are only a few (overpriced) single episodes being sold through the official Disney store, and the first two seasons have been released in outrageously expensive sets that are only sold to schools and educators (and, on average, cost over $1,500 - yes, you read that right). However, this is somewhat mollified by the massive VHS release that proceeded it (which had all the episodes). In addition, there are certain websites that only teachers can access to watch episodes, if it helps.
Mister Rogers' Neighborhood: Episodes from the show's first run (1968-76) have not aired on PBS since 1995. They were taken out of the rotation because, by then, there were a year's worth of episodes from the second run (1979-2001) in the can. It was also said that these episodes could confuse children since they looked different and had some different characters (although the 1974-76 episodes were more similar to the later ones).
The first (black and white) season has probably not aired anywhere since the early 1970s. The first color season (1969) has not aired since 1983, and the 1970-76 seasons were gradually phased out between 1989 and 1995. 20 episodes from this era can be bought from Amazon, but many more remain unreleased, including all of the 1969 and 1972 seasons. Meanwhile, nearly all of the 1979-2001 run has been released.
There is also one Missing Week from the second run: the 1983 "Conflict" week. It was originally created to help children cope with the war-related themes of The Day After miniseries, but was deemed inappropriate to air after 1996 because of real-life wars. This week has not been released on Amazon.com.
Saludos, an old show similar to Sesame Street that teaches Spanish, is very hard to find, and survives only in the tapes of those that recorded it. It is likely impossible find a higher quality version of the show, which shows how hard to find it is. You can only find articles about it.
Many classic Sesame Street segments can be found online and on compilation DVD's. However, only 21 complete (or at least near-complete) episodes from 1989 on back have been officially released on DVD or digitally, including a test pilot.
Also, the episode with the Wicked Witch of the West is very hard to find, since it only aired once due to the fact that children were afraid of the witch and refused to watch the show. Good luck finding a copy now.
Shining Time Station appears to be headed for this, likely never to get a DVD release despite having been nominated for three Emmy Awards and having Ringo Starr and George Carlin playing the Conductor. Luckily, episodes can still be found online. Rights issues are likely the problem, since it used footage from Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends, whose rights currently resides with HiT Entertainment.
Square One TV. The series has not been re-run since the early 2000s (and even then, only 65 of the 230 episodes were re-run), and there are currently no DVD releases planned. Domestic recordings are known to exist of many episodes, and they sometimes show up on YouTube, but they are nowhere near exhaustive, and quality varies widely.
One segment of Square One that has generated its own separate demand for release is the police spoof Mathnet, which featured big-name guest stars and storylines that appealed to adults so much, that PBS at one point edited together one Mathnet storyline into a made-for-TV movie that aired in prime time.
There was a 1990s PBS miniseries called The United States Of Poetry that featured poems being read by the authors and widely varied cinematography like artistic music videos. You may be able to find a VHS copy languishing in your local library, but otherwise it's gone although, oddly, its very dated website is still being hosted.
WonderWorks was a joint PBS/Disney series that created short made-for-TV movies based on acclaimed children's books, such as Jacob Have I Loved, Bridge to Terebithia, and The Hoboken Chicken Emergency. It also brought several BBC miniseries adaptations of classic kidlit to the United States. Despite most of the films seeing release on VHS (some were also fixtures of The Disney Channel in The Eighties, such as The Boy Who Loved Trolls and How to Be a Perfect Person in Just Three Days), only a few have seen the light of day on DVD, and never under the WonderWorks banner. (These include the first two titles mentioned and the BBC adaptations of A Little Princess and The Chronicles of Narnia.)
The American Experience special Vietnam: A Television History was significantly edited from its original 1983 broadcast and VHS release when it made the leap to DVD. Most disconcerting are the removal of references to harsh treatment of Vietnamese rubber plantation workers and quip from a former French officer about comparing said workers to insects. Additionally the last episode, Legacy was excised in its entirety in the DVD set. This episode covered the aftermath of Vietnam post-1975. The only way you can see the episodes in their original format now is to check in to your local library.
If you like either Zoom series and want to see them on DVD? Well you're out of luck. The 90s series only had a "Making Of" VHS and a "Party With.." VHS while the original 1970s had a single "Best Of" VHS release.
Showtime
The Showtime special Andy Kaufman Plays Carnegie Hall (1980), taken from the 1979 one-night-only production often regarded as the pinnacle of Kaufman's career, only had one VHS release in 2000.
Nightmare Classics was a four-episode anthology series produced by Shelley Duvall, Cannon Films and Showtime that was much different in tone than Duvall's previous anthology series Faerie Tale Theatre and Tall Tales and Legends. While those two were popular enough to warrant DVD releases, the Nightmare Classics episodes faded into obscurity after they hit VHS. It seems that the issue with a release is the fact that it was a co-production (Warner Bros. owns the rights to later Cannon titles while Showtime is owned by CBS).
Full Color Football: The History of The American Football League, a five part Showtime/NFL Films produced documentary, has yet to be released on DVD (though the NFL Network runs the occasional rerun). Warner Bros. owns the rights, but seems to be sitting on the title despite strong fan demand.
Doom Runners, a TV Movie from Showtime, is only available on VHS and even then in fairly limited supply. Since the film is hardly more than a blip on the nostalgia radar, the chances of it seeing any kind of physical rerelease ever are slim, but in 2013 it started turning up on the various Showtime movie networks (Flix, et.al.).
The feature-length "Weird Al" YankovicMockumentaryThe Compleat Al managed a video release back in The Eighties, but hasn't been seen since. While the music videos featured in it have turned up on later compilation programs, that's only a fraction of the total show here.
SKY UK
The Strangerers (sic) was a science fiction comedy drama made for Sky1, starring Mark Williams and Jack Docherty and written by Rob Grant. Sky cancelled the show after one season and has never repeated it (and Sky repeats everything), or released it on DVD.
Ten Minute Tales: A series of shorts run over 11 days on Sky Television over Christmas 2009. Despite having some of the best actors around and some of the best writers (Neil Gaiman being one), the network has no plans to put it on DVD, so those who want to re-watch (which you will, as most of them are pretty deep and require several viewings to fully understand them) and/or those who don't have Sky will have find them elsewhere.
The WB / The CW / UPN
Kamen Rider Dragon Knight Has never been released on DVD in The United States despite rave reviews though Low ratings. Completely averted elsewhere especially in Japan where it was more popular than Kamen Rider Ryuki the show it's source footage originates from.
Kevin Hill, an oft-forgotten series starring Taye Diggs and a pre-Mad Men Christina Hendricks, which focuses on a lawyer who is suddenly forced to care for his deceased cousin's ten month old daughter, Sarah. The show was cancelled after its first season due to low ratings, and it has since disappeared into the ether.
Legend. Richard Dean Anderson and John DeLancie in a Steampunk version of The Old West. Anachronisms left and right, but it's a fun ride. Too bad it only lasted one season.
Mercy Point was an intriguing mixture of hospital drama and science fiction. Only eight episodes were made, and the last two were never aired. Those apparently remain completely unseen by anyone in the public to this day. There is no mention anywhere of the show having had a single rerun after its initial run in 1998-99. There are rumors that the series was heading for legal trouble due to similarities with 2000 AD series named Mercy Heights, which may contribute to the low profile.
The short-lived WB series Tarzan suffered this fate. You can still find it online, though the quality is debatable.
Everything after Season 1 of What I Like About You. Warner has no current plans to release the other 3 seasons. On the Season 1 set, the theme song was replaced with some completely irrelevant other tune. Fortunately the rest of the episodes are all availible online.
Ringer, the Sarah Michelle Gellar comeback vehicle, only lasted a season with no DVD release in sight. It is on Netflix, though.
YTV
The Adventures Of Shirley Holmes has been all but forgotten by Credo/Forefront, despite being very popular during its four-season run on YTV and gaining significant critical acclaim. More than a decade after the last season ended, the episodes are no longer being rerun, and there is very little hope of an official release in the future. Bootleg DVDs can be found online if you look really hard for them, though, and a few dedicated fans are working on uploading the episodes to the web.
The Big Comfy Couch ran for seven seasons on YTV (over a period of 14 years), but it has never received a proper DVD release. Time-Life Video released many episodes of the series on VHS in the mid-90's, but releases have been all over the place as far as DVD goes. The series got a release of several early episodes featuring Alyson Court (the original actress who played Loonette) in the early 2000's, which subsequently went out of print. The "remake" season in 2006 is still incomplete despite receiving a partial release, and the only way to see the rest of the episodes is to catch a repeat on Treehouse TV.
The YTV series Catwalk, about a group of young adults trying to establish themselves as a musical group. The show was notable for starring a pre-Party of Five Neve Campbell, and the episodes dealt with mature subject matter and themes, and was very progressive for its time. Despite the success of the first season, the show was cancelled in 1994, and half the episodes were never broadcast. It's never been released on DVD, likely due to a lawsuit arising between the show and a Connecticut-based band (also named Catwalk) regarding the name of the show.
Maniac Mansion, the Canadian television spinoff of the Lucasarts game of the same name, hasn't been seen in North America since it stopped airing in syndication in Canada on YTV in 2002. Despite the level of critical acclaim the series received when it first debuted, the fourth-wall breaking humor, and a cast made up of alumni from the Second City Theatre Company, none of the three seasons have ever been released in their entirety on DVD (two Season 1 episodes were released on VHS more than a decade ago). You can find the complete series through torrents.
System Crash, a sketch comedy series about a group of students in a media club at the fictional Lambton High School, aired from 1999-2002 and garnered a significant amount of popularity. However, it disappeared after the network began transitioning its programming block to younger audiences. It never received an official DVD release, and the only remnants of the series are occasional episodes that float around on Youtube or torrents.
Game/Panel Shows
Game Shows pretty much across the board. With GSN constantly moving away (and back, and away again, and...) from showing the "classics", it's become increasingly hard to find episodes of even iconic shows such as Wheel of Fortune, Family Feud, and Pyramid. And this isn't even getting into the countless series that have been wiped.
In addition, as explained in more detail under The Price Is Right, home video release of product-based series would be problematic from a licensing and rights perspective. Plus, at least for more recent game shows but possibly older ones as well, a DVD release might also require permission from the many contestants who may have signed contracts OK'ing rebroadcast but not home video release.
Concentration NBC Universal hasn't touched the format in nearly 20 years, and won't authorize cable reruns or a DVD release.
The bawdy Everything Goes (kind of a cross between The Hollywood Squares and Strip Poker), which ran on Escapade (1981-84) and the Playboy Channel (1984-88), has nothing other than a "Best of" tape in 1983 covering Seasons 1-2.
Globo Loco, a children's game show from CITV, regarded as much as to be nominated for the "Best Kids Entertainment Show" award. There's one episode on YouTube from its second series and a snippet or two, but that's it.
The Gong Show likely music rights. USA Network showed repeats in the 1980s, and GSN has aired episodes of the NBC, Barris syndicated, and Bleu syndicated versions; it's very possible that GSN still has the rights to broadcast it, so if people want to see it they should start campaigning hard).
Knightmare came to an abrupt end in 1994, and probably will never see the light of day again. A terrible shame, given how much fun it was and how important it was for its pioneering use of Chroma Key and virtual-reality technology. It reran on Sci-Fi Channel (UK) during the 1990s after it went off-air from CITV, and on Challenge TV in the early 2000s. It has never been released on video or DVD, except illegally.
Have I Got News for You has a compilation DVD covering the first twenty-three series (albeit with some extras including a commentary the whole way through with Paul Merton and Ian Hislop, which isn't bad at all for a TV DVD from 2002). Then there's another compilation covering just the next year, but with four extended complete episodes including a double-length version of the first Boris Johnson-hosted one and some more special features, and a third compilation of the two years after that, with a single but lengthy behind-the-scenes special feature and a nearly triple-length version of the second Boris episode. If they won't put out more than five complete episodes, they at least know the way to our hearts. (And yes, this show too can be found online in its entirety.)
The same applies to other topical panel shows such as Mock the Week and 8 out of 10 Cats (who have similar releases compiling highlights and Too Hot for TV material).
Hit Man with Peter Tomarken the 130 educational films used during the show's 13-week run were only licensed for one showing apiece, and Jay Wolpert has been unable to renegotiate.
The Match Game Hollywood Squares Hour dual ownership of the two formats, and maybe Gene Rayburn not wanting the series to be seen because he wasn't pleased with it.
Now You See It (Chuck Henry) he won't clear his run as he wasn't pleased with his work. Many fans think he's being way too hard on himself.
The Price Is Right there's a number of theories why (CBS doesn't want reruns up against first-run shows/is asking too much for it, Fremantle Media is asking too much for it, Bob Barker has some say in the matter, etc.). With the GSN repeats and BCI/Mill Creek DVD set, there was a moratorium on certain episodes by Barker, including but not limited to those where fur coats were given as prizes note (which knocks out the premiere and the next two episodes recorded, one of which was shelved due to an ineligible contestant {and whose existence is in question}).
There are also claims that episodes featuring model Holly Hallstrom are also on the "do not air" list because of bitter (non-)relations between her and Barker. Hallstrom testified against Barker at several of his sexual harassment trials, and sided with another ex-model, Dian Parkinson, when the Barker-Parkinson affair blew up; Barker unceremoniously dismissed her from the show in the fallout.
It's unknown why DennisJames' five-year syndicated run has never been repeated, although speculation has been due to the prevalence of fur coats as prizes. That doesn't rule out the non-fur episodes, but...
Although virtually all episodes are known to exist of the current version, GSN stopped airing repeats in 2000 and only one "classic" has aired since then (the May 23, 1975 episode was shown by CBS in 2002). That aside, it is unknown when (or if) Barker's "ban" on repeats of his era will expire, such as upon his death or if a clause in his will will extend the ban.
The original Bill Cullen series is widely thought to be a different color of horse than the current show, yet repeats of it are not shown either. GSN previously aired 67 nighttime episodes and one daytime show; several other episodes have turned up on YouTube (probably excluded due to cigarette sponsorship on some shows) and the nighttime finale (ABC, Sept. 11, 1964) is on the DVD set.
Home video release of Price might also be restricted by licensing issues, as each episode contains multiple references to real-life brand names, including logos and slogans. Pretty much every company featured would need to give permission (and some would probably demand a fee), and that assumes they'd even allow "outdated" branding and products to be featured. Granted, this issue applies to virtually every other game show with product prizes (Let's Make a Deal, the "shopping" era of Wheel of Fortune, etc), but Price was all about product placement, so the issue would be even worse.
QI is available on DVD in the UK (only Series 1-3, unfortunately), but due to copyright issues for the images they use it will never be shown or released elsewhere. One estimate puts the international image rights for one episode at over £10,000.
Yet it's being shown in Australia on the ABC, so at least they can watch it legit. This probably has something to do with the longstanding legal detente that Australia has due to close legal and cultural ties with the UK. Unfortunately, fans in the US have to find alternate means (it's not even shown on BBC America).
Wheel of Fortune a King World representative stated in August 2006 that the Chuck Woolery era (1975-81) was wiped along with early Pat Sajak shows, and it appears that the archive begins around mid-1985.
GSN has only ever shown certain seasons of the nighttime version, and even then there's some oddities:
Season 2 (1984-85) received a single near-complete cycle; the last week or so was never aired.
Season 5 (1987-88) was likely never shown in its entirety.
Seasons 8-9 (1990-92) and 11 (1993-94) have never been aired, for unknown reasons.
Very few episodes past Season 14 (1996-97) have been shown.
Soap Operas
The vast majority of soap operas (especially of the Long Runner Anglo variety) simply have far too many episodes to ever be released. That, and not much of a 50+-year show is still in existence at all.
Australian company Shock Entertainment are bucking the trend by actually beginning to put Neighbours to DVD - so far, DVD releases have been of the type that are collections of special episodes, but on April 4 2012 Shock released "Neighbours: From the Beginning Vol 1" which comprises the first 56 episodes (of nearly 6,500 to date). Vol 2 is expected in November 2012, and will probably be of a similar length.
Hispanic telenovelas are in no better situation. On one side they tend to be shorter (a standard six month run, aired monday to saturday, gives about 180 chapters) so they could get a DVD release if they want. On the other side, selling them for sindication runs abroad makes the producers recoup part of the costs, so they won't release any "recent" (up to 10 years ago) soap. Worse, when they do do a release, they only make a "best of" thing compressing the story (ex. 180 chapters reduced to 60), putting an epileptic monkey in charge of edition, and trimming scenes at random, creating an unwatchable mutant of soap.
For a while, in Venezuela, it was common to see on the street sellers pirate DVDs of Colombian soaps. Half of the titles were "narconovelas", soap operas with drug-dealing themes whose contents couldn't be broadcast under actual Venezuelan laws unless it was post-Midnight; the other half were current and former soaps about vallenato musicians, a genre which is popular but not mainstream (one of those, Oye Bonita, was eventually aired). The remaining one was Chepe Fortuna, a comedic soap which was broadcast but quickly pulled off the air when someone in the government decided that a villainesque character named Venezuela was an Stealth Insult to the country (the character was a Fat BastardSmall Name, Big Ego lady with a teeny tiny dog named Hugo; draw your own conclusions).
A notable inversion of this trope is the original Dark Shadows. Except for one single lost episode, all 1,200+ episodes of this soap opera were recently released on DVD in a single box set, constituting the greatest number of episodes ever released to home video at one time. Prior to this, incredibly, the entire series had been released on VHS tape as well, likely requiring diehard fans to build additions to their homes in order to hold all the tapes. It is also the only soap to ever see widespread rerun circulation, resulting in many unofficial tapes being circulated before the DVD set came out.
Other
Subverted with Power Rangers. Which originally never had full seasons released on home release and periotically had compilation DVDs of some of the later shows in the United States. Saban is only now starting to release full box sets, with Mighty Morphin' - Lost Galaxy getting released in Various Boxsets with most of them only available in an expensive bundle of season 1-3 and 4-7. A boxset with 1-3 seasons has been released with another boxset with 4-7 being planned. season 1 and part of2 are available in various sized boxsets as well. Saban does plan on releasing later seasons in the future. Most of Samurai has been released on DVD with Super Samurai getting a full boxset as well as some smaller sets of some episodes. However all episodes of Power Rangers are available on Netflix uncut. Though most countries play this straight as any prior releasees have been discontinued and very few other countries (Canada, Ireland, and the UK) have Netflix leaving many outside the US to rely on "other means" to watch episodes that aren't being re-aired.
There have been Best Of compilations of American Bandstandnote (and good luck finding a decent copy these days), The Midnight Special, Don Kirshner's Rock Concert, and Soul Train...but aside from the last show being rerun on Centric, seeing full-season releases or full-show reruns doesn't seem to be in the cards, mostly because of the cost and effort involved in securing the rights of musical and (in Midnight and Concert's cases) stand-up comedy performances.
Mostly due to the fact it was a local (Seattle) show and the station that created it is now part of a larger station group, Almost Live has also never seen the light of a DVD box set...despite the fact that you could probably convince half the city to give up espresso for a month just to get one. For those outside Seattle, Almost Live was what established "Bill Nye the Science Guy", and his Almost Live colleagues made appearances on the show. Also well worth it to see Nye in some amusing but definitely-not-for-kids stuff like "The Street Walking Lawyers of Aurora Ave" and "Ree-bok Cross-dressers".
Baywatch only had the first three syndicated seasons (1991-94) released on DVD in America, and the "River of No Return" two-parter wasn't included in the Season 2 set because it got a standalone release which has long been discontinued. The sets featured music edits, too, including the iconic theme song. The entire series got released in Germany, though.
Beat The Cyborgs was a CITV entertainment show broadcast in 2003, so for such a comparatively recent series it's disheartening to see not just a lack of VHS or DVD, but NO online clips of the show (just one trailer, all there is as visual representation on YouTube that this show existed). It can't be revived due to the tragic death of Mark Speight, who was the Borgmaster.
The 1987 TV movie Casanova, directed by Simon Langton, written by George MacDonald Fraser and starring Richard Chamberlain, Faye Dunaway, Ornella Muti, Sylvia Kristel and Hanna Schygulla has never been released on VHS or DVD in the United States other than a severely-edited 122-minute VHS version in 1992. A much longer version with nudity has been released on VHS in various European countries and Latin America, but there has never been an official DVD release anywhere. The best available version appears to be a Japanese laserdisc of the original U.S. broadcast version of the movie (with Japanese subtitles).
In 1998, CNN aired an amazing 24-part special on the Cold War. It was released on VHS, but then September 11th happened and large amounts of footage from the later episodes, which dealt with the USA's interventions in the Middle East, were reclassified. But those episodes were never recalled, so if you get your hands on them you can legally watch classified footage (which bits are classified is unknown, of course). Copies still float around online, and the series is shown in many history, international relations, and foreign policy classes.
Somewhat averted as the series was released in full by Warner Brothers on DVD in early June of 2012 at a reasonable price, though it's definitely likely some of the re-classified footage has been culled out of the DVD release.
Conquest, a show hosted by Peter Woodward on The History Channel a mere six years ago. The History Channel's website doesn't even list the show anymore and acts like the 28 episodes they made and aired never happened. Which is unfortunate, because it was a great show that depicted many classical weapons and their history/use.
Crash Zone, a 1999 Australian TV show that aired on the Seven Network for 26 episodes was released over 6 VHS volumes that were made exclusively available to schools. The show never got a public home media release, VHS or otherwise, when the second season was made available on iTunes. The only trace of season 1 to be found online is a trailer, though it is hoped that the first season will also eventually be released on iTunes.
Divorce Court - The current version, featuring real-life arbitration hearings of divorce cases, is alive and well in syndication. Nobody, it seems, remembers (or is interested in airing) two earlier dramas bearing the name Divorce Court ... y'know, the one that featured fictional stories supposedly based on "real-life" divorce cases, and student attorneys arguing the cases with actors playing the litigants and witnesses. The original version of the original format debuted in 1957, with Judge Volitare Perkins presiding; despite running a then-impressive 12 years in syndication (to that time, it was one of the longest runs in syndication), the series has never been repeated and is largely forgotten today. An updated version, with even more relevant and sometimes raunchier stories, premiered in the spring of 1985, with Judge William B. Keene serving as the judge. That series has been re-aired (most notably on Court TV and earlier, on the USA Network), but except for occasional uploads to video-sharing services has not been seen since at least the mid-1990s.
Any of the E! True Hollywood Story specials. Aside from the understandably daunting task of trying to release 14 seasons worth of unrelated media (ranging from TV and film stars to celebrity scandals and popular culture), many of the episodes have music or footage clearance issues. That said, many of the episodes could (and should) have been released as extras on DVD sets that didn't have any extras in the first place (Miami Vice, Married With Children, and others). This isn't helped by the fact that E! has only released a scant few episodes to Emmy Award voters only and has since limited reruns to episodes that feature reality TV famewhores. Thankfully in syndication, but mainly as late-night filler for TV stations and edited to fit a half-hour and remove E! branding.
They (or at least Comcast) have also seen fit to pull down any uploads on YouTube for no apparent reason. Considering the above, don't expect to see most of them any time soon.
The CTV news drama E.N.G.: Not only did this show (about a team of anchors at a politically-charged news station) run for five seasons, but it was one of the most watched programs on the channel it aired on. It won a whopping ten Gemini Awards (including Best Dramatic Series four years in a row) and practically swept every other Canadian series critically and commercially when it was on...until it was dumped from the network without explanation. Twenty years later, and it still hasn't been released.
Freddy's Nightmares A Nightmare On Elm Street: The Series. Five episodes were released on VHS in the 1990s, which are long out-of-print. There was also a DVD set in Region 2 which contained the first three episodes, but alleged poor sales kept it from being released anywhere else and stopped any more episodes from being given a DVD treatment.
Glasgow Kiss, an extremely well-done six-part series about a Glaswegian sportswriter and the financial management planner he falls in love with (played by Iain Glen and Sharon Small, respectively), has yet to appear on DVD. It can be found on the internet, but requires considerable effort to hunt down.
Infinity Limited, by the Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1980-84.
It's unlikely that Iron Chef will ever be released on DVD, due to a combination of length (there were over 300 episodes), copyright issues (much of the music was from Backdraft, Glory, and Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story), and licensing issues between Japan, the US, and Australia. Also, many episodes never left Japan in the first place. note (There's also a rumor going around that another reason is that per his contract Takeshi Kaga {the Chairman} would have a right to royalties, probably more than Fuji {which never thought it'd last more than a couple seasons} or Food Network were willing to give. Kaga did get excised from the "History of Iron Chef" episode included with the "Battle of the Masters" DVD, so...)
Iron Chef America has no excuse. Despite that, only the Battle of The Masters was released on DVD.
Iron Chef Japan is still being shown on The Cooking Channel, albeit with the original music now swapped for copyright friendly tracks.
The very popular Dutch 1960s series Ja Zuster, Nee Zuster is only available now as fragments and as recorded songs, not due to copyright issues but because most of the master tapes were lost.
The Judge: An 80's dramatized court show that never aired on TV after repeats on USA Network in the early 90's.
About half of Kaze no Haruka is available to view online. Much searching has not revealed any part of the series to have been released either on DVD or for download.
Kometto-san (Seρorita Cometa in Spanish), a 1960s Widget Series mixing live action, puppets and animation that aired in Mexico through the 1970s and mid-1980s. Probably due to the earthquake of 1985 the series was Lost Forever, since tapes were not so common then.
The Canadian-produced sister series to Kung Fu, Kung Fu: The Legend Continues. Despite starring David Carradine and running for four seasons in syndication (a longer run than the original, not the first timethat's happened), the show still hasn't been released on DVD. It is available online and on torrents, though.
There hasn't been a single DVD of the UK or US versions of The Magic Roundabout. The last release was a "best of" on VHS in 1993. This might have to do with the fact that the English narration is technically a Gag Dub of the more moralistic French original.
Unless there has been an act of God within the time taken to write this, fans of the absolutely epic show Martial Law will be left champing at the bit for a DVD release- as of 2012, no plans have been announced despite numerous petitions for one of Sammo Hung's defining performances.
The horror TV series Monsters. If you have Chiller, you can catch it, usually via marathons.
Memphis Beat, never released on DVD (entire two seasons) after it's cancellation by TNT in 2011.
MTM Enterprises seems particularly cursed. The studio was synonymous with "quality television" in the 1970s and 1980s, producing some of the most critically-acclaimed series in American TV history, but none of them (with the exception of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Remington Steele, the latter no doubt thanks to Pierce Brosnan's megastardom) have seen anything close to their complete runs getting out on DVD.
Seasons 4-5 of The Muppet Show; the Season 3 box set was released in 2008. In addition, music rights issues led to several numbers getting left out of the Season 1 set. Rights-holder Disney just doesn't make their Muppet holdings a priority. A chunk of episodes from Seasons 4-5 made it to the now-out-of-print Time-Life compilation DVDs at the Turn of the Millennium, but they're mixed in with episodes from Seasons 1-3, requiring some double-dipping for those who have the box sets.
For that matter, many Jim Henson-era Muppet specials have fallen into this trope, having not aired on television since The Nineties at the latest:
The Muppets Go Hollywood (1979): A variety special tie-in to The Muppet Movie.
John Denver and the Muppets: A Christmas Together (1979): The soundtrack album is still around, but the original special...
The Muppets Go to the Movies (1981): A tie-in special to The Great Muppet Caper that doubled as a sendoff for The Muppet Show, focusing on classic movie spoofs and tributes.
The Fantastic Miss Piggy Show (1982)
The Muppets: A Celebration of 30 Years (1985)
The complete versions of Rocky Mountain Holiday (1982) and A Muppet Family Christmas (1987), due to a "Funny Aneurysm" Moment in the former (a scene involving John Denver flying a personal plane, as he died doing just that) and music rights issues in the latter.
The Muppets at Walt Disney World (1990): Notable as Henson's final Muppet project, as he died just ten days after it aired. And from that sad event, there's...
The Muppets Celebrate Jim Henson (1990): Thanks to the fractured ownership of Henson-related properties (Disney owns the "classic" Muppets, Sesame Workshop has the Sesame Street crew, Sony has non-Muppet works like Labyrinth...), it would be a true challenge to release this touching, career-spanning special uncut.
Certain, uh, non-official translations of Retro Game Master, were taken down from YouTube or otherwise removed when Kotaku announced another episode that had already been previously fan translated. Once Kotaku's license to show the series expired, they pretty much officially sanctioned people watching fansubbed versions instead. Also, circulating the tapes is the only way for anyone to watch the parts of the show that aren't the challenges; rights issues make it so that even in Japan, the official DVD releases cut down each episode to just the challenge segments. It gots worse. The broadcasting company plans on taking down all the episodes in Youtube, subs and all.
The New Adventures Of Robin Hood, a kitschy 90's series from TNT in the vein of Hercules and Xena, has only Season 1 available on DVD, and then not until 2010. The remaining three seasons are completely unavailable.
The Made-for-TV MovieOil Storm received a lot of attention after apparently predicting Hurricane Katrina. However, as it is a mockumentary made up in part from various forms of archival footage, it is unclear if it will ever be rereleased.
Out of This World not only has DVD distribution tied up in limbo due to legal issues with the showrunners being blocked from making any more money off the show. This prevents the it from airing on American television, where reruns last aired in the mid-nineties.
Pop Up Video is presumably stymied by music rights issues (although it saw one VHS / DVD compilation release in 1999). A select few videos can be found on VH-1's website and YouTube. All the full reruns still air on VH-1 Classic, but unless you have a higher-tier satellite package, you likely won't see the show's complete run ever again.
Speaking of VH-1: any I Love The _____ series. More movie, television, and music clip rights issues than you can shake a stick at. The decade-based series were often rerun up through 2009, but I Love Toys (2006) wasn't so lucky, and the 90-minute I Love the Holidays special only ran a few times in 2005.
Professional Wrestling: In the pre-VCR/cable television era, most local or small regional promotions that were fortunate enough to have their own syndicated television programs have been erased to history. First, videotape (prior to the 1980s) was an expensive commodity, and promotions that were able to afford it simply reused the tapes when recording their material. Second, due to (perhaps) a perceived lack of future rerun potential, many promotions and/or television stations destroyed the tapes (or more likely, films) once they aired or wore out, their (wrestling) companies ceased their promotional activities or other reasons. This means that with the exception of those having foresight or individuals who recorded the show and still have the tapes stashed away somewhere the history of these promotions no longer exist in video form, much less in broadcast quality (due to derogation).
World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) is a notable exception, having hundreds of thousands of hours of videotapes and films of classic programming available for broadcast or on-demand download; this includes programming from promotions the McMahon family has acquired the rights to, including the NWA, WCW, ECW, and AWA. They've even got some wrestling footage from Du Mont! But even in this case, it is possible that individual episodes of syndicated programs (especially those prior to the late 1970s) have been recorded over or otherwise have been destroyed for various reasons.
That said, the sheer amount of footage would sadly make DVD releases of television shows all but impossible. In 1998, among the main shows alone, WCW, WWF and ECW had over 300 hours of footage. This would make even a volume release of the year impractical, even divided among promotion.
The AMC period sitcom Remember WENN, an unfortunate casualty of the pre-Mad Men era, is not on DVD and not in syndication.
Most of the Japanese live-action Super Sentai series have never aired in the United States and none have ever seen any home media release. This includes the classic Goranger, which essentially kicked the genre off in the mid-1970s.
Sightings, a paranormal news program that aired in syndication during the early-to-mid 1990s.
Space 1999 had two episodes released by U.S.A. Home Video, but both tapes were sued by two of its stars and blocked from further distribution within a year. The silliest thing about this is, the reason they wound up unavailable on video for over a decade afterwards wasn't copyright infringement, but rather low quality. That's right, the very first uncut videocassettes of the series in the United States were banned because the video wasn't detailed or colorful enough. You can read some more about this silliness, among other things, here.
Spectreman. BCI-Eclipse, the company that released other Toku series like Ultraman and Iron King in the US, actually stated that they wanted to release it but were unable to determine who currently owned the rights to the English dub of the series.
The award-winning, four-season syndicated TV show Starting Over (not the movie with Burt Reynolds).
Superior Court: Another dramatized court show in the 80's never released on DVD since it last aired in repeats on USA Network in the early 90's.
Takeshi's Castle was only shown at 7:00 AM on Virgin 1's cable channel. Those with basic Freeview could only see it at 4:00 AM.
Tracker only had a DVD release in the form of a cobbled-together pseudo-"movie" of a couple episodes. Fans refused to buy it, and Lions Gate never saw the point of a whole series DVD release. Cue the fan-made DVDs.
This Is The Life and other religious dramas from the 1950s through early 1980s were once a staple of Sunday morning television. In a nutshell, these Christian dramas underwritten by a Protestant or Catholic synod would present a story where the main characters faced a moral dilemma and attempted to resolve it through their own secular means before turning to the Christian solution; the host would then review the situation at the end, provide a brief commentary on how the lesson can be applied to the viewer's life, and give appropriate Scripture reading. Many of these programs starred both established actors and then-unknowns prior to their first big break. Since the last of these shows the Missouri Lutheran Synod-underwritten This Is The Life, circa 1988 ended first-run production, these Christian anthologies have virtually vanished. None of these shows have been uploaded to YouTube or offered for sale on home video (not even in the 1980s by Christian-based ministries, during or after first-run production), and finding any station that has saved the tapes may be more difficult than the proverbial camel passing through a needle's eye. The most likely place to find any of these shows would likely be a church that might have old off-air VHS recordings of the show in its library, or a rural public access station that has old tapes in its archive and are running them as filler, but even in remote rural areas, most public access cable TV stations don't publish their broadcast schedules. Many religious cable networks won't air them these days because their 'for everyone' morals don't meet the certain viewpoints they espouse.
Related: Insight, a syndicated anthology drama series by Paulist Productions, which ran from 1960-1985. Notable for airing during late night, early mornings, and other strange times. Essentially The Twilight Zone with a religious twist. However, unlike most typical religious programming, its non secular nature was seldom evident at first glance due to the lack of heavy handed preachiness. It guest starred many established actors of the time as well as up and coming actors who would later become stars. Out of the twenty-five years of the show's run (250 episodes), only ten episodes are avaiable from Paulist Press (VHS only as of 2011). Good luck in finding most of the rest of it. Many rumors exist as to why it's not headed for DVD anytime soon. One posible reason is that the show represented Catholic theology of its time and may no longer represent current Church doctrine on a lot of issues.
TV Burp, anyone? Old episodes are rarely shown outside of immediate broadcast, and there have been no full series boxsets because of rights issues on the multiple clips from different shows and their networks and/or companies that Avalon doesn't own. There have been multiple Best of DVDs as well as at least 20 Best of episodes on TV (but those still fall under old episodes).
The English television company TVS (Television South) some time ago bought out the U.S. company MTM (Mary Tyler Moore's production company). Then somebody else, wanting the rights to the MTM shows, bought out TVS. A number of TVS programs have ended up never being released on VHS or DVD. For example, a lot of folks would give their eyeteeth to see The Witches and the Grinnygog again, which at the moment is only available as an illegal bootleg.
A month after TVS ceased broadcasting it was bought by International Family Entertainment, who did use some TVS shows on the now defunct UK version of The Family Channel. IFE was bought by 20th Century Fox (who now have the MTM rights) and Saban, who in turn sold the rights to Disney as a very minor part of their takeover of Fox / ABC Family and the international Fox Kids / Jetix channels. Unfortunately at some point during this game of musical programme rights, all the paperwork relating to TVS's programmes was thrown out, meaning the entire library is basically in rights hell and unlikely to see the light of day. A few shows did escape this, in the months leading up to the end, TVS sold its current network shows like Art Attack and The Ruth Rendell Mysteries to independent producers (and How 2 to Scottish Television), complete with the back catalogues of those shows, and the local news and sport archive was sold to successor Meridian. However, the vast majority of TVS shows are buggered.
The 1993 produced-in-Canada TV version of The Untouchables with Tom Amandes, William Forsythe, and John Rhys-Davies.
The popular Swedish Vintergatan ("Milky Way") series, which were humorous science fiction adventures for children. The two seasons can't be released on DVD because of music rights issues. On the other hand, Swedish Television reruns it once a year, so you can tape it yourself with no legal problems.
Young Blades hasn't been released on DVD, which is unsurprising due to its lack of popularity and its being on PAX. There are a few unofficial DVD copies out there, however: after one fan lost all her taped episodes during Hurricane Katrina, she wrote to the production company and they sold her all the episodes on DVD, including missing scenes. Several other fans followed her example.
Our America With Lisa Ling on OWN has managed, through what has got to be the worst cable deal ever, to find itself in this territory despite being an active show producing new episodes. And one of the highest-rated shows on the network. A network that reruns just about everything else on the roster to death. If there isn't a new episode being aired, or a new episode about to be aired, good luck finding it online, on the schedule, anywhere. Lisa isn't overly happy with the arrangement either.
Despite being released in Europe, there seems to be absolutely no plans for a DVD release for Lilyhammer in the US. To make matters worse, the American rights belong to Netflix and they seem to see absolutely no value in releasing things outside of the streaming section of the website (you can't even rent "rental only" discs of the show).
The HBO anthology series Lifestories: Families in Crisis (which dramatized true stories of families dealing with hot-button issues) ran for years on the network and briefly ran in syndication as well, but has never been seen on DVD. Even though the show featured a few actors before they were famous (such as Ben Affleck and Calista Flockhart), HBO has limited interest in releasing it.
