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    Trope Namer 
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. Word of God (well, word of Joel anyway) states that the phrase was not in reference to licensing/copyright issues but to the fact that Comedy Central was not available everywhere in the U.S. when the show premiered, similar to other channels in the early days of cable. So, the only way they could gain a national audience was for fans to trade tapes with people who could not watch it any other way. 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).

However, later a different problem began to arise as reruns of the show began to start dropping episodes - episodes of MST3K required broadcasting licenses for the films themselves and as these rights expired, the episodes themselves would be pulled from rotation if a new agreement wasn't worked out. In addition, rights to the movies were originally only gained for broadcast, and reproduction rights for the emerging home video market were even more complex and nightmarish, slowing the schedule of releases on VHS and later complicating DVD and streaming releases. On top of that, when the show switched networks, Sci-Fi could not run the Comedy Central-era episodes, leaving the first seven seasons out of legal circulation entirely aside from the scant few VHS releases Rhino Home Video put out. Essentially, the trope became fan speak because tape trading and later torrents and YouTube uploads became the only way to see most of the series.

Eventually things improved as the DVD releases began. A fair number of episodes of MST3K are currently available for purchase legally as current license holder Shout! Factory proved very adept at wrangling even some of the more difficult episodes loose for DVD releases and keeping the show active on streaming services. For a while Best Brains was uploading episodes to the long defunct Google Video and currently Shout Factory will do the same at random with episodes they own the rights to upload. The Comet streaming channel will run episodes in specific time slots as well. Given the somewhat rosier status now, one of the creators has now said "Keep circulating some of the tapes," meaning fans should support the legal options to view the show.

Even so, there remain 10 episodes of MST3K that will likely never see a legal release. After the release of Volume 39, Shout Factory announced they had no more episodes they were able to license for the showing, ending its DVD release at Vol. 39. Currently, these episodes are #201 Rocketship X-M, #213 Godzilla Vs. The Sea Monster, #309 The Amazing Colossal Man, #311 It Conquered the World, #416 Fire Maidens from Outer Space, #418 The Eye Creatures, #807 Terror from the Year 5000, #809 I Was A Teenage Werewolf, #905 The Deadly Bees, and #906 The Space Children. Shout Factory included the host segments from the above films in a special features set on Volume 39. The movie rights issues have led to less legal options still being the only way to view these episodes to this day. In addition, older releases occasionally go out of print and may not even be reissued if the license situation changes again. Ultimately, MST3K is a show that will in some way always need to rely on fan bootlegs to continue to be viewed.

Ironically, some of the films featured in MST3K are themselves difficult or impossible to find on legal home video releases, such as the TV movie Overdrawn at the Memory Bank or Operation Double 007, yet these are among the episodes that are actually available on DVD.

    General examples 
  • Many TV series have been available on VHS and 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 and The Invisible Man. Of course, the biggest culprit of this phenomenon is 20th Century Fox, who have given this treatment to such shows as The Practice, Hill Street Blues, St. Elsewhere, NYPD Blue (except in the UK), Picket Fences and many others. It seems that Fox don't consider it worthwhile to release non-current, non-syndicated shows on DVD if they don't sell over a million copies. They're also very reluctant to sell off their licenses to other big studios or smaller enterprises.
  • 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 VHS or DVD release in North America but can be seen online, usually pirated. (Examples include the cop series Scott & 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.
    • Regional lock-out online is a rough equivalent for shows that have their archives online. Live in the United States? You can see every clip from The Daily Show on the Comedy Central website. Live in Australia? Hope that someone was nice enough to upload a copy of it to YouTube.note 
  • 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 and attempting to rip them into a media player-compatible format is stymied by outrageous Copy Protection since those DVR-Rs don't have to follow the DVD standard.note  So if your favorite show ends up falling into category 3, then you still need to keep "circulating the tapes."
  • Some series have complete and widely available DVD releases, but almost comically spotty Blu-ray releases which appear to be a result of the distributors dipping their toe in the water but then changing their mind and sticking with just DVD. While having only later seasons but not earlier ones on Blu-ray is understandable, in the case of shows like Nip/Tuck[1], Scrubs [2], Rescue Me[3], and Burn Notice[4], only a single season of each was made available on Blu-ray.
  • Loss of licenses and original prints has relegated hundreds of pornographic films into non-digital obscurity. Because some adult stars and film producers are perfectly fine with having this aspect of their past lost and forgotten, helps make it so.
  • When it comes to Theme Parks, there are numerous television specials, documentaries, and souvenir videos that have fallen into this territory over the decades due to falling out of date as the parks expand and evolve. Very few specials featuring Disney Theme Parks are in circulation on hard media or streaming, even ones featuring musical numbers and/or footage of A-list creatives (The Making of Captain EO, Ernest Goes to Splash Mountain, pretty much any grand opening special, etc.) and next-to-nothing related to the Universal Studios parks is extant aside from the ridefilm and most of the preshow videos for Back to the Future: The Ride and the Shrek 4D short (primarily because it is canon to the rest of the franchise, and the hard copy releases don't include the preshow material).

    ABC (Australia) 
  • The Glass House is stuck with the "too topical to show in repeats" problem. There has been a DVD release of a few of the best-of compilations, but otherwise the show is pretty much unavailable.
  • Its predecessor, Good News Week, is worse off, since not even a best-of compilation is available. While its most recent run has led to many clips being uploaded to YouTube, it hasn't seen a DVD release, and probably never will.
  • The ending two-parter of the third season of Johnson and Friends were never released on home media, those being "The Crying Baby" and "Bringing Up Baby". A copy of the latter did exist on YouTube, but the former was thought to be lost until the official channel uploaded it. The official channel has since gone under for unknown reasons as of 2018, however.
  • Swinging, one of ABC's original children's series, was never released on VHS or DVD, and only three episodes have been recovered in their entirety so far (plus one that was recovered only in part). The show also has the added annoyance of having a title containing a word shared by several other TV show titles, causing online searches to return results for unrelated shows and making it unnecessarily hard to find the episodes that have been recovered.

    ABC (USA) 
  • Although the entire ABC Afterschool Special series did get a DVD release, it's been out of print for a while. It's even harder to find the specials from rival channels like NBC and CBS that were similar (Afternoon Treat and Schoolbreak Special, respectively).
    • Similarly, many episodes of its sister series ABC Weekend Special, which aired on Saturday mornings, were never released to home media.
  • America's Funniest People, a Spin-Off of America's Funniest Home Videos, aired from 1990 to 1994. The first two seasons with Dave Coulier and Arleen Sorkin have been on YouTube since 2018. Less popular are the show's third and fourth seasons, where Sorkin was replaced with Tawny Kitaen; only brief clips of individual performances and cameos exist.
  • Boomerang, a Muppets-esque puppet show hosted by Broadway actress Marni Nixon and aired on Seattle ABC affiliate KOMO from 1975 to 1980, with the last reruns being in the early '90s, has never seen a commercial video release in any format, and home VHS or Beta recordings are very few and far between, with only one full episode having been uploaded to YouTube.
  • Burke's Law: The first season saw release; Seasons 2 & 3 (the latter an unsuccessful Retool as Amos Burke, Secret Agent) are still MIA on the official release front.
  • 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.
  • The Drew Carey Show got as far as a Season One release and a "best-of" DVD. Warner Home Video said that music licensing issues have all but killed any chance of a future release for the show's remaining eight seasons as Drew Carey wanted the songs to be left intact on home-media. As of 2022, the Rewind TV multicast network shows the series.
  • Earth☆Star Voyager was a little-remembered but underground-circulated Disney Sunday Movie special that, like several other specials and Made For TV Movies that aired under that banner, was intended as a backdoor pilot; poor ratings canned that. Disney fails to even acknowledge the film's existence these days, and most productions that aired under that banner suffered the same fate (Mr. Boogedy is one of the few exceptions, having surfaced on Disney+). The only one that went to series, The Last Electric Knight (which became Sidekicks), only warranted a U.K. VHS release.
  • Getting Together has never been aired since 1972 or released on home media, although episodes occasionally turn up on eBay.
  • 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").
  • Happy Days: While the entire series has been rerun endlessly for the past 30 years in syndication, only six seasons have – to date – been issued on DVD. Seasons 2-6 have replaced 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 INSP or Me-TV.
  • The Jackie Thomas Show: Despite being a relative success in ratings, the show was cancelled after just one season. No episodes are known to have been rerun, and the series has never received a home media release, nor is it present on any streaming services. Even online it's nowhere to be found outside a few short clips, though you can occasionally find fans claiming to have copies of it.
  • John Denver & The Muppets: A Christmas Together, a popular Christmas special first aired in 1979, has never been released on videotape or disc, most likely due to the large number of song rights that would have to be secured. (Fans have put the special up on YouTube, and it still generates a fair amount of views there, especially during the holiday season.) The album that inspired the special, on the other hand, has a seemingly eternal life, being released several times over the years on vinyl, audiocasette, compact disc and even digital download.
    • The 1983 follow-up special Rocky Mountain Holiday is on DVD but is edited to remove a Harsher in Hindsight moment (a scene involving John Denver flying a personal plane, as he died doing just that in 1997). In addition, the usage of the Jaws theme as an underscore at one point was replaced by a Suspiciously Similar Song, due to rights issues.
    • Similarly, 1987's A Muppet Family Christmas lost several songs for its video releases due to music rights issues. Later editions also edited out two scenes: one of Fozzie and Elmo turning on the Christmas tree, and the other when Fozzie talks to his mother about hanging stockings. To this day, the uncut version of the special remains a hot ticket on YouTube and in tape-trading circles (especially with the original commercials) when the holidays roll around.
    • 1981's The Muppets Go to the Movies, a tie-in special to The Great Muppet Caper that doubled as an unofficial send-off for The Muppet Show, hasn't aired on American television since the Nickelodeon rerun package of the early '90s. It did receive a VHS release in the UK and a DVD in Israel.
    • 1982's The Fantastic Miss Piggy Show is another one that hasn't been seen since the Nickelodeon package; beyond its interest to Muppet fans, it's also notable for having Andy Kaufman's final appearance as his Alter-Ego Acting persona Tony Clifton. It received a VHS only distributed to schools by Films Incorporated, who also distributed The Muppets Go Hollywood (see further down the page).
    • Muppets Tonight was supposed to have a full-series release once rights-holder Disney finished releasing the original The Muppet Show on DVD, but since Disney gave up on that series with two seasons left to go, it remains in limbo. Now that The Muppet Show is on Disney+, there's a chance this might get rescued.
  • Aside from a few VHS releases in the 1990s, the 1991 remake of Land of the Lost (1974) 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.
  • The remaining three seasons of Life Goes On. The first season's release was also delayed due to music licensing, which led to the show's Real Song Theme Tune ("Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da" by The Beatles) to be replaced by an original track.
  • The TV show Lime Street (1985), starring Robert Wagner. Only five episodes were aired (according to That Other Wiki three more unaired episodes were aired on Lifetime in 1987), and competition with NBC's The Golden Girls and 227 seriously harmed its ratings and made it even harder to come by. Only one full episode can be found on YouTube. And don't expect it on DVD anytime soon as Wagner himself doesn't want it released (keep in mind this was not necessarily due to regretting anything about the show, but out of respect due to the premature death of teenage Samantha Smith, who played Wagner's daughter on the show, in a plane crash after completing several episodes, forcing the show's demise).
  • The US adaption of the British miniseries Metropolis, which stars Michael E. Rodgers as a Stalker with a Crush, fell into obscurity after it didn't get past the pilot stage and wasn't picked up by ABC. It is near-impossible to track down the pilot since there is no known home media release, TV airings, nor bootleg/promotional recordings of this pilot.
    • Heck, the same could be said with the actor's personal and TV commercial appearances.
  • While the bulk of the The Muppet Show was released on Disney+ in February 2021, there are still a few missing episodes and segments. It is presumed that these are almost entirely due to music rights issues that had previously affected several episodes included on the Season 1 DVD box set:
    • Season 5's Brooke Shields episode is absent, most likely because the ending of the "Alice in Wonderland" Show Within a Show hinges on a performance of "We're Off to See the Wizard". This previously appeared on one of the Turn of the Millennium Time-Life compilation DVDs uncut.
    • Season 5's Chris Langham episode is absent. Unlike other cut/missing episodes, this is presumed to be due to his arrest on child pornography charges. It's also the only completely missing episode, having never appeared on DVD.
    • The European feed of Disney+ is also absent the Spike Milligan (Season 3) and John Denver (Season 4) episodes; the former is included in the Season 3 DVD box set.
    • Cuts made to other episodes are listed here.
  • NYPD Blue following Season 9 (of 12). Thank you, Amazon Instant Video - in HD, no less.
    • Season 4 was released in 2006; Season 5 came out in 2014 (!). Season 10 is due out 2016. Looks like an aversion might finally be coming.
  • The docudrama miniseries The Path to 9/11 has never been rerun or released on home video since its initial airing due to intense controversy and political pressure over alleged misrepresentation of facts and partisan bias against the Clinton administration. As a result, the series can only be accessed through piracy, recorded copies of the TV airing, or bootleg releases.
  • The Practice only saw a release of the first two seasons 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). While Shout! Factory took over distribution rights for the series and bizarrely released a boxset for the final season in 2014 (likely to capitalize off the fame of Boston Legal, whose main character plays a pivotal role in Practice's final season), but nothing else.
  • Who's the Boss? has only had the first season released on DVD. Poor sales prevented the rest of the series from being released.

    BBC 
Programmes that aired on The BBC prior to 1978 are particularly prone to this. Prior to that year, it was BBC policy to regularly erase tapes. Untold volumes of programming have been lost due to this, and The BBC Archives have been scouring the Commonwealth and wider Earth for original recordings and copies that affiliates and licensees may have kept to complete archives of programmes that may have had content erased under this policy.

Due to the sheer volume, some programmes have higher priority than others. Doctor Who has had top priority from the beginning of the recovery efforts. Still, it is likely that some programmes will be lost forever.
  • Birds on the Wing still exists in the archives (mostly as monochrome telerecordings) but has never been seen in any form since its initial 1971 airings.
  • Blake's 7 is not available on Region 1 DVD (although it has been released in the UK).
  • David Bowie figures into two BBC productions that are stuck in video limbo.
    • The 1982 production of Bertolt Brecht's Baal featuring Bowie as the title character. It doesn't help that the EP tie-in album featuring fully-orchestrated versions of its songs was not released in full on CD until 2017, and then only in the box set A New Career in a New Town (1977-1982). At least the Performance Video made for "The Drowned Girl" can be found on the "Sight & Sound" edition (U.K. only) of The Best of David Bowie 1980/87 Greatest Hits Album and at YouTube's VEVO service.
    • 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). Significant swathes of footage were incorporated into the theatrical documentary Moonage Daydream in 2022, however.
  • The Brittas Empire: Not the show itself (which is easy enough to locate both online and on DVD), but the post-show series Get Fit with Brittas (A series of 10-minute shorts released after the show ended which aimed to educate the public on the importance of physical health) counts. It’s not included on the DVD box set of the show and very little evidence of it exists online, with the exception of one episode that resurfaced on YouTube in September 2021. You can watch it here.
  • Byker Grove has never been rerun since its 18-season run ended in 2006, nor has it ever been commercially released. You'll be lucky to find anything more than the odd episode or clip online, usually focusing on breakout actors Ant and Dec.
  • While the master tapes of Charley's Grants were lost, domestic soundtrack recordings for episodes 1, 3, and 4 have been recovered. However, they are unable to be heard by the public in any way, shape, or form.
  • 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. American fans can watch most of the episodes on YouTube.
  • Dick & Dom in da Bungalow; no 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 and a DVD release which contained highlights from Series 3 (broadcast 2003-04), but the latter 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).
  • Doctor Who:
    • One of the extras on the DVD release of "Revenge of the Cybermen" is a documentary which examines the lengths to which fans once went to get their hands on episodes which they had missed for one reason or another. This often involved paying large amounts of money for videotapes of the episodes in question, including ropey Nth generation copies.
    • Historically, the BBC have been happy for fans to openly distribute Tele-snap Reconstructions of missing episodes,note  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. In cases where the BBC did release their own competing reconstruction, the fans would stop distributing their version, but the BBC never reconstructed a wholly missing story for the VHS or DVD range. This is, presumably, no longer the case, as BBC Studios started commissioning these same fans to produce official reconstructions in the late 2010s for release on DVD and Blu-ray.
    • 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 1970s fan videorecordings of many Jon Pertwee-era episodes to produce color remasters.note 
    • The original 2003 DVD release of "The Two Doctors" featured the non-canon short A Fix with Sontarans, a crossover with the once-beloved children's program Jim'll Fix It, as a bonus feature; note the use of the term "once-beloved." A year after Jim'll Fix It host Jimmy Savile died, an ITV documentary outed him as one of the most prolific child predators in modern history, revealing how Savile was able to sexually assault a shockingly high amount of minors throughout his career. As a result, the BBC buried all of their material of Savile in their vaults, with A Fix with Sontarans being among the casualties: reprints "The Two Doctors" DVD from 2014 onward were quietly modified to remove the short, with the new version carrying the same barcode and using almost identical packaging. When Season 22 came to Blu-Ray in 2022, the short was re-edited to remove all evidence of Savile's involvement. Of course, pre-2012 pressings of the DVD can be found pre-owned, but you'll only know which version you're getting by checking the Special Features listing on the back of the case.
    • The thirtieth-anniversary charity Reunion Show "Dimensions In Time" has never been officially released on home video due to the high cost of licensing it from Children in Need. Not many fans are clamoring for it, as it's notoriously one of the most embarrassing things to ever happen in connection with the show, but it remains the most notable gap in the show's Home Video releases.
    • Likewise, the Affectionate Parody Doctor Who: The Curse of Fatal Death made it to VHS, complete with an exclusive 27-minute making of, but it never came out on DVD. It was available on iTunes in the UK, and remains on Comic Relief's YouTube channel, but this version is cropped from 4:3 to 16:9 and lacks the 'Making of' segment. To complicate things further, both releases are slightly re-edited from the original 4-part version in different ways.note 
    • The full episodes of Doctor Who Confidential are 30-45 minutes, but the DVD releases only contain 15 minute cutdowns due to disc space and music licensing constraints, and several out-of-series episodes are excluded entirely.note  Some of the Specials are exceptions to this, as they had standalone releases where disc space was less of an issue. Aditionaly, staff who worked on the series recieved full-length DVDs of each series, which are sometimes sold on to fans.
    • Totally Doctor Who fared even worse, with only the animated Infinite Quest serial and the two Behind the Scenes segments covering said animation being released on DVD. Again, staff did recieve their own copies.
  • Fist of Fun and This Morning With Richard Not Judy have mostly 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...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.
  • Only the first few series of Grange Hill have been released on DVD. A lot of people have uploaded their VHS copies of 1980s episodes to YouTube and the BBC doesn't seem to mind.
    • This is slowly being remedied by a company called Eureka Entertainment, who as of October 2020 have released series 1-10, with the show's two Christmas specials included on the series 7&8 and series 9&10 box sets respectively. There are only 21 more series to go...and shortly after the series 9&10 boxset came out, they announced there would be no further releases. Some of the early series were added to Britbox, but many of the 90s and 00s seasons are still hard to come by.
  • 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 (although most of them fall victim to being only available in other countries), 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.
  • The only surviving episode of It's Awfully Bad for Your Eyes, Darling..., "A New Lease", was never released on any home media, but can be viewed on YouTube here, albeit in black and white rather than in colour.
  • Many shows presented by Clive James have also suffered from this. Snippets of his talk shows do turn up on YouTube from time to time, but will likely not see reruns or a DVD release soon seeing that he often pokes fun at archive footage from other TV stations for which copyright needs to be paid. Another example of this is his 1993 ambitious documentary series Fame In The 20th Century, about celebrities in the 20th century. The show used a lot of archive footage and clips from films and TV series, again bringing copyright problems into the mix. There is a book about the series, though, and it is available online on James' personal website. On the Internet itself there is hardly any footage of this series to be found.
  • The BBC ran the forerunner of pretty much all reality shows back in the 1970s called Living In The Past where a bunch of historical re-enactors tried to live successfully in an Iron Age lifestyle. They have never released the 12 one hour episodes, nor issued any reasons for refusing to do so (although it is suspected that they didn't get the proper permissions to sell footage of some of the participants).
  • 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.
  • Subverted; while Only Fools and Horses is still the BBC's best-selling series of all time on both VHS and DVD, the Corporation's apparent desire to eradicate all traces of the original Ronnie Hazlehurst theme tune has led to the VHS releases of the first series (which, unlike the DVD, kept the original theme intact) becoming quite sought after by purist fans.
    • The same applies to the original version of "A Royal Flush," which is unavailable on any home video format (the VHS release had about a minute of footage removed, and the DVD release removed nearly ten minutes of footage and added a laugh track). However, the original cut still appears from time to time on the digital channels, so it's not too hard to find decent quality versions of it.
    • In a straight version, several mini-episodes such as Christmas Trees, Licensed To Drill and the Comic Relief Special have never been released on VHS or DVDs.
  • 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 aired on the cable channel Ovation before its Network Decay. It's never had a standalone home media release, nor has it been included on DVDs of related material such as the 25th anniversary Royal Albert Hall performance.
  • CBBC series Planet Ajay has no DVD releases, and for the longest time anybody wanting to watch the series after it originally aired was shit out of luck. As of 2018, however, the entire series can be found on YouTube, but the chances of a DVD release are practically non-existent for two reasons: Firstly, there were segments featuring the eponymous main character Ajay singing a popular song from another artist Once per Episode, so there are likely music rights problems involved; and secondly, the show has been long forgotten anyway, so it's unlikely to be considered profitable enough for a DVD release.
  • A Prince Among Men was never repeated or released in any format. The first series (and the first episode of the second series) have resurfaced on YouTube but the rest of the series remains missing.
  • All episodes of 1967-1968 series The Revenue Men, about a British government team investigating smuggling and people trafficking, are believed to be completely lost.
  • Spike Milligan's Q sketch series - Q5 (1969), Q6 (1975), Q7 (1977), Q8 (1978), Q9 (1980), and There's a Lot of It About (1982) - were cited as a huge influence on Monty Python's Flying Circus by the members of Monty Python themselves. Even though at most four of the 38 episodes are lost (all from Q5), the surviving episodes have never been released on DVD, and the most readily available fan copies are variable quality home recordings from Australian broadcasts from between 1979 and 1986 (at a time when Milligan was living and working in Australia).
  • While all of the original broadcast versions of Red Dwarf are readily available on both DVD and BluRay, the 1997 Red Dwarf Re-Mastered versions of Series I-III are much harder to find, restricted to a VHS release, and a DVD release entitled The Bodysnatcher Collection that quickly went out of print due to a warehouse fire.
    • Somewhat ironically, the BluRay release of the first eight seasons includes all of Bodysnatcher's bonus features, but not the Re-Mastered episodes or the associated "What's Different" text commentary.
  • 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 was Eric Idle's post-Monty Python show. It won't get a release because of music rights issues and because Idle considers it sub-standard. 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 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 Savile regarding his involvement with child abuse. This includes a substantial chunk of Top of the Pops's run and the entirety of Jim'll Fix It.
    • Speaking of Top of the Pops, BBC Four re-runs either skip or edit a number of other episodes:
      • Episodes hosted by Dave Lee Travis (1972-84), due to his groping conviction.
      • Episodes hosted by Mike Smith (1982-88), who was due to sign a licensing agreement to permit rebroadcasts when the Savile revelations happened and every news report used footage of the one episode they presented together. He then blocked all footage of any of his shows being used and passed away before the reruns got to his episodes, meaning the episodes are still blocked today.
      • Episodes hosted by Adrian Rose (1991-92) due to him not signing the licensing agreement allowing his episodes to be rebroadcast. As a result many performances including the infamous Nirvana performance cannot be shown in its original context.
      • Episodes featuring Jonathan King hosting a US charts segment are edited to remove him due to his pedophilia convictions. This occasionally also removes other performances as he sometimes linked back to a performance happening back in the UK.
      • Episodes featuring performances by convicted pedophile Gary Glitter (who later hosted the show Three times in The '90s) are edited to remove him (unless he appears during the UK chart rundown). Prior to the Savile revelations, his footage was left intact since it was felt that enough time had passed and he did not earn any royalties from the reruns.
      • Episodes featuring performances by Rolf Harris and R. Kelly are edited for similar reasons. It is assumed if episodes from the 2000's are re-run, then performances by Lostprophets will also be removed.
    • Subverted with an episode of Tweenies featuring a Jimmy Savile impersonator. This 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.
  • The Sketch Comedy Scotch and Wry has had a few compilation DVDs but the whole series has never been released in its entirety.
  • Due to music rights issues, Shoestring wasn't released on DVD in its entirety until 2017. By that point it hadn't been rerun since 2002 and was practically impossible to find.
  • The Sparticle Mystery, a show where a machine designed to detect parallel universes sends everyone 15 or older into a parallel universe, fits this trope to some extent. In the US, Series 1 and 2 were available on Netflix, but they were removed on May 1, 2018, and Series 3 never was there. It seems that this show is now not (legally) watchable anywhere outside of the UK, even on DVD or Blu-ray. Fortunately, all the episodes can be found floating around somewhere on the Internet.
  • Demon-hunting drama Strange, consisting of a pilot episode and a six-episode series, has never been released on DVD, and is only occasionally broadcast on other channels.
  • Trapped has not been seen much since it first aired on CBBC (2007-2010) so fans have to rely on episodes illegally posted online to see it again. It reran in October 2020 (presumably because a horror based game show is appropriate to air in the days leading up to Halloween).
  • Two Up, Two Down still exists in the archives but has never been seen in any form since its initial 1979 airings. Only one publicity photograph of Paul Nicholas and Su Pollard is visible online.
  • Good luck finding any of the (surviving) episodes of The Wednesday Play or Play for Today that weren't hugely popular/controversial like Cathy Come Home, Abigail's Party, or Brimstone and Treacle.
    • Abigail's Party at least was released on BBC Video in The '80s, and can be watched on YouTube.

    Belgian Radio Television 
  • Celluloid Rock, a documentary detailing the history of rock, has become unavailable for viewing. Thankfully its content has been put in books.
  • Hitring, a music program, has gone down in history as the very first winner of De HA! Van Humo, but due to the fact that it was so badly preserved only segments of episodes are available for viewing.

    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.
    • An episode, complete with commercials, is featured in a compilation movie from the Provincial Archives of Alberta, which is rated PG in Alberta.
  • A rather sad example would be Christmas Dreams, a 2009 Made-for-TV Movie about a girl who stumbles upon a magical store while searching for a gift for her sister, and ends up striking an Intergenerational Friendship with its owner. Ed Asner and Tom Cavanagh costar. All the while, the characters perform some of the more rarely sung Christmas songs like "Count Your Blessings Instead of Sheep" from White Christmas and "Maybe This Christmas" by Ron Sexsmith. While it's a worthy Genre Throwback to older Christmas films, it was only aired once, and was never seen on any channel, broadcast or cable, ever again. It's not available online or on any streaming services, and didn't even get a video release. The only video footage that can be found is a two-minute trailer created by Tricon Films, the movie's production company.note  A shame, since it's so recent that circulating the tapes shouldn't be a problem for it.
    • Then again, since the movie relies so much on obscure Christmas songs, music rights issues might be in play here - though like Kids Incorporated, they'd be easier to clear since all of the songs are sung by the characters and not the original artists. Why it still hasn't aired since is a mystery for the ages. Perhaps the world was not ready for a new lavish Christmas TV movie and decided to stick with more familiar stuff like Rudolph, Frosty and The Grinch for much of the foreseeable future...
  • 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. The entire run can be bought on Amazon Instant Video in the United States, or streamed free with ads on Tubi (which is the only way it can be seen in Canada!).
  • Four on the Floor, radio comedy troupe The Frantics' attempt to break into television, ran for a single series of 13 episodes in 1986; it has not been released on video, although episodes sometimes show up on YouTube.
  • 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.
  • The interstitials in CBC's children's programming blocks. Most of them aren't available anywhere. One particularly glaring example is Get Set For Life (2000-2003). It featured none other than Alyson Court as the main host, yet there's barely so much as a mention of it online, and YouTube didn't get any part of it until spring 2015. As of then, there's still very little footage circulating anywhere, so if you have a VHS converter, a YouTube account, and any part of the block recorded from its run, get at it! A considerably less hard-to-find official soundtrack album entitled Get Set To Sing with Alyson and Michael was made in 2002, which will pop up here and there around the thrift store/yard sale circuit and occasionally on sites like eBay.
  • The Listener. If you're an American, the series got cancelled halfway through the 1st season (of 5). In any case, the only DVD listing is for a region 2 release of Season 1, which won't even play in Canada (you know, the country of origin)! Even torrents are somewhat difficult to find.
  • While Made in Canada (aka The Industry) is still aired on some US public television stations and the Canadian channel Bite, 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.note  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 Trunk Treasures" collection of 4 random episodes (picked by two of the show's puppet co-hosts) and a smattering of episodes on YouTube (including some episodes, and even rehearsals, uploaded by Mark Kersey, a man who appeared on the show during its last ten years), the series isn't available to buy anywhere.
  • 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.
  • 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. This iteration of the show ran for six years from 1996 to 2002 (following a version of the original show called "Canadian Sesame Street" or "Sesame Street Canada", which ran from 1972 to 1996), and consisted of almost entirely Canadian content with unique Muppets created specifically for the show, including Basil the polar bear, the bilingual otter Louis, the cat Chaos, and the wheelchair-bound Anything Muppet 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. The reason it didn't catch on was that the real Sesame Street was still watchable in Canada since PBS appears on many Canadian cable services, and thus harmed the show's ratings. In addition, only one episode of the show was released to home video (the special Basil Hears A Noise on VHS). While clips of the show can be found on YouTube (and are further hard to find because the show title is so common), there are only two full episodes on said website so far.
  • 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.

    CBS 
  • Beakman's World was available to stream in its (almost) entirety on Netflix, but there is still no full DVD release forthcoming (though it has been released in Mexico and Brazil, where it's far more popular). Looks like we're stuck with the "Best of" set made after Season 1...
  • Bobby Vinton's Rock N Rollers, a 1978 hour-long '50s throwback TV special that also featured Stockard Channing, Penny Marshall, and Eric Estrada among others. All that exists online is a promo, which is in circulation solely because it aired during The Star Wars Holiday Special.
  • 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 Retool.
  • Close to Home (2005) 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.
    • As of 2021, the series is available to stream on Max and Amazon Prime Video.
  • 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, and it's been a while since it was rerun.
  • EZ Streets: 3 episodes were released on DVD in 2006. No word on the remaining 6.
  • Forever Knight's first season aired on CBS in their old 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 David Letterman's talk show. 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!"note 
  • Franks Place. This critically-acclaimed but low-rated dramedy was cancelled after one season on CBS. A DVD release is unlikely due to music-clearance issues.
  • 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.
  • Hack, a crime drama about a former cop who now works as a taxi driver, ran for two seasons from 2002-04. The first season has been released on Amazon Video on Demand, but no others seem to exist.
  • He And 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.
  • Jake and the Fatman: Despite a healthy 5-season run; the series only made it to Season 2 before DVD releases stalled due to poor sales. Additionally; unlike parent series Matlock and spinoff Diagnosis: Murder; this show has been little-seen in syndication since it ended in 1992.
  • Julie Andrews: One Step Into Spring was to receive a DVD release by April 2013, which was briefly moved to March 2014 (to compete with Muppets Most Wanted, as The Muppets are heavily featured in the special) before being shelved entirely (though it is still listed on sites like Amazon). Again, can be found on YouTube.
  • Like ABC, CBS ran a few specials featuring The Muppets that are currently in video limbo.
    • The Muppets Go Hollywood (1979): A variety special tie-in to The Muppet Movie, notable in that it was apparently never rerun,note  even in syndication packages of Muppet specials (i.e., the one Nickelodeon had in The '90s). However, it was released on VHS in 1988 by Films Incorporated; this release was distributed to educational outlets that year.
    • The Muppets: A Celebration of 30 Years (1986 Milestone Celebration special): Palace Video in the UK released a VHS sometime in the late '80s.
    • The Muppets Celebrate Jim Henson (1990): Created in the wake of Jim Henson's sudden death, this Heartwarming Tear Jerker of a special (which won the Writer's Guild of America award) is caught in video limbo due 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...
    • The Henson Company also teamed up with Paulist Productions to create a one-off Christmas Eve mass special in 2013. Dubbed A New York Christmas To Remember, it was presented at New York's St. Paul The Apostle church, and its major selling point was a nativity dramatization narrated by Regis Philbin and with puppets by Jim's then-recently deceased wife Jane. Like most Christmas Eve mass specials, it hasn't been rerun, and it was presented on YouTube briefly in 2014-15, but taken down by Paulist shortly after. It has, however, been circulated on at least one trading site (but we'd rather not say which one).
  • Murphy Brown. Thanks to music rights tangles (and low sales — buy the season, fans!), everything after Season 1 is stalled. That's 225 episodes sitting around collecting dust in a Warner Bros. vault. Even when it was in syndication, it was usually shoehorned into horrible middle-of-the-night time slots. 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. Things have improved a bit since Encore Classic started airing the show in December 2013, but since that's a premium channel you only get as part of a multi-channel package, you're paying more to watch the show than you should be, and thanks to the always fun Copy Protection thrown on premium channel recordings, forget about burning it to DVD. Reruns are also on Antenna TV, but it only airs late at night. Eighteen random episodes did appear on Paramount+ to promote the revival.
  • Looking for a home video release of the much-maligned The New Perry Mason? Too bad, because CBS wants nothing to do with that series. Also doesn't help that they don't even own the series despite owning the franchise; the show was produced by 20th Century Fox Television (now part of Disney), who had also provided production facilities to CBS for the original Perry Mason series. Unless you happen to own a recording or kinescope print of an episode or two, then you're screwed.
  • Night Heat, a Canadian police drama series (produced by CTV) that aired as part of CBS' "Crime Time After Prime Time" block of drama programming — it and Forever Knight (see above) were the first Canadian-produced dramas 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 it didn't receive an official DVD release until 2014.
  • Partners, because of low ratings and was met with negative reviews, CBS stopped airing it halfway through. The only place that the complete series was aired was in South Africa, which means that North America will probably not get a DVD release any time soon.
  • 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. Reruns of the syndicated versions of the episodes also air on the Get TV network, and Pluto TV has a channel dedicated to it as of September 2020 (also using the syndicated cut). However, most of the full, uncut original versions of episodes are still missing.
  • 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.
  • Riders In The Sky: A very brief 1991-1992 series, perhaps best described as Pee-wee's Playhouse IN THE WILD WEST!, and with the "Riders in the Sky" troupe as the leads. Clips do pop up on YouTube from time to time, enough to prove that the series existed, but almost no full episodes.
  • The Sentinel: Season 1 was released on DVD around 2005, none of the remaining three seasons have been released.
  • Silk Stalkings after Season 5, while the DVD releases of the first five seasons have gone out of print. In 2020 Shout! Factory acquired the rights to it and many other Steven J. Cannell Productions titles, and it's now available on the free-with-ads streaming services Stirr and Tubi.
  • Still Standing: Not a single season has been released on DVD, and as of writing this, is no longer syndicated (at least in America).
  • Switch (1975) has never been released on home video, and currently can only be watched online.
  • 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.
  • A Year at the Top ran for five episodes in 1977. It was never rerun or released on home media, and is now impossible to find, legally or otherwise.
  • Yes, Dear, Why this show isn't available in any form of media is anyone's guess. Hope you managed to record reruns on TBS, CMT or on Nick Jr.. through their NickMom block.

    Channel 4 
  • Channel 4'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 If with 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.
  • Brit Com Phoenix Nights has scarcely been repeated on television and has never been made available on any streaming service because creator and star Peter Kay doesn't want the show's memory being diluted through frequent re-runs. It was available on DVD though.
  • The original British version of Whose Line Is It Anyway? outside of the UK. There's only one set of Series 1-2 on both sides of the Atlantic. A&E, who released the Region 1 British box set, has let it run out of print and no longer acknowledges its existence. American viewers can watch British Whose Line on Hulu...the last two series, to be precise. There's no legal way to watch Seasons 3-8 in America anymore since Comedy Central (its original U.S. syndicator, though BBC America briefly reran episodes in the early 2000s) 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 
  • BattleBots. You'd think there'd be some DVD release of the series now that a Summer 2015 reboot has happened. 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. But every segment (all of them!) is available on their website. Even going back to 1999!
    • Segments from the Craig Kilborn era of The Daily Show are non-existent, either on the website or on DVD. It's likely that the network's distaste toward this run of the series has kept it from ever resurfacing (aside from brief flashbacks shown on Stewart-era episodes). Comedy Central's website doesn't even acknowledge Kilborn's stint at all. On an episode of The Late Show with Stephen Colbert where Colbert reunited with his fellow correspondents, Stewart noted Colbert was on the show before him with Kilborn. Colbert noted the tapes of that era are impossible to find and went on to say that there is no proof the Daily Show existed before Jon Stewart became the host. Whether or not Colbert was being humorous or serious about this position depends on how you interpret the moment.
  • The U.S. version of Don't Forget Your Toothbrush, a Disney-produced game show that aired on Comedy Central, hasn't fared much better. The episodes only ran once on the channel, was canceled after one season, and was never seen again afterward. Unlike Win Ben Stein's Money, GSN didn't bother picking up the rerun rights to this one. Your best bet is if you recorded this show when it originally aired.
  • Im With Busey. Episodes have routinely appeared online, and petitions have been started for Comedy Central to release the show on DVD. As of 2017, the show is still unavailable on home video.
  • Win Ben Stein's Money, one of the channel's most well-known programs, last aired in reruns on GSN in 2005. Beyond that, there are no home video releases, and full episodes only show up sparingly on YouTube via old Comedy Central or GSN recordings. It may not be much of a surprise since Disney, who produced and owns the program, has a history of sitting on their game show archives and doing nothing with them aside from the occasional reboot.

    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 an 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.
  • Junkyard Wars: Despite being the spiritual ancestor 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.
  • 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.
  • Justifiably, Sons of Guns, which was easily found on all services at the start of 2014, is no longer available at all in any form due to the show's main cast member committing a Role-Ending Misdemeanor involving the sexual assault of a child; Discovery pulled it as soon as they could, outside of a contractual obligation to Netflix that kept it there until the Discovery deal ended.
  • That's My Baby was only ever released on the VideoNow PVD format in black-and-white.

    Disney 
  • Walt Disney Home Video is notorious for not releasing complete-season sets of recent shows, at least in the US. And in some cases, the episodes released have been edited together. Hannah Montana in an example: to date, Disney has only released the first and fourth 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 its fans. It was added to Disney+ sometime in 2021 but still has no physical release.
  • Bunnytown only received one DVD release. The entire series is available on iTunes, but it's not on Disney+ yet.
  • Dumbo's Circus, a 1985-86 Spiritual Successor to Welcome to Pooh Corner with the same Chroma Key / Goofy Suit production style, had a whopping 115 episodes produced for its single season. Only 15 of these have been found, and thus the series is a huge example of lost media. If, by some chance, you have an episode of the show on a tape, DO NOT GET RID OF IT!
  • 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. Fortunately, the entire show is available on YouTube.
  • As soon as the final episode of Hannah Montana aired, they almost NEVER reran it again (in the US in the daytime on Disney Channel) for some unknown reason. One rumor was it was related to Billy Ray Cyrus. Previously you can watch the whole show if you have Netflix, and some episodes of the show can be seen at differing times on the channel's Disney Replay block, but you can watch the whole thing through the Disney NOW app, but of course you'll still need a participating Pay TV Provider account to access it. You can also find every episode via Disney Channel's on-demand service for cable TV, but the only catch is that Season 4 is listed as a separate series titled Hannah Montana: Forever, instead of alongside the other seasons. Ultimately, the entire show became available on Disney+ starting on launch day. It has remained available there ever since.
  • Honey, I Shrunk the Kids. While all three films have been released on DVD, the TV series never has, and now it's off the air again after the end of Hub Network.
  • I'm in the Band, one of the first Disney XD original programs, has suffered this ever since its 2011 cancellation. It has yet to receive a single DVD release, and Disney XD stopped rerunning it after 2016. Any episodes that have been uploaded to YouTube have had various edits made to them to avoid copyright claims. It even has yet to appear on Disney+. Currently, the only legal way to watch the series in its entirety is on iTunes.
  • 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. The whole series, except the original shorts, is available on iTunes, but it's not on Disney+ yet. Also, the DVD release features the shorts as bonus features, but it's now out of print.
  • Kids Incorporated on DVD would be a fan's nightmareevery 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 Warner Bros (MGM's current DVD distributor).
  • Lunch Box, a show that showcased several shorts from around the world based on books as well as the occasional Direct to Video production like Mother Goose Rock 'N Rhyme and Barney And The Backyard Gang. Like similar shows of the era that showcased foreign productions as part of a newer show, it would be very hard to get the rights to every individual short featured on there.
  • Sing Me A Story With Belle, a syndicated Disney series where Belle from Beauty and the Beast owns the bookshop in her village, had two VHS releases consisting of two episodes each. The 2011 DVD releases of Beauty and the Beast: The Enchanted Christmas and Belle's Magical World included one episode each. The show was never released in full on any format, and the aforementioned releases do not cover all 26 episodes of the show. If you still want to watch it, a quick YouTube search should give you most of the episodes.
  • Snow White Live at Radio City Music Hall hasn't been seen for years due to an ongoing pay dispute with one of the performers. To date, it's only been available on off-air recordings of the HBO and Disney Channel broadcasts and an out-of-print official VHS/Betamax release by Disney.
  • Under the Umbrella Tree was a Canadian series created for CBC (see above) in The '80s but is more well-known for being syndicated through Disney. Noreen Young used to sell independently released DVDs on her site, but it no longer exists.
  • Welcome to Pooh Corner, one of Disney Channel's first original programs, has had only a handful of VHS releases from the mid-1980s (all out of print and almost impossible to find, at least in good condition; one is the special that served as the Trope Namer for Too Smart for Strangers) and a Disney-licensed educational DVD with only two episodes available (one of which is the aforementioned Strangers special). Outside of that, it's been out of reruns for years and there are no plans for any sort of official DVD release or digital download, leaving people who want to find non-home-video-released episodes to check their old Disney Channel recordings.
  • The World According to Jeff Goldblum, the National Geographic Channel's most-hyped Disney+ launch title, nevertheless disappeared from Disney+ in May 2023, without any official physical or digital download release.
  • Most of the pre-2004 Disney Channel movies aren't available on DVD or Disney+. Some of them were on video, but those are long gone. One particular 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 or Disney+).
    • To celebrate the 100th Original Movie Adventures in Babysitting (2016), Disney Channel has put their films up on Amazon Video, iTunes, and Google Play. And yes, that includes Tiger Cruise and some movies tied in with shows that have yet to see their episodes become available to download. Their pre-1997 films (or Premiere Films) on the other hand will most likely not see the light of day.
  • Much like the above example: until 2014 almost nothing on Disney Channel was available through any means other than being aired on Disney Channel itself, including past series (meaning that many series only had a few select episodes available for viewing - on YouTube, hosted illegally through independent third parties and were frequently subjected to being taken down).note  In 2013 it started airing the "Disney Replay" block featuring older shows that hadn't been shown on the network in years but, again, the only legal means to access these episodes was either through directly watching this block or recording it on DVR. In 2014 Disney Channel finally started uploading complete series of select shows on Netflix, but that remains the only means to legally have random/on-demand access to shows outside directly from Disney Channel services. And of course you can watch even the old ones on the Disney NOW app, but a Pay TV Provider account is needed to watch them all. Things seem to be changing even more thanks to Disney+. Over 7,000 episodes of multiple Disney television shows were made available at launch.
  • Older Disney Channel/Disney Junior interstitials such as Pass the Plate, Disney 365/Playhouse Disney 123, Disney Junior Fun Facts, the Imagination Movers spin-off Where Is Warehouse Mouse?, and Choo-Choo Soul were removed from the air during the latter half of the 2010s. There is little footage of many of them having resurfaced online. Some, however (i.e. Choo-Choo Soul and Where Is Warehouse Mouse?), have had better luck than others with several of their shorts being available online.
    • Disney Junior Fun Facts was an interstitial series that taught facts about animals and territories, with some being made to promote Treasure Buddies. A couple of shorts were available on the Disney website at one point and still seemingly exist on there, but they no longer work.
    • Before programs on Disney Junior, there were interstitials of parents helping their kids. A few have resurfaced on websites like Internet Archive, along with most of the episodes of PB&J Otter.

    FOX 
  • 21 Jump Street was actually released in its entirety on DVD, but people (mostly, those who had watched its original run in the late '80s) felt cheated that it didn't feature the original soundtrack, and complained a lot about that online. The series was pretty iconic for featuring lots of music by artists then-and-still-now famous, or of artists that later became famous; apparently because getting Copyright to put this on DVD was deemed too expensive to the producers, this was all replaced by muzak and music by little-known artists. note 
  • America's Most Wanted, given its status as a reality legal program that dates itself pretty quickly, never got any reruns despite having been one of Fox's longest-running shows. The only way to see it is if you were lucky to have taped it off television. The later revival on Lifetime isn't any wiser.
  • Bakersfield P.D. aired on FOX for one season and despite being re-aired on Trio under "Brilliant But Canceled" has never been released on DVD. Several episodes were uploaded to YouTube but all 17 episodes are virtually impossible to find.
  • The Bernie Mac Show beyond Season 1, likely due to music clearance issues. The series is currently airing on Bounce TV.
  • Brimstone. It was Screwed by the Network, but then again, it's FOX, after all.
  • The Chevy Chase Show, one of Fox's most infamous late-night talk show failures, has never seen the light of day since its original broadcast. Some, including Chase himself, prefer to keep it this way.
    • Ditto for Fox's other talk show programs, including the network's launch program The Late Show with Joan Rivers, Talkshow with Spike Ferensten and The Wanda Sykes Show. Unlike the latter two programs and The Chevy Chase Show (all three of which are owned by Disney now), Fox still owns The Late Show, and Fox has made clear that they want to keep that show buried in obscurity.
  • Comic Strip Live, another late-night program Fox has never rerun (though it was the most successful late-night show Fox has aired thus far, running for 4 seasons). As a stand-up comedy show, it wasn't even aired in some markets given the show's raunchy content. Unless you were lucky to have taped it, don't bother looking elsewhere.
    • The similar prime-time show The Sunday Comics (which ran two half-seasons in 1991 with reruns in early '92) also falls under this trope.
  • 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.
  • The Fox Cubhouse in its entirety is like this, due to the multiple copyrights behind the shows that were a part of the show. The only one of the shows which ever got a complete release in North America was The Animal Show With Stinky and Jake. The other shows have been released in one way or another, but for U.S. fans, it's a problem:
    • Johnson and Friends: Australia got the whole series on DVD, but the United States didn't have the same luck. An official Johnson and Friends YouTube channel used to exist that had all of the episodes uploaded, but the channel went under in 2018 for unknown reasons.
    • Magic Adventures of Mumfie: See the Western Animation page for details.
    • Rimbas Island: There are only two VHS tapes in existence featuring this show, which was part of the already-rare-itself Bright Beginnings collection from Buena Vista Home Video and DIC Toon-Time Video. The other episodes of the show are impossible to find.
  • It's probably for the best given the channel's infamous history and terrible programming, but most of Fox Reality Channel's original programming is no longer in circulation since the network got replaced by Nat Geo Wild in 2010, and its content only continues to circulate via bootlegs. Only Solitary and Househusbands of Hollywood are fortunate enough to get a digital release, and even then the latter is missing the last two seasons. Amazon Prime did offer most of the channel's original shows to purchase for some time....until Disney purchased 21st Century Fox in March 2019 and took all of Fox Reality's programs down with it (yes, Disney owns the Fox Reality library now), forcing the curious to go back to bootlegs.
  • 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 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 to the atmosphere of the show.
  • 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.
  • K-Ville, a short but relatively well-received series, has still not had any kind of DVD release, despite the show ending in late 2007. Fortunately, the episodes can be found on Hulu and Xfinity- for free.
  • The Lone Gunmen is a spinoff of the still beloved series The X-Files but aside from one, long out of print DVD release, it's not available legally in any format, not even for rent on Amazon. There are illegal uploads on YouTube that kind of fit in with the anti-authority vibe of the show...but we can't sanction that.
  • Much like Saturday Night Live, MADtv also has DVD release issues, though not because of creator distaste 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. As of 2020, HBO Max has all 14 seasons of MADtv (the short-lived revival season that aired on The CW isn't there, though Hulu once streamed it), though a lot of episodes are skipped over due to licensing and copyright issues involving the celebrity cameos and musical guests.
  • 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. However, the show is available on Hulu (every episode from seasons one to seven is present and accounted for and the music that would have been removed from a DVD release is there), and DVDs for all 7 seasons (with the music intact) were later released in the U.K. and Australia.
  • 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.
    • There's a good reason for this: the show was a horribly done Macekre, to the point where the Japanese creator of the franchise is said to have sworn to never let it be licensed in America again.
  • Models Inc., an obscure 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 Mystic Knights of Tir Na Nóg only ever had one home video release, a long out-of-print VHS with the series premiere as a feature-length movie, and has never been released on DVD...except in, of all places, Germany.
  • The New Addams Family, aired on Fox Family, has never been released on DVD, or even VHS, in North America, as the rights are now tied up with Disney (owner of co-producer Saban's library), Corus Entertainment, and the Charles Addams estate. The only DVD release was from the UK as a 2-disc set containing the first eight episodes. Its pilot film, Addams Family Reunion, hasn't fared much better, having only been released on VHS, which is now out-of-print and fairly pricey on eBay.
  • The New Adventures of Beans Baxter. As 20th Century Fox Television didn't produce it despite it being an in-house Fox program, the rights are still legally with Fox and not Disney. That being said, the show never got into syndication and has never been released in any other medium. Gotta keep those tapes rolling...
  • The 1990s hip-hop cop drama New York Undercover has never been released on DVD 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, 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.
    • As of 2023, the series is streaming on Peacock and Prime Video.
  • Profit was an example of this for a long time until Anchor Bay released all twelve episodes (eight aired; four unaired) on DVD. It got to the point where David Greenwald, the series creator, circulated the tapes himself with DVD sets that he himself made!
  • 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 $treet 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, Sony never saw fit to release the series on DVD or sell rerun rights to another channel.
  • 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 at one point, and a YouTube user was lucky to capture that.
  • As is the norm with soap operas, Fox's ill-fated venture into the medium, Tribes, has yet to see any DVD release. What's worse, it was never rerun, leaving fans to have to resort to their old recordings.
  • The War at Home surprisingly got a DVD release of Season 1, but not 2, which is currently only available online. Notably, season 1 got far less positive reviews than the next one, which was praised for its tackling of homosexuality.
  • Werewolf (1987) 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.
  • Woops, a post-apocalyptic sitcom from 1992. Only the pilot and last episode circulate online — good news for the latter, as it was notorious enough to warrant placement in What Were They Thinking? The 100 Dumbest Events in Television History.

    Game Show Network (GSN) 
  • Only one episode of The All New 3's a Crowd (a 1999 Alan Thicke-hosted reboot of the notorious 1979 game show 3's a Crowd) seems to circulate.
  • Burt Luddin's Love Buffet (1999), Starface (2006), Think Like a Cat (2008), and Hidden Agenda (2010) seem to be completely unaccounted for on the Internet outside a few scattered clips.
  • The same is true of reality show Carnie Wilson: Unstapled (2010), which is absent from the Internet except for a few clips. Fellow GSN reality show Chuck Woolery: Naturally Stoned (2003) was posted in full in mid-2022.
  • The phone-in game shows from the late 1990s, such as Decades, Trivia Track, When Did That Happen, and Prime Games, are long gone due to having been broadcast live. Throut and Neck, another short-lived interactive phone-in show, is somewhat more accounted for. Surprisingly the pilot episode, which was broadcast live and never re-aired due to a myriad of technical difficulties, is among the surviving clips.
  • Extreme Gong, the Totally Radical 1998 reboot of The Gong Show, has only a few short clips and one episode with terrible sound quality. (Given the show's toxic reputation among the fanbase, this is probably for the better.)
  • Faux Pause, an MSTing of obscure game shows, lasted for 22 episodes in 1998. Roughly eight episodes circulate, and co-host Mary Gallagher has uploaded a few clips as well.
  • Only one episode of How Much Is Enough? is online, albeit with bad watermarking. Given that it only aired for a short time in 2008, was never rerun, and had one of the most bare-bones premises on the planet, it's hard not to see why this one doesn't see much circulation.
  • While the Chuck Woolery era of Lingo (2002-07) was a longtime staple of the network, the first season taped in the Netherlands was by far the least-rerun and has since become the hardest to find. The last time Woolery Lingo aired on GSN was October of 2016, and GSN now seems to go out of their way to ignore its existence. By contrast, GSN gives the 2011 reboot with Bill Engvall lots of love, despite its vastly inferior reputation with the community. All 40 Engvall episodes are available on Tubi, and GSN posted one of those to YouTube during the Wordle craze of early 2022.
  • National Lampoon's Funny Money was a stand-up comedy-based game show that aired in 2003. Other than a few selected performances from the now mostly-obscure comedians who appeared on it, not many full episodes are in circulation.

    HBO 
  • The American Comic Relief telethons, which each ran four hours originally, were never released to home video uncut; the VHS releases dropped such segments as interstitials profiling the homeless and trimmed some of the comedians' sets. As well, only the edited version of the 2006 show was released on DVD (alongside a Clip Show of the previous editions).
  • Encyclopedia was a collaboration between HBO and Sesame Workshop that covered a different letter of the alphabet in every episode, with up to twelve different segments of skits or songs covering encyclopedia topics. Although it earned positive reviews from critics and won some Emmys, it hasn’t been re-released or re-aired since the 1990s. Clips and episodes of the show are rather scarce online, and although the show supposedly had all its episodes released on VHS, only the “B” episode has ever been able to be found online for purchase alongside a tie-in puzzle book. It doesn’t help that not only is the show’s title rather hard to Google, it shares a similar name to another HBO series from around that time, Encyclopedia Brown.
  • Most episodes of the Encyclopedia Brown series saw release on VHS, except for "The Case of the Incredible Culpepper". You can likely find them at your local library, but other than those tapes, they haven’t been re-released or re-aired in any form either.
  • The Hitchhiker, a three-season anthology featuring a mysterious wanderer who tells stories about humanity's dark side, never had a complete series release, despite being marketed as such. A three-volume set of various episodes from throughout the show's run were released by HBO Home Video in 2004 but were later discontinued, as was a Canadian release of seasons 1 and 3 in 2004. A Hitchhiker: The Complete Collection was released by Alliance Entertainment in 2011, but is not actually "complete" - it only has 30 episodes out of 85. Part of the reason why the full series has never been released is a rights dispute over the second season.
  • Kindergarten was only ever released on four out-of-print (and extremely hard to find) VHS tapes. It has yet to see a DVD release. It is on HBO Max, however.
  • The 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) and airs occasionally on HBO Family, HBO has limited interest in releasing it.
  • HBO used to broadcast recordings of live theater productions, as did many other early pay-cable services. With the apparent exception of a Sherlock Holmes play (airs occasionally on premium cable channels) and the 1982 Camelot revival starring Richard Harris (saw a DVD release) these have all vanished into obscurity.

    ITV 
  • Partridge Films' Animal Alphabet, or at least the Italian dub. Probably released anywhere from 1998-2002, no DVD or VHS of the dub are known to still exist. Until an email was received revealing its identity, it was simply referred to as 'the 6th dub', as the only dubs mentioned online were English, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese, adding up to only 5 dubs. There is a possibility, however, that it might still exist in the archives of ITV somewhere, as in the 1990s they received the rights to Partridge Films and its creations.
  • Art Attack. Yeah, the arts and crafts show. The show ran through more than a decade and was eventually cancelled in 2007. It was "revived" in the early 2010s, yet there's not much left, not even on 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.
  • While all of the aired episodes of Coppers End survive in the archives in some form, they haven't been re-aired since 1971 or released on DVD. One episode was uploaded to YouTube in June 2023, but the channel where it was uploaded has since been terminated, with the episode in question gone once more.
  • While there exist a few DVD releases of Harry Hill's TV Burp, they have been limited to compilations of the show's best bits, with full releases seemingly impossible due to the publishing rights associated with the other programs' clips. These same issues prevented the show from being repeated on ITV's catch-up website. Still, individual sketches and entire episodes are easy to find on YouTube.
  • Inside George Webley: All of Series 2 from 1970 survives but isn't able to be viewed by the public in any way, shape, or form. A few publicity stills from the two series are all that are available to be seen by the public.
  • Knights of God, a sci-fi series produced by TVS note  in the late '80s in which a future Britain has been taken over by a fascist religious order (the Knights of God of the title) following a civil war, isn't available officially on DVD, and seemingly not on VHS either. Given TVS' archive seems to be mired in rights issues, it probably won't be. There is a Novelization however, a few copies of which you might find available on Amazon.
  • Series 5-7 of Law & Order: UK have only been released on DVD in the UK. Anyone in the US who wants to see them will have to either purchase a universal DVD player or scour the internet (fortunately the episodes are available in this format). Anyone wanting to see Series 8 will have to scour the internet for it too, as not only has it not yet been released on DVD, it hasn't even been aired on BBC America as yet.
  • Life-Force was shown once by ITV during 2000... and then never again, likely due to the controversy it courted and lower than expected viewership ratings following its scheduling issues, despite critical acclaim. It then only appears to have been repeated during the 2000s in Australia by the ABC. Naturally, no home media releases exist, and the series remains exceedingly hard to find even in an unofficial capacity.
  • Although all episodes of On the House exist in the ITV archives, the series has never been officially released in any form and is unable to be found online outside of a two-minute clip from the Series 2 episode, "Take Me to Your Leader".
  • 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 want all 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 '90s, was a VHS-only release between 1993-1995, and then aired on television from 1996-2002, before returning on ITV4 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.
  • While the master tapes for all six episodes of Shine a Light were wiped, domestic audio recordings of "The Great Relief" and "Two's a Crowd" have been recovered, albeit unable to be listened to by the public.

    MTV 
  • The 2gether TV series has yet to see a DVD release, while the DVD for the original TV movie is out of print and runs for very high prices on secondhand sites.
  • On an episode of Headbanger's Ball, the host read on air a letter from a fan asking if he could buy a copy of a recent episode, in which a particular musician had been an in-studio guest. The host explained that MTV didn't sell copies of previous episodes, and directed the letter writer to investigate the classified ads section of various Heavy Metal-themed magazines. The host was openly explaining to the viewer that there was a significant videotape-trading underground, and implicitly endorsed making use of such resources.
  • 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 to release 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 an 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.
  • Season 6 of Next is pretty readily available, but the first five are nearly impossible to track down.
  • 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, it became a rerun favorite on cable; nowadays, Pluto TV streams select episodes on demand.
  • The original broadcast version of 1986's Made-for-TV Movie Babes in Toyland. As originally aired it was 140 minutes long without commercials, but it was cut to 94 minutes for a European theatrical release and it's that version that was released to home video and syndication.
  • The Bold Ones - an NBC Wheel Program that aired from 1969-73, never released on DVD. As of November 2013, digital subchannel Cozi TV airs episodes Sundays at 7 p.m. Eastern.
  • The Cosby Show: Though it's been released on DVD and episodes can be found within five seconds on search engines like Google, cable networks like TVLand, Bounce, BET and Centric began pulling televised reruns of the groundbreaking Bill Cosby-starring sitcom in the wake of growing allegations of sexual assault against women. The cancellation order also affected Cosby's other TV shows such as Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids and Little Bill.
    • As of this writing, the entire run of The Cosby Show is still available for streaming on Amazon Prime, as are ‘’The Bill Cosby Show’’ and Cosby. His Nick Jr. series Little Bill is still available, but only on a pay-per-episode basis on Vudu. As of Dec 2018, the show has resumed airing on TV One.
  • The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd: A well-regarded dramedy that aired on NBC for one season (1987-88), was rescued by Lifetime when NBC cancelled it, and ran until 1991. It hasn't been syndicated since 2002 and has never been released on DVD or even VHS. Even nigh impossible to find online.
  • Empty Nest was, in its day, quite popular (finishing in the Top 10 for its first three seasons, and running for seven seasons total) but has never received a DVD release of any kind, and can't be found on any streaming service, even the free, ad-supported ones. It has also been hard to find in syndication since it was cancelled in 1995, though it enjoyed a three-year run on Laff from 2015 to 2018 (most clips of the series which can be found today are from this run). This is in complete contrast with its parent series, The Golden Girls, which has enjoyed an interrupted run in syndication since going off the air, and whose complete series is available on DVD and streaming.
  • 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.
  • Fame, the TV adaptation of the 1980 film, ran on NBC for two seasons (1982-83) and was Un-Cancelled in First-Run Syndication, running until 1987. Only the two seasons that ran on NBC received season set releases, with the syndicated seasons still in limbo to this day. The whole show ran on the Canadian channel MuchMoreMusic from around the Turn of the Millennium until it underwent Network Decay around 2008 or 2009 (it's since gone by the name M3); as such, most online copies of the unreleased episodes have the network logo in the lower right corner. It was last seen in 2011 when Ovation reran it in the U.S.
  • Fatal Vision, the miniseries adaption of the Joe McGinnis book about the Jeffrey MacDonald murder case, has yet to receive any kind of home media or streaming release. The only way to watch it are Youtube uploads of recordings from when it first aired in 1984.
  • Fight Back! with David Horowitz is unavailable on streaming services, DVD, or commercial VHS, and only a handful of short YouTube clips exist, so home VHS tape trading is the only way to obtain full episodes.
  • The Hogan Family isn't on DVD, iTunes or Netflix, and is quite hard to find on YouTube (only two-thirds of a full episode and about 2 random clips are there as of this writing), with the one YT channel that hosted all the episodes having them all taken down. Torrents of the show are even scarcer - good luck trying to find the House Fire Wham Episode "Burned Out" (or any episode guest starring Willard Scott, for that matter) even with torrents - and some don't even have peers to connect with in uTorrent. ABC Family and Canadian network CTS (since renamed Yes TV) have also aired the show during the 2000s, so you'll have to hold on to your recordings from those networks. That said, at least one user on the Sitcoms Online forum might have it as long as you have stuff to trade.
    • According to That Other Wiki, the only episode to get a video release was "Bad Timing" (the one where the older son, played by Jason Bateman, and his Girl of the Week contemplate having sexnote ), released "especially for teachers and health educators to use as a tool to promote safe sex"; nowadays even that can't be found on eBay.
  • Almost every episode of Heroes Volumes 1-3 was accompanied an episode of the documnentary series Heroes Unmasked when it aired on BBC Two, totalling 44 15-minute episodes.note  Being a BBC-produced tie-in to an NBC series, it was understandably not released on DVD nor re-aired outside of the series' initial BBC run. It wasn't even brought to BBC iPlayer when the service hosted Heroes in 2020. Despite this, it apparently did air in some international markets.
  • The short-lived Country Music variety show Hot Country Nights lasted for only 12 episodes from November 1991 to March 1992 and does not appear to have ever been rerun. Only one full episode and clips of a few scattered individual performances seem to circulate on YouTube.
  • Hull High, a musical high school drama that predates High School Musical and Glee and features several future Roundhouse actors, only aired for a while in 1990, and while some episodes/clips can be found on YouTube, they're always foreign dubs. Good thing the songs were left in English.
  • 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. However, the whole show can be found online in varying sources - while only the first two episodes, the "Secrets of the Muppets" special (which premiered on Nickelodeon in 1992, three years after the show was cancelled) and both pilots are on YouTube as of this writing, the rest of the show was available on Vimeo for a spell and, in April 2015, all of the episodes (save for the segments copyrighted by the Jim Henson Company) were found on the now-terminated Henson Rarities YouTube channel. The uncut episodes can also be obtained through torrents.
    • Sesame Street: 20 And Still Counting was originally intended as a Poorly Disguised Pilot for The Jim Henson Hour, but was packaged as a standalone special and aired one week before Hour debuted. It was released on DVD twice, in 2010 by Lionsgatenote  and in 2013 by Gaiam Vivendi Entertainment.
  • 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.
    • The original DVD box sets of Friends included extended cuts of several episodes which added in extra jokes and sometimes entire scenes that had been cut for broadcast. Technical issues meant these cuts couldn't be upscaled to HD, so while the entire show is available via Blu-ray and streaming it's only the original broadcast versions of the episodes.
  • 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.
  • LAX, a short-lived drama about the employees at Los Angeles International Airport. Perhaps understandable, considering the show's terrible ratings during its run.
  • Midnight Caller still hasn't been released on DVD, and tapes can sell for over a hundred dollars. Thankfully most of the episodes can be found online.
  • Both seasons of The Monkees have seen release on DVD, thankfully averting this. However, these episodes only have the "original" songs as opposed to those when it was seen in summer or Saturday morning reruns, so the chances of finding those versions is rather slim.
  • The Muppets at Walt Disney World was a 1990 special that was notable as Jim Henson's final Muppet project to premiere in his lifetime, as he died just ten days after it aired. One thing that might be holding this one up is the fact that it was created to celebrate the Muppets becoming part of the Walt Disney Company, and Henson's death threw the whole business into disarray, so it's seen as Harsher in Hindsight now. However, this special can be found on YouTube very easily.
  • The Name of the Game. Season 1 of the late 60's anthology series with Gene Barry, Tony Franciosa, and Robert Stack had been slated for an August 2014 release date, but that was postponed indefinitely. There is still no word on when this series will be released.
  • The Nutt House: A short-lived failed sitcom; NBC only aired five of the ten episodes, although the BBC aired all ten. Only available via episodes recorded on VHS and uploaded to YouTube or similar, and some important parts of episodes are missing. (For example, the last few minutes of "Accidental Groom", meaning it's not clear just how Reginald gets out of the Citizenship Marriage to his Abhorrent Admirer.)
  • The Playboy Club: NBC and 20th Century Fox cancelled the series after three episodes, leaving four episodes unaired. The only way to seek out the show (Bile Fascination or not) would be through torrents of ripped episodes.
  • 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, saw the light of day in 2009, with the music rights sorted out for all episodes to be uncut. However, the boxsets stalled at Season Five (1979-80 and the last featuring the remnants of the "Not Ready for Primetime" players plus Harry Shearer before he did voicework on The Simpsons). The next couple of seasons are usually considered best left unreleased (particularly Season Six, often cited as SNL's worst season ever). In terms of streaming availability, Peacock Plus offers the show's entire run, but many post-Season 5 episodes have significant cuts for musical guests whose rights couldn't be cleared and/or sketches that went over badly (the Steven Seagal episode, for instance, drops most of the skits he prominently featured in).
    • While full episodes may be becoming impossible to get (unless you actually stay up on a Saturday night to record it or use torrents), websites like NBC.com and Yahoo Video do have collections of the best sketches from SNL's near-40 years on the air.
    • Sketches can be removed even after a day, especially if they have copyrighted music. The Lady Gaga hosted episode of 2013 had several sketches (including her opening monologue and the bittersweet sketch where Lady Gaga appears as an old woman named Mrs. Germanottanote  who tries to convince her landlord that she used to be known for her songs "Poker Face" and "Bad Romance" and for her bizarre costumes and stage shows) removed when the episode was uploaded to Hulu the next day.
    • Then there's plain sketch removals; after the glass repair company Safelite became very unhappy about a parody commercial in the 2017 Gal Gadot episode that portrayed a glass installer as a predator breaking a customer's windshield on purpose to creep on her daughter (and just two days after the Harvey Weinstein story broke and started the "Me Too" movement), NBC thought wiser and junked the sketch entirely from any further dissemination on YouTube, their site and any place they allow episodes to replay, replacing it with a dress rehearsal piece. If that happens, better hope you kept the recording for the night to watch a sketch you enjoyed but everyone else found wanting.
    • 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.
    • Sinéad O'Connor's performance in the October 3, 1992 episode, where she infamously ripped up a photograph of Pope John Paul II, shouting "Fight the real enemy!" in protest of the Catholic Church's child abuse (which was mostly unknown at the time), has never reaired. The reruns use the dress rehearsal version of the performance, where she simply held up a photo of an impoverished child, with clips from her on-air performance only ever shown in segments on SNL's most controversial moments.
    • When Martin Lawrence hosted the February 19, 1994 episode, his opening monologue veered into a graphic talk about women's hygiene. In reruns, that section of the monologue is omitted, with a voiceover explaining why it can't be re-aired.
  • St. Elsewhere: Only Season 1 on DVD, although this is another one that UK folks can enjoy via Channel 4 on Demand. Every single season is also available on Hulu for US residents.
  • Seasons 3-6 of Third Watch, largely due to music copyright issues.
  • 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 Torkelsons, later retooled as "Almost Home": both lasted only one season, consisting of 33 episodes together, in 1991-1993. It has a small but dedicated fanbase who kept circulating petitions to get it released on DVD, to no avail. By the early '00s, as people were getting DVD burners and technology to convert VHSs to digital, DVDs (bootleg, of course) were being sold by individuals on eBay and sometimes given away for free via fan forums. Since 2008, the entire series is on YouTube (in pretty bad video quality unfortunately, it being a rip of a 15-year-old VHS); the producers have never bothered to petition a Copyright claim about this.
  • 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 
  • The Adventures of Pete & Pete: While the first two seasons were released on DVD, season 3's was cancelled. It was not because of clearance issues, but because Paramount, Nickelodeon's video distributor had bought out DreamWorks. Likewise, Paramount pulled it from the schedule. Years later, Chris Viscardi later said that the DVDs were finished, and were stored in a warehouse. So if someone happens to go inside said warehouse and steal the DVDs from it, and possibly sell it on eBay, it's possible.
  • Any live-action production from the Cy Schneider or early Geraldine Laybourne years of Nickelodeon such as the biography series Against The Odds (hosted by Bill Bixby), the behind-the-scenes movie production series Stand By, Lights, Camera, Action! (hosted by Leonard Nimoy), and Out of Control — a sort of SCTV for kids headed up by Dave Coulier years before Full House — seem to have been largely forgotten.
    • Some of the more notorious examples of early Nickelodeon lost media include Reggie Jackson's World of Sports and Vic's Vacant Lot, two early sports and fitness-themed shows with little footage extant. It wouldn't be until 2022 that 1 full episode of Vic's Vacant Lot was found along with the last 2 minutes of an episode of Reggie Jackson's World of Sports.
    • Nickel Flicks is another example. It was the first show to be created after Nickelodeon launched and also the first show to be cancelled on the network. It showed serials from the 1920s–40s, in addition to early comic one-reelers and silent short films. There were host segments to talk about the serials by John Moschitta, who later on became famous as the "World's Fastest Talker" in FedEx commercials and was his first onscreen appearance. While we do know and have the serials, the host segments have never been released as the original masters were stolen in a storage unit.
  • All That has yet to see any DVD 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 NickRewind airings). Several episodes from Seasons 2-4 are available on iTunes, most of them with the musical guests removed. However, three episodes have them intact in a separate "All That: Retro Essentials" volume.
    • Neither The '90s Are All That nor its successors The Splat or NickRewind have aired any episodes from the first season, making them very hard to come by and only circulating in VHS recordings of their original broadcasts or 1990s reruns (save for the second episode, which aired on Nick in 2005 to commemorate the series' 10th anniversary).
    • The pilot episode in particular hadn't surfaced online until the early 2010s.
    • The series has since been added to the NickSplat VRV streaming service and the series has an official YouTube channel that posts clips from the show.
  • Allegra's Window has only six long out-of-print VHS tapes that each last no more than 30 minutes and are mostly expensive. Fortunately, the first season is available on iTunes and Prime Video, and the series was added to Paramount+ in 2021... only to be removed two years later, leaving the second season stuck in this trope.
  • 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. Qubo (one of Ion's spinoff cable channels) reran it in 2014.
  • 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 and Coliseum (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. Eventually, Nickelodeon and Amazon conspired to release a pair of 3-disc MOD sets. It was later added to the NickSplat streaming service on VRV.
  • Attack of the Giant Vulture, a segment from Nickelodeon's Short Films by Short People was heavily sought after for years, until someone finally found it a few years ago.
  • Beyond Belief!, an obscure series about odd and paranormal phenomena (no relation to the later Fox show of the same) has not been seen since 1994 and no footage of it existed online whatsoever until most of an episode was uploaded in January 2020.
  • Bing: The Sound of Something New was a show about current entertainment trends hosted by David Sidoni which ran for 13 weeks in the winter and spring of 1995. Due to the timely nature of the episodes, they were given one repeat and never seen again. All that survives of this show online is a lone 30-second promo.
  • Although Blue's Clues has received a digital release, there are two things that have yet to be re-released.
    • Blue's Big Musical: The film was put onto iTunes in 2012, but has since been removed. The film is not available on any digital service; Nickelodeon doesn't seem to be interested in releasing it again. The entire film is on YouTube.
    • Although Blue's Room did receive eight DVD releases, these was never a complete release on DVD. The show was also not available on digital services for many years unlike the original. The show is currently available on Paramount+, but with a few episodes missing.
  • BrainSurge never had a DVD release, and Nickelodeon stopped airing reruns. Episodes can be found on most internet sites, but good luck finding the whole series, as Family Brainsurge barely has any episodes or clips that are in good quality, and the series is held back by rights issues between all production companies involved, who are fighting over distribution rights of the series.
  • The Brothers García had no home media release at all. Several recordings of the series from reruns on The N circulate but are hard to find. In 2013, one YouTube user uploaded recordings of every episode... with Greek subtitles. One of the co-creators of the series posted a comment on the upload of the first episode stating that he has been trying for years to get Nickelodeon to sell him back the rights for the series so that he could release it digitally and on DVD, but to no avail. Reruns on NickRewind are unlikely as several episodes feature celebrity guest stars and in some cases, copyrighted music, such as one episode where George fantasizes about spending the day with Shaggy (as himself) with a montage set to his music.
  • Caitlin's Way originally aired on Nickelodeon from 2000-2002, and repeats aired on TeenNick from 2003-2009. Despite its longevity, it never had an official release on DVD or VHS. Dedicated fans have uploaded most of the episodes on YouTube.
  • Cappelli and Company, a 1993 local show from WTAE in Pittsburgh which got carriage on Nick Jr. for two years, is hard to find, stopped airing reruns after 2003 in Pittsburgh, and it hasn't aired outside of the U.S.. Unless you know someone who had a Hearst-owned station where they lived in the 1990s and taped the show off there or Nick Jr. (or have access to the WTAE tape archive), you might be out of luck.
  • Only the first season of Clarissa Explains It All was ever released on DVD, and only a select few episodes from the other seasons are available from other sources. A series of Sony Wonder tapes with themes (i.e. "Clarissa Explains Dating") were released in the 90s, and most have been uploaded to YouTube. Although it was one of the inaugural shows to kick off NickRewind, it only ran for 2 months in 2011, and has made sporadic appearances since then. The complete first four seasons and a few episodes of the fifth season can be found on Paramount+.
  • Cousin Skeeter hasn't been much since its end in 2001, and it is not available though Paramount+. Most of the series has resurfaced on the internet, but it doesn't cover the full run.
  • CryBaby 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 it that 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. As of 2012, the series began airing again on Antenna TV.
  • Eureeka's Castle only got three VHS releases that you'll have to pay a ton of money for, and there are only a handful of episodes on YouTube. Not helping matters is that, like Pinwheel, the show often used short films made by other companies.
  • After the demise of Nick GaS, Nickelodeon's Game Show library has become only sporadically available, mostly on YouTube.
    • Your best bet to watch most of the series from the late 1980s and early 1990s is YouTube. Since Nick GaS aired near-complete collections of the original Double Dare, Think Fast, Make the Grade, and Get the Picture, home recordings of those episodes still circulate widely (although some of the more prolific YouTube uploaders have had their accounts shut down). Less fortunate are Super Sloppy Double Dare (nearly half of the 1987 series never aired on Nick GaS) and Finders Keepers (more than half of the Eure era and the two celebrity weeks from the Toffler era were skipped by Nick GaS). Some episodes skipped by Nick GaS exist as home recordings from the original airdates. Nick GaS also skipped nearly a quarter of the episodes of Nick Arcade, but a complete collection was made available for streaming on Paramount+ in 2021.
    • The mid to late 1990s are better represented. Various shows from that era, such as Family Double Dare, Nickelodeon GUTS, Legends of the Hidden Temple, and Figure It Out, have briefly re-surfaced on TeenNick's The '90s Are All That block. A few select episodes are also available for purchase on iTunes, including 11 episodes of the ultra-rare Fox Family Double Dare. iTunes also has a few episodes of the 1987 version of Super Sloppy Double Dare and Nick Arcade. In 2015, Nickelodeon also released a DVD containing one or two episodes each of both Super Sloppy and Family Double Dare, Legends, Figure It Out, Guts and Nick Arcade. Reruns of the original edition of Double Dare returned to TV on The '90s Are All That's successor block, The Splat, along with all game shows that had aired on the previous block. Clips from Wild and Crazy Kids and Nick Arcade were featured in a game show-themed promo launched before The Splat premiered, but have yet to air on the block.
    • The 2002 revival of Wild and Crazy Kids of the series hasn't aired since its cancellation in the same year.
    • In November 2019, Pluto TV launched the NickGames channel which included some of the 1990s game shows, including Double Dare, Guts, Legends of the Hidden Temple, and Figure It Out; in 2020, NickGames was discontinued and its programming was divided between Nick and Neonates.
  • Gullah Gullah Island:
    • The show's short-lived spin-off, Binyah Binyah, had 8 to 13 episodes made for it but only five aired; no reruns or home video releases of the show occurred.
    • A 71st episode aired in 2000, according to a newspaper listing. Entitled "You Wanna Salsa?", the episode focused on Latin music, including its origins. The episode never resurfaced on any home media or streaming releases, and it only ever aired twice. Part of the episode was used in a Gullah Gullah Jam Sessions interstitial that played in between other Nick Jr. shows.
  • King Pins aired on Nickelodeon as a one-time special in 1988. Very little is known about this unsold game show pilot other than it having a bowling theme with married couples competing. It exists among private collectors, but no copies have surfaced yet.
  • Good luck finding episodes of Mutt & Stuff, because this show no longer airs reruns on the Nick Jr Channel, and it also has no DVD Releases. The show is available on Amazon, but you have to pay to watch the episodes. The episode 'Cowboy' can be viewed on TV News Archive, but mislabeled, so you have to search for it.
  • The Mystery Files of Shelby Woo has all 12 episodes from the first and second seasons available on iTunes, but good luck finding the remaining 28 episodes of the third and fourth seasons.
  • 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 (and the fact that the network doesn't look fondly at this show, saying that they'd rather leave it as a "distant memory"). 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 the Checkered Ears, and Charlie's Climbing Tree), though seldom outside their countries of origin. The series' only home video release was a compilation VHS tape with songs from the series, but it's long out of print.
  • Roundhouse. The first two episodes were each released on VHS compilations with episodes from other Snick shows. The rest of the series is pretty much never going to get an official DVD release. Especially egregious since every song featured on the show was original, save for one song co-written by Madonna (who never recorded it) and another written by the show's music director in The '70s. However, a few episodes from all four seasons showed up on YouTube over the years, and from 2014-15, a truly dedicated fan who went through recording every single episode during its run uploaded all the episodes he taped - nearly every episode was uploaded to his channel, save for half of season 3 and a few episodes from seasons 1 and 2, and that was only because the tape he recorded them on broke. (The remaining season 1 episodes and three of the five missing season 3 episodes have been uploaded by other users.)
  • Salute Your Shorts, aside from sporadic airings on The '90s Are All That. It is a part of the rotating catalog of the NickSplat streaming service on VRV.
  • Space Cases. Only a select few episodes from the first season were aired on The '90s Are All That and its successor The Splat to date. Otherwise, there's always YouTube.
  • True Jackson V.P. only had the first half of its first season released on DVD; the second and third seasons were released as Amazon exclusives.
  • Unfabulous only has one episode of season 1 available on DVD as part of the out-of-print TeenNick Picks Volume 1 disc, as well as the complete seasons 1 and 2 through Amazon.com's burn on demand service with no season 3 release in any form; the series is currently not streaming on Paramount+ or other streaming services.
  • Only seasons 1 and 2 of Victorious are available on DVD, with no apparent plans to release the last two seasons anytime soon.
  • Wild Side Show (later retitled Wild Side) ran for two seasons between 1992 and 1994. Only a handful of clips totaling less than 10 minutes' worth of footage and an off-air recording of an episode from the series' second format are currently available to be viewed online. The series was co-produced by Alliance Films, whose children's library is now owned by WildBrain, with European distribution handled by Studio 100. This is why the show hasn't been seen on Nickelodeon for decades.
  • You Can't Do That on Television's sister series, Turkey Television, never received any home video releases. It also hasn't aired since the early '90s.
  • You Do Too, a Nick Jr. UK show from 2002 featuring puppets and humans interacting with each other as they answered mail sent to them by viewers, is very hard to find, and hasn't aired outside of the country. It might as well be The Brothers Flub of Nick Jr. shows.

    Nine Network 
  • Hey Hey It's Saturday is best remembered in its 1985-1999 run, even having its own official website. Contents from the 1984-1985 "Saturday Night" era, segments from the 1971-1983 Saturday Morning Cartoon run, and the 2010 run (although the contents of the first episode are on a YouTube channel) are trickier to get.
  • Series 11-13 of Hi-5 as originally broadcasted have become a case of this (their YT channel features the first 10 seasons in full). Several DVDs do include a few full episodes of these seasons rather than the popular 60-minute compilation edits.
    • Some Kind of Wonderful, The Movie which is a documentary on the search for the remaining two members of the Hi-5 House gang has never gained a DVD release although it should've been.

    Noggin/The N 
  • Almost all of Noggin's short-form shows (like Citizen Phoebe and Me in a Box) are only available online from old home recordings.
  • Girls v. Boys, a competition show that aired during Noggin's "The N" block, ran for four seasons — none of which were released to DVD. Only a few short clips are available online at all.
  • Jack's Big Music Show did have seven episodes released on DVD, and four episodes can be purchased on Amazon, and that's it as far as legal releases go. It was on the Noggin app for a while, but it was pulled and is also on Paramount+ in Australia. Music rights might explain why this show would be difficult to re-release.
  • Out There, a Sesame Workshop co-production that aired during "The N" block, never got a DVD release. Only a handful of episodes are available online. The only merchandise was a promotional CD with some songs from the show.
  • Sponk! and On the Team, two of Noggin's earlier original shows, were never released to DVD. Only a few episodes are available online from each.
  • Tweenies had an American dub aired on Noggin produced by Rick Siggelkow, creator of Shining Time Station. Unlike most of his shows, it never got any home video releases and is extremely difficult to find.
  • A Walk in Your Shoes was an educational, documentary-style show on Noggin that showcased two teenagers who swapped lives for a day. There were VHS releases (and one DVD release) of the show, but they are impossible to find given that they were only released to schools. Even a search on YouTube shows only a couple of episodes ("Muslim" and "Homeless"), a few clips from "Ballet/Hip-Hop" and a teaser for "Desert/Water".

    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 was broadcast when VHS was in its infancy, so if you happen to have a home recording of any of its episodes, don't erase it.
  • Alive From Off Center (1985-1996): Originally hosted by Laurie Anderson, this show featured all sorts of avant-garde performance shorts. They ranged from a guy using the streets of New York as a drum set, to a Laurie Anderson skit (featuring her recurring gender-bending character) and a memorable short featuring no human actors but had a Rube Goldberg Device run completely uninterrupted and without human intervention for 15 minutes. This series, despite its eleven-year run, was never released on home video and episodes survive only due to VHS taping while it was on the air.
  • An American Family, the 1973 docudrama also known to be the very first example of "Reality TV" on American television, has had a 2000s revival re-airing in conjunction with the 10th anniversary of eldest Loud sibling Lance's death, the DVD release of a "best of"-type package put together by Alan and Susan Raymond (without input from the surviving Loud family members), and the release of the HBO film about the making of the show called Cinema Verite. Before that, it had aired in full once in ca. 1990 (which, unlike the most recent series of repeats, came with its original music intact — some people recorded that re-airing onto VHS and used it to convert into video files that were then uploaded online). Aside from that, you'd have actually had to have been old enough in 1973 to watch the series because, thanks to those pesky music clearance issues and the fallout between the Louds and the Raymonds (who took over control of the whole shebang from the show's creator Craig Gilbert or his estate), you are very unlikely ever to see the original 12 episodes get any sort of official release.
  • Barney & Friends:
    • Its original incarnation Barney and the Backyard Gang, has not only never had a DVD release, but most of the episodes have not seen a re-release since the mid-1990s, with the only two episodes to see re-releases after that period being "Barney In Concert" and "Waiting For Santa" in VHS form.
    • Seasons 1-6 of the show have not aired on TV since 2004 (2011 on Sprout), and very few of those episodes got VHS releases back in the day. Season 1 got the most video releases, with 20 episodes being put out by Time-Life Video via an exclusive TV offer and 4 more getting commercial releases by The Lyons Group themselves.note  In contrast, Season 2 only got six episodes released,note  Season 3 only had three released,note  Seasons 4 and 5 only had two released each, and Season 6 had zero released. The good news is that all of the episodes can be found online, but they're of varying quality.
    • The only three Barney Home Videos that have ever gotten DVDs were Imagination Island, Barney Songs and Barney's Musical Scrapbook. None of the other pre-1997 Barney Home Videos have ever gotten a DVD release since 2006.
  • Between the Lions has a few VHS and DVD releases, all of which are, of course, out of print. Episodes can easily be found on YouTube, though. Malaysia got the first and second seasons in their entirety on DVD, but as the show got Screwed by the Network before Seasons 3 and 4 could air in that country, episodes from the third and fourth seasons are still in tape circulation limbo.
  • 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 preceded it (which had all the episodes), which can be found in classrooms getting rid of their old tapes. In addition, there are certain websites that only teachers can access to watch episodes, if it helps. Between 2015 and 2019, certain episodes were available on Netflix. Currently, there are 31 episodes available on Google Play (as well as iTunes in the US).
    • The main stumbling block for a commercial DVD release is a contractual stipulation Nye imposed on Disney during the show's conception that was revealed in a 2017 lawsuit. Although Disney owns the series and all the footage related to it, Nye is entitled to a percentage of licensing profits per the stipulation, meaning that if Disney were to widely release the series on home video, the sets would have to be priced out of affordability to the general public in order to both make a profit from the releases and honor the royalty arrangement, explaining why the single-episode DVDs and educator-only season sets are sold in high prices.
  • A Capitol Fourth is the annual 4th of July Concert on PBS, and in recent years has grown in the ranks to the number-one program on the network. YouTube uploads exist of the 1986 and 1996 concerts but only clips of individual performances from other years are also posted. If you have home-recorded media of any of the other concerts, keep it!
  • In 1987, the Flying Karamozov Brothers and Avener the Eccentric put on a production of Shakespeare's The Comedy of Errors. Unfortunately, not even the performers themselves ended up with copies of the show and it was never offered as, say, a fundraising bonus. So if you didn't tape it—or if your tape had degraded—you were probably resigned to never seeing it again. Thankfully, somebody did upload the show in its entirety to YouTube in 2014.
  • The Electric Company (1971): This led to Sesame Workshop making the original show available to fans. Before, it resisted putting anything on DVD while fan sites that uploaded clips were forced to take them down when threatened with "cease and desist" letters. The Workshop expressed surprise at the response to the release of the first DVD that a Volume 2 was later issued.
    • Out of the 780 episodes aired, only 40 have come to DVD and another 29 to iTunes. Good luck finding the other 711 episodes, especially after star Bill Cosby got knocked down by a sex scandal, though a few do exist as TV rips. There may also be rights issues with Spider-Man, who was a recurring character on the show and is owned by Marvel.
    • Only the last two seasons still aired after the show was cancelled in 1977.
  • The very first Frontline documentary, "NFL and Game Fixing: An Unauthorized History of the NFL", has not been seen since its initial broadcast due to the NFL generally not liking any insinuation of any ties to organized crime, to the point where it's even been suggested that host Jessica Savitch's untimely death in a car accident before the year was out was because of her involvement in the story.
  • Lamb Chop's Play-Along is in a music rights nightmare, which explains the lack of any DVD releases. During its PBS run, however, select segments of the series were released on home video by A&M Video, but never any complete episodes, and said VHS tapes are now rare to come across. Episodes used to air on Kids and Teens TV, but one has to hope NBCU has the money to secure all the song rights for a proper DVD release. Its short-lived spin-off, The Charlie Horse Music Pizza, suffers a similar fate. Not only has the series not been seen since the closure of the PBJ network in 2016, but only five VHS releases exist, containing 5 segments each. These sets are hard to come across even on eBay.
  • Mister Rogers' Neighborhood: The first run (1968-1976) has not aired on PBS since 1995. The black and white season (1968) has probably not aired since the early 1970s due to the diminishing lack of interest in monochrome programming with the rising adoption of color TV. The first color season (1969) has not aired since 1983 and the remaining seasons (1970-1976) were gradually phased out between 1989 and 1995. This was due to fears that these episodes could confuse children due to their different look and characters, and because there were more than enough episodes of the second run (1979-2001) in the can for reruns. Outside of 20 episodes released on Amazon, that run remains unavailable; meanwhile, except for the 1983 "Conflict" week, which was pulled from reruns in 1996 note  and is not available on Amazon, the second run is available in its entirety.
  • The National Memorial Day Concert is similar to the Capitol Fourth example above. There is an upload on YouTube of the 1992 concert but only clips of every other concert.
  • The Noddy Shop only had three home media releases that were exclusive to the United Kingdom. Other than that, episodes are rare to come across.
    • Thanks to Silbert Records, the music for the show has seen an official release, but not the show itself.
  • NOVA. The digital releases only go back to a selection of episodes from Season 27 (2000). The show started in 1974. There are some single-episode, expensive DVDs and VHS tapes as well, but anything older than 2000 is extremely rare.
  • Odd Squad has numerous DVD releases in existence (Creature Encounters, Odd Squad Villains — The Best of the Worst, Dance Like Nobody's Watching, Reindeer Games, The O Games, the movie, and the Australia-only Crime at Shapely Manor DVD). However, DVD releases of Season 2 and Season 3 are completely nonexistent, and the only way for Americans to watch them legally is to either catch reruns on PBS Kids or watch them in the network's video app and wait until they rotate monthly. Those in Canada fare off better, with the TVO Kids YouTube channel having uploaded every episode up to Season 3's "Welcome to Odd Squad".
  • The creator of The Puzzle Place, Lancit Media, went bankrupt shortly after the series ended, stopping any future releases of the series. Though a few VHS releases exist, they're extremely hard to find. It's unknown who currently handles the rights to the series.
  • Ramona, a 10-episode miniseries based on some Ramona Quimby books starring a young Sarah Polley, had some VHS and Laserdisc releases, but they're long out of print and never jumped to DVD.
  • Many classic Sesame Street segments can be found online and on compilation DVDs, but full episodes of older seasons are scarce.
    • Only 21 complete (or at least near-complete) episodes from 1989 on back have been officially released digitally, including a test pilot.
    • A handful of street scenes from 1990-2017, plus some older ones, have been released on DVD and digitally; while some episodes from 2004 to at least 2015 are full-length episodes, complete with Elmo's World, others are only the street scenes. If you have full versions of those and other missing episodes, please hold on to them.
    • Also, the episode with the Wicked Witch of the West, originally aired in February 1976, is very hard to find due to airing only once. note  After overwhelmingly negative reactions to the episode, many parents complained that their children were frightened by the witch's behavior and threats and were now afraid to watch the show. The episode was not re-aired during the show's summer 1976 rerun cycle, and not even so much as brief clips have been seen anywhere since. Additionally, as the home video recording industry was in its infancy in 1976, original off-air copies of the episode are likely very difficult and nearly impossible to find.
    • Caroll Spinney's final vocal performances as Big Bird and Oscar in Episode 5022 are completely lost, as his vocals were dubbed over.
    • Elmo's Playdate has not been seen since its initial simulcast airings, not even appearing on HBO Max.
    • Averted to an extent with the announcement that nearly every episode of the show would be digitally restored and preserved in the American Archive of Public Broadcasting. The episodes are available for viewing on-site at the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. and by appointment at WGBH in Boston. Unfortunately, there are at least 60 episodes that are currently missing from Sesame Workshop's archive. However, as described on the linked page, they could be found from other sources in the future.
    • The original versions of most of the classic episodes are found on streaming services like YouTube, HBO Max, and Hulu. The HBO Max versions, in particular, are very heavily edited, with tons of segments being cut from them. When they were rerun on PBS and Sprout, certain sketches were cut from them as well.
  • Shining Time Station is likely never to get an official release on DVD or streaming services, despite having been nominated for three Emmy Awards and having Ringo Starr and George Carlin playing Mr. Conductor. It's been speculated that the failure of Thomas and the Magic Railroad, which marked its final appearance, may have played a hand in this. Although episodes of the show can be found online, a select number of them have been blocked by Mattel in 2023 due to them containing classic episodes of Thomas & Friends, but fans can still watch the show on the Internet Archive.
  • When the archive of Siskel & Ebert & the Movies was made available online in the mid-2000s, Roger Ebert said that as far as he knew, the master tapes of his and Gene Siskel's first two series, Opening Soon at a Theater Near You/Sneak Previews (1975-82) on PBS and the syndicated At the Movies (1982-86), had mostly been wiped. Fortunately, not only did some master tapes escape destruction, but off-air recordings have since been found of hundreds of other episodes. That said, the collection is nowhere near exhaustive (particularly for the original 1975-77 incarnation of Opening Soon at a Theater Near You), and the quality varies considerably. Most of the episodes that do circulate are available for free at Siskel and Ebert Movie Reviews.
  • Square One TV has not been re-run since the early 2000s. Even then, only 65 of the 230 episodes were re-run, and during said rerun period (like with The Electric Company) they were Edited for Syndication as it aired on Noggin, which wasn't commercial-free, 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 primetime.
  • You can easily find most of the original BBC UK dubs of Teletubbies officially on YouTube. As for the PBS US dub, you can find several compilation DVD and VHS releases, but regular half-hour episodes are extremely scarce. Since PBS sold off the show in 2008, no one knows who's in possession of the master tapes. Oh, and there are 365 episodes of the show, though, reportedly, some of them were never actually re-dubbed.
  • Tots TV's American dub, in which Tilly spoke Spanish, is very hard to find aside from a few rare VHS releases and an episode on the Internet Archive's Understanding 9/11 mini-site.
  • 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.
  • 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 the harsh treatment of Vietnamese rubber plantation workers and a quip from a former French officer about comparing said workers to insects. Additionally the second episode, The First Vietnam War, and the last episode, Legacy, were excerpted in their entirety in the DVD set. The latter 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.
  • Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego, and all of the original tunes by Rockapella that its episodes included. Ditto its successor series, Where In Time Is Carmen Sandiego.
  • WonderWorks was a joint PBS/Disney series that created short made-for-TV movies based on acclaimed children's books, such as Hatchet (as A Cry in the Wild) and The Hoboken Chicken Emergency. It also brought several other countries' miniseries adaptations of classic kidlit to the United States. Despite most of the films seeing release on VHS (and some serving as fixtures of the Disney Channel in The '80s), only a few have seen the light of day on DVD, and never under the WonderWorks banner. These include the BBC versions of A Little Princess and The Chronicles of Narnia, the first two Kevin Sullivan-produced Anne of Green Gables adaptations, and Jacob Have I Loved and Bridge to Terabithia.
    • Frog and its sequel, Frogs!, starring Paul Williams, only exist on VHS.
  • Anyone who liked the two Zoom series and wanted to see them on DVD was out of luck for many years. The 90s series only had a "Making Of" VHS and a "Party With.." (Meanwhile, the original 1970s had a single "Best Of" VHS release.) In the case of the 90s series, however, things have since looked up. 2011 saw half of season two being uploaded onto YouTube, and in 2015, a truly dedicated fan who went to the lengths of constantly recording the series uploaded every episode he'd taped to YouTube, which included every episode, aside from three-quarters of season 1, and that was only because the network had failed to rerun the entire season. If anyone has those season one episodes, they should probably hang onto them.

    Seven Network 
  • Despite being one of the most iconic sitcoms in Australia, Hey Dad..! never got any full-season DVD releases in its home country, only a "Best Of" compilation. It definitely won't be getting any now, since show star Robert Hughes was convicted of multiple sexual assaults against young girls.

    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.
  • 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.).
  • 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.
  • Jim Carrey's Unnatural Act, his 1991 stand-up comedy special, isn't available in either the original 46-minute version that aired on Canadian television or the 30-minute Showtime recut (which dropped both the interstitial scenes of Carrey goofing off in Toronto and the final fifteen minutes, which see the humor take a darker and more surreal turn, though it added footage from the curtain call).
  • 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).
  • While less angsty than the Felicity example due to being available to own on DVD, Queer as Folk (US) is becoming this with regards to the original, aired version with the soundtrack still intact. When Netflix finally bought the rights to stream the series, the rights to the majority of the songs had expired, leading Showtime to be forced to have fourth-rate bands record mockbuster tunes to substitute them (most times they're obvious, but some fans have admitted to liking a number of the mockbuster tunes even to the point of preferring them to the original). Netflix dropped the series in 2019.

    Sky UK 
  • Despite being a cult series amongst British soccer fans, soccer-themed drama series Dream Team has never been aired on TV in the UK since it was axed in 2007. It has also never got a DVD release and has never been made available on a streaming service.
  • The Strangerers (sic) was a science fiction comedy-drama made for Sky One, 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 to find them elsewhere.

    The WB / The CW / UPN 
  • The Beat, a six-episode (13 were produced) police procedural series that aired on UPN. Despite being created by the same people as the critically lauded Homicide: Life on the Street, and featuring a young Mark Ruffalo and a crossover from the Homicide character John Munch, the series has pretty much vanished until 2024, where this YouTube channel has uploaded episodes of the series here.
    • The channel in question states that the unaired 7 episodes were telecast internationally (possibly Brazil). Episode 1 is unfortunately still missing and several of the other 12 have non-removable Portuguese subtitles, all in varying video quality.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer made it to DVD (eventually - Region 1 took a while), but this trope is in effect for the newer media. Fans have been clamoring for a Blu-Ray release for a while now, but the show's filming and format have caused problems. In short, as far as Joss Whedon is concerned, Buffy is a 4:3 show and always will be (except for one episode shot in 16:9), and really intended for the older TVs of its time; as such, it's really not suited for an HD remaster. FOX made one attempt at transferring it to HD, and it was an unmitigated disaster held as one of the worst remasters of all time, which nobody wants to see on disc.
  • 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 its 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 10-month-old daughter, Sarah. The show was cancelled after its first season due to low ratings, and it has since disappeared into the ether.
  • Manhunt, a six-episode reality TV that was pulled due claims of rigging and is now considered Lost Media as it has never been seen since its first airing. The most notable interest was that it features a pre-WWE John Cena as a villain named "Big Tim" and former American Gladiator Raye "Zap" Hollitt as part of the cast.
  • Mercy Point was an intriguing mixture of hospital drama and science fiction. Only seven episodes aired, and the last two were never aired (with recorded scenes from the eighth episode being retooled into the seventh episode). 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.
  • Red Handed, a four-episode hidden camera series on UPN (narrated by Adam Carolla). To judge by contemporary reviews condemning the focus on lowbrow, profane, and otherwise juvenile humor, its disappearance might be for the best.
  • Ringer, the Sarah Michelle Gellar comeback vehicle, only lasted a season with no DVD release in sight. It is on Netflix, though.
  • The Steve Harvey Show only has a 5-episode best-of DVD and no plans to release any seasons. The Wayans Bros. only has season 1 available on DVD (Though all five seasons can be viewed on Amazon's digital service). Neither show is available on Netflix or Hulu. But both shows are easily accessible, as they're Adored by the Network as Filler for the Viacom networks MTV2, BET, and Centric.
  • 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 available online.

    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 late 1990s, 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 2000s, which subsequently went out of print. Season 7 (2006) only received a partial release. The entire series is available by FilmRise on YouTube; oddly enough, though, the Season 3 intro replaces the original intro for seasons 1-2, with the exception of "This Little Piggy".
  • The YTV series Catwalk was 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. The fact that Disney now owns the series through Lucasfilm does not bode well for it.
  • My Special Book is a children's series that aired on both the YTV Jr. block and its successor Treehouse TV for 90 episodes. None of the episodes were ever released on home media; the image found on the show's page was literally the only part of the series that had surfaced until fan recordings of the episodes started surfacing.
  • 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.

    Award Shows 
  • While the official Oscars YouTube channel has many clips of Academy Award ceremonies, such as the actual awards presentations/acceptance speeches and host monologues, full show releases aren't in the cards due to myriad music and film rights issues that would have to be cleared for such segments as Best Original Song nominee performances or film montages. The 1994 playlist, for example, doesn't include Bernadette Peters' opening performance of a specially-rewritten-by-Stephen Sondheim-himself version of "Putting It Together" because it was accompanied by a montage of clips depicting the filming and promotion of a variety of films. And don't expect to find footage of notorious moments like the 1989 opening number with Rob Lowe and Snow White or Will Smith slapping Chris Rock at the 2022 show.
  • Any award show produced by Dick Clark Productions. Don't get your hopes up on a full DVD Release of the Golden Globes Awards or the Billboard Music Awards.
  • The Kids Choice Awards: No DVD releases of any of the ceremonies exist for obvious reasons. The good news is that the ceremonies can be found on various sites, but some have only been partly found (like the 1996 one) or lost.
  • The NAACP Image Awards. Only a couple of the ceremonies are available online, including the 1996, 1997, and 2015 ceremonies (the last one has the original commercials on it, but the audio is EXTREMELY Loud). YouTube and the AP Archive have clips, but good luck finding the full ceremonies, ESPECIALLY the new ones!
  • The People's Choice Awards is another awards show that can easily be found online, but there are some exceptions. Good luck finding the ceremonies from 1975 to 2009. Only clips from that era are available online.
  • The Spike Video Game Awards, which aired from 2003 to 2013, count as this. Only the 2005, 2007, 2010, and 2011 Ceremonies are available in full online, where other ceremonies are available only in clips or downright impossible to find (especially the full ceremonies). Only parts 1 and 3 of the 2009 ceremony are available online (although part 3 has it labeled as a different title for some reason).
  • Good luck finding the full Teen Choice Awards ceremonies from 1999 to 2008. The 2008 Teen Choice Awards, for a long time, was also only on YouTube in two parts and only had the host segments. Clips from that era are on YouTube and AP Archive.
  • The TV Guide Awards is another Award Show that is hard to find. Only clips from the 1999-2001 ceremonies (as well as 1964) are available online. The whole ceremonies are IMPOSSIBLE to find online. Same goes for the Cable Ace Awards and the Blockbuster Entertainment Awards word for word.

    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, Jeopardy!, and Pyramid. And this isn't even getting into the countless series that have been wiped or those that simply haven't been transferred to a digital format for preservation (such as some of the holdings at the Library of Congress). 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 approving rebroadcast but not home video release. The June 2015 launch of the Fremantle-owned Buzzr network offers some slight hope that these shows might be seen again.

  • 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).
  • Have I Got News for You has a compilation DVD covering the first 23 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 Hollywood Squares is an odd case- the different versions have either been rescued or haven't been rerun, at least not in a while. The Davidson version was last seen on the USA Network, while Bergeron's run was last seen on GSN- and even then, certain episodes were absent due to clearance issues.
  • 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 21st Century. It has never been released on video or DVD, except illegally.
  • The Match Game-Hollywood Squares Hour was unable to be rerun for almost 35 years after its cancellation due to dual ownership of the two formats, however, the legal rights appear to have been cleared up, as Fremantle'snote  digital subchannel Buzzr added it to its lineup in February 2019. Contrary to long-held belief, while Gene Rayburn wasn't really pleased with the show (particularly the botched Squares format), he never put an embargo on it — that was his next show, Break the Bank (1985) (he had disputes with the producers, so hence that show falls under this category too — though the embargo may not be valid anymore, thanks to the original distributor eventually coming under the umbrella of Disney).
  • The Million Second Quiz (Which aired on NBC in 2013) definitely counts as this. Some clips of the show are available on YouTube, but there are almost NO full episodes online. The only episode that's available online is the September 13, 2013 Episode, which can be found on Archive.org's TV News Archive (Just a warning though, it's mislabeled, so you have to find it HARD to watch it). Even worse, the show was aired live, so it's unknown if master tapes for the show even exist. That said, the entire run does exist on the trading circuit.
  • Name That Tune — music rights, primarily. The Lange version was rerun on both the USA Network and The Family Channel, while the Kennedy version hasn't been seen at all since it ended (that run is now under the control of Ralph Edwards' estate).
    • The Lange version was partially rescued; 20 random episodes surfaced on Tubi in 2021.
  • The Pop 'N' Rocker Game was a short-lived game show/variety show hybrid that featured live concert performances and a quiz show element related to each performance. While many clips of the performances exist, only three full episodes have surfaced. Given the concert-heavy premise, clearance issues are likely at play here.
  • Although virtually all episodes of the current run exist, the Bob Barker era of The Price Is Right fell into rerun limbo after Game Show Network ceased airing repeats in 2000, and a good number of theories popped up as to why it went MIA from television (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.). In the "Frequently Asked Questions" section of its official website, Buzzr says that the reason it doesn't air this version of Price is because the run is "exclusive to Fremantle's broadcast partner" (i.e. CBS), lending weight to the "no reruns against first-run episodes" hypothesis. With the GSN repeats and BCI/Mill Creek Entertainment DVD set, there was a moratorium on certain episodes by Barker, including but not limited to those where fur coats were given as prizes; said "fur ban" knocks out the series premiere plus the next two taped episodes, one of which had been shelved after taping due to an ineligible contestant (its existence remains in question). Then in November 2020, CBS-owned Pluto TV announced it would launch a new channel dedicated to Barker-era Price repeats, which it did on December 1st of that year. True to form, the schedule started with the first episode after Bob's ban on fur prizes in 1982 and has steadily moved onward from there.
    • Meanwhile, Dennis James' five-year syndicated run has never been repeated, because according to former Price staffer Scott Robinson something like five of the 301-episode 1972-80 nighttime series did not have a fur. One episode from the nighttime run #003N which was taped on August 28, 1972, was shelved due to a mistake during the showcase that no one could figure out how to fix and its replacement show wasn't taped until after #039N (the season finale) on May 4, 1973.
    • Though the 1985-86 Tom Kennedy-hosted version was rerun on Game Show Network up until 2000, it too hasn't been seen anywhere since, presumably due to the same issues that have plagued repeats of the current daytime run.
    • The 1994 syndicated run with Doug Davidson hasn't been rerun either, but that's due to rights issues (ironically, between Fremantle and CBS — Paramount Television distributed it, and of course they were absorbed into CBS with the 2005 Viacom/CBS split-up).
    • The original Bill Cullen series is widely thought to be a different color of horse than the current show. Game Show Network previously aired 67 nighttime episodes and one daytime show (the latter's run is presumed to be largely wiped); several other episodes have turned up on YouTube (probably excluded due to cigarette sponsorship on some shows) and the ABC nighttime finale is on the DVD set. Buzzr finally began airing repeats of this version — the first version of Price to be rerun anywhere since 2002 — in 2019.
      • 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 (though since the mid-2000s, the show's prize descriptions have become genericized and more generic products have been offered, possibly to address these types of restrictions). 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.
      • For similar reasons, the Australian format of the show (1980s with Ian Turpie as the host, and various later series with Larry Emdur) have never been re-aired after their original network run.
  • 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, as it's not even shown on BBC America! Starting in 2015, Hulu has three seasons on at a time; worst of all, they're not even the XL cuts.
  • Skedaddle was an extremely short-lived game show that only aired six weekly episodes as part of the Funtastic World of Hanna-Barbera block. No episodes are known to circulate.
  • Sporting Triangles aired on the ITV Network for four entire series from January 7th, 1983, all the way to August 13th of 1990, but despite that, it has never gotten a single home video release to date. Even its video game adaptations have become this!
  • 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. Game Show Network 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; about a week or so of episodes were never aired.
    • Season 5 (1987-88) was likely never shown in its entirety.
    • Season 6 (1988-89) aired in 2003 and about half of the aired episodes have been uploaded.
    • 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, although Season 31 (2013-14) started airing in October 2016, followed by a small portion of Season 30 (June 2013) starting in January 2017. Game Show Network stopped airing Wheel in 2019.
    • Thanks to a fan, all but a very small number of episodes from Seasons 7 (1989-90) and 13-20 (1995-2003) have been uploaded online. The Season 7, 13, and 14 episodes came largely from Game Show Network reruns in the early 21st century.
    • The September 11, 2001 episode was thought to be lost for obvious reasons until fans discovered it over a decade later buried on archive.org. It turns out that Washington DC's ABC affiliate WJLA had aired the episode at 11:30 PM the following Saturday, followed immediately by the next two episodes, although titles for other programming appeared in listings.
    • The fifth episode of Season 34's Veterans Week was not aired in many areas, partially because, due to Election Day coverage delaying the second episode onwards, it was scheduled to air on November 12, 2016, a Saturday. Normally, Saturday (or Sunday) airings of Wheel are reruns and are often scheduled by local stations to air at random times to make room for national and local weekend programming. Due to ongoing coverage of the election results, many stations aired the episode in overnight time slots or did not air it at all, and the episode never reran.

    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...at least not in full.

  • 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 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, the entire series had been released on VHS as well, likely requiring diehard fans to build additions to their homes in order to hold all the tapes. It's also the only soap to ever see widespread rerun circulation, resulting in many unofficial tapes being circulated before the DVD set came out.
  • On one hand, Hispanic telenovelas tend to be shorter (a standard six-month run aired Monday to Saturday is about 180 chapters), so they could get a DVD release if they want. On the other hand, selling them for syndication runs abroad allows the producers to recoup part of the costs, so they won't release any "recent" (up to 10 years ago) soap. Worse, when they do have a release, it's usually only a "best of" thing compressing the story (ex. 180 chapters reduced to 60), putting an epileptic monkey in charge of editing, and trimming scenes at random, creating an unwatchable mutant of a soap.
    • In Venezuela, it has become increasingly common to see on the street sellers of pirate DVDs of Colombian soaps. Half of the titles are "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 are current and former soaps about vallenato musicians, a musical 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 villain-esque character named Venezuela was a Stealth Insult to the country (said character was a Fat Bastard Small Name, Big Ego lady with a teeny tiny dog named Hugo; draw your own conclusions).
  • Only four DVDs of Home and Away have been released. The first two were special unaired episodes, "Secrets and the City" and "Hearts Divided", each presented with two previous episodes to set the scene. The latter two were clip shows presented by cast members, Home and Away Romances and Home and Away Weddings. Funnily enough, the Romances disc came with a bonus feature that would have been a much bigger selling point: the 1988 feature-length pilot episode. The "Weddings" disc had a single full episode, Leah and Vinnie's wedding.
  • Australian company Shock Entertainment are bucking the trend by actually beginning to put Neighbours to DVD - this started with the "Defining Moments" collection in 2002 - fifteen episodes of births, deaths, and weddings, from 1986 to 2002 - followed by two "Iconic Episodes" collections of at least 22 episodes each and minimal overlap with the earlier collection. However, on April 4, 2012 Shock released Neighbours: From the Beginning, Volume 1 which comprises the first 56 episodes (of over 8000 to date). Three more From the Beginning volumes of similar length followed, as well as The Charlene Years, Volume 1 (which helpfully followed on from the then-unreleased From the Beginning Volume 4). There have been no further box sets released since 2013, but that still amounts to 297 episodes from 1985-1986.
  • NBC released a DVD set of 10-or-so episodes of Sunset Beach for promotional purposes. Some lunatics in the UK banded together and traded recordings until all but 1 out of 725 shows were posted on YouTube.
  • The Young Doctors is usually considered as one of the best pre-Neighbours Australian soap operas despite being basically impossible to find footage from the show online, only info from those who remembered it and the run history.
  • In the early 2000s, the tide seemed to be turning for classic soaps, with a few rerunning on cable television, several offered via streaming websites, and the legendary Guiding Light and As the World Turns receiving official DVD releases. After a few years, all of these offerings disappeared. Currently, a Guiding Light DVD set of 20 episodes sells for nearly $200.

    Other 
  • $40 a Day, a series hosted by Rachael Ray which originally appeared on Food Network, and subsequently re-aired on Cooking Channel, The Travel Channel, and TLC, disappeared from air in the 2010s. The creators likely felt that inflation made the show too much of a relic. It's not available on DVD or for streaming, either. At least, not officially; you'll find a few episodes on YouTube.
  • Anglia Television's adaptation of Alice in Wonderland Did not have a VHS or DVD release, but can easily be found online, it's just there are no official online releases, but rather pirated uploads or short clips of certain scenes from the show, usually growth and shrink scenes by Macro/Micro enthusiasts.
  • 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".
  • There have been Best Of compilations of American Bandstand note , 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 the cases of Midnight and Concert) stand-up comedy performances.
    • A lot of 1970s and '80s episodes of "American Bandstand" (as well as a few from the 1960s) were rerun briefly on VH1 in the mid-late 1990s, completely uncut and with all its original music. You're pretty much guaranteed to find that any YouTube uploads of "American Bandstand" performances from the '70s and early '80s will come from those repeats. Why VH1 were allowed to rerun those episodes uncut is a question only the late Dick Clark could have answered.
    • Effective early 2014, Soul Train is being broadcast on digital MeTV subchannel Bounce TV.
    • One Midnight Special episode made it to VHS/DVD with few if any cuts — the one Andy Kaufman hosted in early 1981, which Sony Music Entertainment released in 1999 to tie in to the release of Man on the Moon.
  • Ants In Your Pants was a Canadian children's series that took on the unique form of an MTV-style music video anthology, and was run endlessly on Treehouse TV for about a decade. Sadly, Treehouse seems to have all but forgotten about it, and no home video releases are in sight, likely due to music rights/licensing issues (an out-of-print soundtrack album has been made though). A handful of the songs/videos featured have been uploaded to YouTube as well, compiled onto a rather nifty playlist.
  • 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.
  • Big Bag was a preschool show that used to air on Cartoon Network around 1998, and was one of few live-action shows produced for the channel. It was produced by the award-winning company behind Sesame Street (Sesame Workshop, then known as the Children's Television Workshop) and had a few international versions released on other channels. Because Big Bag's ratings were so low, SW has neglected to reissue the show.
  • Blips, a British children's program created by Ragdoll Productions of Teletubbies fame. None of the 26 episodes were ever released on home media, and it hasn't been seen airing on television since 2006. As of this writing, only the online Flash game made for the show has been recovered.
  • Brothers, a Showtime original sitcom that aired from 1984 - 1989, was briefly rerun in syndication in the early 1990s and then seemed to completely disappear from view. This is in spite of the program's groundbreaking take on homosexuality and gay issues and the novelty of getting to see Yeardley Smith in a live-action setting. (There is also a "hey, it's that famous relation" in terms of the eldest of the three fictional Waters siblings being played by Brandon Maggart, who is now best known for being Fiona Apple's father.) One possible explanation for the program not getting a DVD release is that it was always a cult program since it was one of the first examples of original programming on pay TV and not as well-known as "Soap", another early gay TV pioneer (but which aired on a network).
  • 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).
  • Cloud 9 have only released two of their series, The Tribe and The Adventures Of Swiss Family Robinson despite most of their shows being cult classics and/or starring big-name actors like William Shatner.
  • 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 from 2002 to 2003. 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.
  • Diners, Drive-ins and Dives: Seasons 1-4 are on DVD; seasons 5-11 are MIA.
  • Divorce Court - The current version, featuring real-life arbitration hearings of divorce cases, has been in syndication since 1999. 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 (in 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.
    • The current version hasn't fared that much better, either. Local Atlanta station WPCH-TV (who, funnily enough, aired the show regularly from 2014 until WAGA-TV got them back in 2019) reran some episodes from Judge Mablean Ephriam's era around 2008 or so, but were never rerun again afterward and haven't been seen since. Fox Reality Channel also reran episodes of the Mablean era until the network shuttered in 2010. Likewise, current judge Lynn Toyler had episodes of her run on Hulu...beginning with season 16 (2014-2015) until September 2019, when season 21 premiered. Since seasons 1-15 of the current run as well as the Judge Keene and Voltitare series (and all earlier incarnations before them) are owned by Disney as part of 20th Television's library (Fox Television Stations took over production beginning with season 16, taking the IP with it), it's unclear when that portion of the show(s) will ever resurface. As of March 2022, Tubi and Pluto On Demand have episodes from season 17, which was Mablean's first.
  • Don't Eat the Neighbours - a joint British-Canadian puppet series that aired between 2001 and 2002. There was only ever one video/DVD release with just four episodes, out of a total of twenty-six.
  • Down to Earth, a typical 1980s family sitcom, ran for sixty-seven episodes from 1984 to 1987 on Superstation TBS. None of these episodes have ever been released on DVD or streaming or even torrent sites in any way, shape, or form, or have ever been seen again or rerun after the series finished airing. Some of the episodes are on YouTube, but they're taken from old tapes with commercials attached to them, meaning these were the only episodes that the uploader was able to save. About thirty of the sixty-seven episodes aired have been forever lost to time, and will most likely be lost forever seeing as how the series apparently isn't memorable or well-known enough to get a DVD release of any sort.
  • 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, it still hasn't been released.
  • While much of [An] Evening at the Improv (both the original syndicated and later A&E seasons) and its syndicated spinoff Improv Tonite are now available on streaming sites like Tubi, many episodes are missing due to music rights issues. Some material from missing episodes turned up on various VHS compilations, but more conveniently some clips from Evening such as Jim Carrey's Season One appearance have been officially uploaded to YouTube.
  • Freddy's NightmaresA 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.
  • It's not easy being a Japanese fan of Goosebumps (1995), since the dub of the series that aired on public broadcaster NHK is presumed to be lost, with the videos from Nico Nico Douga removed for copyright infringement. It last aired on Disney XD in 2009.
  • Any TV series hosted by Rolf Harris will definitely not be getting an official home release after he was jailed for sexual abuse of children.
  • Hello Noddy was a South Korean Noddy show that aired on MBC that was a framing device for either Noddy's Toyland Adventures or The Noddy Shop. Nothing but images exist of the show online, though several TV ads for tie-in merchandise have resurfaced.
  • In early January 2021, approximately five months after Home Movie: The Princess Bride released its final episode on the platform, Quibi was shut down and its library was sold to Roku, who later announced that they would be releasing the platform's entire original library on one of their free ad-supported channels. Unfortunately, this series was not included in the Roku acquisition due to its status as a remake of a preexisting film. By May 2021, Quibi's official YouTube channel had been set to private, including this series' trailer and the full fourth episode, scrubbing the last of the series' officially released material from public viewing. According to a June 2021 Vanity Fair article, the only remaining legal way to watch this series is a private streaming service accessible only to Emmy voters, and the creators of the series are hoping that the series might hopefully capture enough attention through the Emmys for it to be released to the public somehow once more. Despite this, people have been able to easily continue illegally distributing it, even on YouTube.
  • Hot Seat with Wally George was an early example of a talk show featuring a confrontational ideologue as host. It ran locally on KDOC Anaheim and nationally in select cities, airing from 1983 to 1992. Because the station that produced the series couldn't afford to store them, they destroyed most of the masters of the show. Out of 490 episodes, roughly 70 have been found. Fans are actively looking for more; KDOC occasionally reruns the scant few episodes they saved, and more only exist in home video recordings or YouTube clips.
  • David Lynch's three-episode miniseries Hotel Room.
  • A quick search does not reveal any episode of the Indian TV serial Hum Log to have been released on DVD (although the first episode was uploaded to YouTube by Doordarshan, the channel that aired the show). Shame, as the show holds a special place in history as the first Indian TV serial ever.
  • Infinity Limited, by the Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1980-84.
  • The Invisible Man has had two different releases of its first season on DVD, plus a release of the pilot and first episode in France which a number of American fans ordered from overseas before the full sets were released in the states. However, there is still no sign of the second season being released on DVD in any form. Both seasons are available on Hulu, though.
  • 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 among Japan, the United States, and Australia. Also, many episodes never left Japan in the first place. note 
    • 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.
  • Aside from a short-lived iTunes release of "Peek A Boo", the Jim Henson Play-A-Long Video series can only be found on old VHS tapes with no DVD or digital release in sight. Not only do they have a cult following with those who grew up watching them, but "Wow, You're A Cartoonist!" kick-started the career of Tatyana Ali of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air fame.
  • Reruns of the 1980s Christian Television Network kids' game show Joy Junction fell into this trope due to incidents not too dissimilar from the abrupt vanishing of The Cosby Show; when one of the cast members, Ron Brown (who had a segment where he performed with a marionette named Marty), was arrested in 2012 as part of a sting operation that later revealed that Brown had been part of chat rooms discussing killing children and eating them; eventually being convicted in 2013. Upon the arrest, CTN as well as TBN sub-channel Smile of a Child immediately pulled reruns of the series.
  • The Judge: An '80s dramatized court show that never aired on TV after repeats on USA Network in the early 1990s.
  • After Judge Alex ended its run in 2014, the show was in limbo for five years until Nosey picked up the first season to stream on their website. Unfortunately, the episodes were taken down quickly following a cease-and-desist order from Disney, who had just bought the show's producer 20th Century Fox, and so far there aren't any plans for the series to resurface anytime soon. Other court shows Fox produced that were also on Nosey, including Texas Justice and Cristina's Court, were also pulled in the process.
  • 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.
  • The original Latin American dubbed version of Kometto-san (Señorita Cometa in Spanish), a 1960s Quirky Work Toku mixing live action, puppets and animation (And ended on a Bittersweet Ending, as seen here) that aired in Mexico and other Latin American countries through the 1970s and mid-1980s was lost after an earthquake in 1985 destroyed part of the facilities (including some of the tape archives) of Televisa, the network that held the rights to the series. Home copies of some episodes that were recorded prior to 1985 in formats such as Betamax (home tapes were not as common then) have been posted online. Although the dub's master tapes were permanently lost, a redub of the entire series was made in 2013 that aired on the Mexico City channel Cadenatres (now known as Imagen TV) until 2015.
  • The 1960s anthology series Kraft Suspense Theatre has never been released on DVD.
  • The Canadian-produced sister series to Kung Fu (1972), 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 time that's happened), the show didn't see any DVD release until 2014 when the first season was released in the US only (surprisingly, not in Canada!). The second season was released on DVD in 2015, but the final two seasons have yet to see a DVD release to this day. It is available online and on torrents, though.
  • The Law & Order: Criminal Intent episode "The Glory That Was" has been taken out of rotation since after its first airing, due to causing controversy in Brazil surrounding Rio de Janeiro bid's for the 2016 Summer Olympics. This is unfortunate because it's one of the few episodes in which the fate of Wheeler's ex-fiancée is mentioned. It's not even on the season eight DVD, although now it can be found online through less than reputable means.
  • Despite being released in Europe, there seems to be absolutely no plans for a DVD release for Lilyhammer in the United States. To make matters worse, the American rights belong to Netflix and they seem to see absolutely no value in releasing things outside the streaming section of the Web site (you can't even rent "rental only" discs of the show). Netflix's rights have also expired as of late 2022, so it has been removed from the service with no plans to allow people to view it again, let alone allow people to keep a permanent copy.
  • Welsh children's detective show Llan-ar-goll-en has never had an official home media release, nor is the series in its entirety available for streaming. The most legal means one has for watching this show is living in Wales (and only Wales) and watching S4C on TV, or keeping up with the show on the BBC iPlayer; the latter would be fine if the episodes weren't temporary available (lasting only 30 days per rerun) and only released as they air. Luckily nearly all episodes of the show, with subtitles intact started to get archived since March 2020note , thanks to a fan effort to preserve episodes as they were released on the iPlayer. To this day, "Sanau" is the only episode that is missing, as it hasn't aired since August 2019. You can still read its English transcript here.
  • While older episodes of Maury have generally been easy to locate beginning with season eight in 1998 (which is where producer NBCUniversal's archive of the series begins), episodes prior to that are impossible to look for outside of home recordings due to CBS owning the rights to itnote . Not even the Nosey streaming service, which showcases episodes of Maury, has been able to get hold of any of the Paramount-produced episodes (only the NBCUniversal-produced/owned episodes are shown). On top of that, both Maury Povich and NBCUniversal are unable to gain clearance from CBS in regards to those episodes, explaining why "milestone" episodes exclusively feature footage from the Universal-produced episodes.
  • Memphis Beat, never released on DVD (entire two seasons) after its cancellation by TNT in 2011.
  • The horror TV series Monsters. If you have Chiller, you can catch it, usually via marathons.
  • 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, Remington Steele, The Bob Newhart Show, Hill Street Blues, and WKRP in Cincinnati, the second being no doubt thanks to Pierce Brosnan's megastardom) have seen anything close to their complete runs getting out on DVD. You can blame the library's current owners, 20th Century Fox, for this otherwise inexplicable behavior. Shout! Factory has stepped in and worked with Fox to release Newhart, Rhoda, and Lou Grant.
    • WKRP is an interesting case. When Fox released the first season on DVD in 2007, almost all of the licensed music was replaced with generic tracks. Shout Factory's 2014 re-release of WKRP was able to keep over 90% of the original music.
    • The Duck Factory, a 1984 NBC sitcom about an animation studio that toplined then-newcomer Jim Carrey, only got as far as six of its thirteen episodes released on VHS (with an additional two in the U.K.) after he became an A-list movie star in The '90s.
    • And on the subject of MTM, the people who owned them for a while- the English television company TVS (Television South), which was part of ITV, is also caught up in this. 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 Entertainment, 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. 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 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- including the pre-1993 episodes of Catchphrase, the 1988-90 adaptation of Concentration, and All Clued Up- are buggered.
  • The New Adventures of Robin Hood, a kitschy 1990s series from TNT in the vein of Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena, has only Season 1 available on DVD, and then not until 2010. The remaining three seasons are completely unavailable.
  • Many NHK shows fall under this in Japan, including Okaasan to Issho and Inai Inai Baa!, suffer from this, as once an episode of these series airs, it only gets a few reruns before being shelved and is never released to home video, save for select segments of the shows getting released in once-a-year compilation DVDs and NHK Plus streaming the episodes for a few months before pulling them.
    • Pitagora Switch is the most notable example of this. The only home media release consists of the Rube Goldberg machine segments and nothing else from that show. Some songs from the show were released to CD, though.
  • The Made-for-TV Movie Oil Storm received a lot of attention after apparently predicting Hurricane Katrina. However, as it is a mockumentary made up in part of various forms of archival footage, it is unclear if it will ever be re-released.
  • The Original Amateur Hour began as an old-time radio show in the 1930's before moving to TV, Channel Hopping between all of the Big Three TV networks (and DuMont), and should be considered groundbreaking in that it was the Trope Maker for the TV talent show, paving the way for everything from Star Search to American Idol, and it also launched the careers of luminaries like Raúl Juliá, Frank Sinatra, Irene Cara, Connie Francis, Beverly Sills, Ann-Margret, Pat Boone, José Feliciano, and Gladys Knight. While full episodes are hard to find, especially on YouTube, the masters are presumably still out there, stored in the Library of Congress - a documentary about the show hosted by Boone was released on DVD, and among the bonus features were two complete episodes of the show, including the original commercials; three episodes and an excerpt of the DuMont run are also among the channel's surviving warenote . A revived version with Willard Scott aired on the above-mentioned Family Channel in 1992; despite its warm response and high ratings (not to mention the TV debut of Nick Carter) this new version only lasted one season. Good luck finding full episodes of that now.
    • In this case, this trope can be attributed to the gigantic backlog of episodes, as well as the fact that very few people had VHS recorders, let alone knew how to use them properly, by the time the show ended its original run in 1970 (they did by the time the ABC Family version got on the air, and ironically that one's much harder to find than the episodes from The '50s). However, like most of the examples on this page, you can see bits and pieces from every incarnation of the show on (where else?) YouTube.
  • 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.
  • Out of Jimmy's Head never got a DVD release due to its abysmal ratings and huge backlash from older audiences due to being on a channel not well-regarded for its live-action fare. Apparently even said channel itself wants it to be forgotten.
  • Out of This World (1987) 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 it from airing on American television, where reruns last aired in the mid-nineties.
  • Philadelphia had a number of fondly remembered, locally produced children's shows back in the Seventies and Eighties. WCAU had Starstuff and The Candy Apple News Company, while WPVI had the long-running Chief Halftown and Captain Noah's Magical Ark.
  • Pizza has a DVD release for its fifth season, and its Spiritual Successor shows have had DVD releases too, but its first four seasons aren't available in any official way.
  • The complete series DVD of Playmakers, the acclaimed ESPN scripted football drama, has gone out of print and likely won't ever be re-released due to the same reason the series was cancelled in the first place: The NFL's objections to the subject matter (including at least two storylines on drug use: one on cocaine, the other on steroids).
  • 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 VH1's website and YouTube. VH-1 Classic once aired all the full reruns, but they disappeared upon the network's transition to MTV Classic in August 2016.
    • 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. Good luck finding either of them in full, in any format (not even trading websites have them circulated).
    • Behind the Music only had a handful of VHS/DVD releases, and music rights issues make them unlikely to show up again. VH-1 Classic reran many of the more popular episodes, often in "remastered" versions which added relevant events that happened to the artist(s) since the original airings. Again, all that disappeared when VH-1 Classic became MTV Classic, and now those episodes seem to be lost forever, as well as others that were never "Remastered" to begin with (such as those chronicling a certain year in popular music, or one that looked at the final days of John Lennon).
  • While the rest of the Power Rangers franchise is readily available on DVD, Power Rangers Beast Morphers, the first season put out by Hasbro after acquiring the franchise, is sight-unseen on DVD. Episodes can be seen in reruns and on Netflix, so it's not entirely absent from being seen again, but it's not available to own in any way, shape, or form, not even by digital download via services like Amazon.
    • The franchise as a whole has a rather spotty record on Blu-ray. The three theatrical movies and the second half of Power Rangers Samurai are the only parts released on the format.
    • Most of the seasons have recently been removed from Netflix.
  • Many, many, many prehistoric animal documentaries have not been released on DVD. Wanna see them? Your best friends are Netflix, YouTube, and torrents. They are the only places you'll find Animal Armageddon, Dino Lab, Dinosaur Revolution, Koreanosaurus, Life After Dinosaurs, Prehistoric, Prehistoric Assassins, and Prehistoric Monsters Revealed, along with many lesser, mostly-science and few-CGI documentaries, like Super Croc, Utah's Dino Graveyard, and others.
  • Radio Free Roscoe, a Canadian Family Channel production (that was later picked up by Noggin's teen block, The N), had 52 episodes but has only ever received one DVD release; a compilation of eight fan-selected episodes from the first season. Copies of the remaining episodes can still be found online and for download, though like many Family Channel original productions, a full DVD release seems unlikely.
  • Fox News Channel's successful comedy show Red Eye with Greg Gutfeld will never have episodes released publicly, despite the fact that it is well archived at Fox. The only way to watch this show is to find ripped episodes online. There are only about 10 episodes that can be found on YouTube, which is sad considering the daily program had 1,853 episodes, and because of Fox News sticking to habits, this is likely to happen to The Greg Gutfeld Show also.
  • The AMC period sitcom Remember WENN, an unfortunate casualty of the pre-Mad Men era, is not on DVD and not in syndication.
  • Certain 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. The broadcasting company plans on taking down all the episodes on YouTube, subs and all.
  • The early '90s Irish Puppet Show Rimini Riddle is now impossible to find, except for two short clips on YouTube. Most of what is known about the show comes from the vague memories of people who watched it as kids.
  • The Rosie O'Donnell Show. Despite the show being very popular during its run, it was cancelled in 2002 and was not even rerun. Episodes and clips are pretty easy to find on YouTube, however.
  • Safe at Home is another 1980s Superstation TBS sitcom that is so obscure, it's extremely hard to believe it ever existed at all. First and foremost, the series has never seen any reruns, streaming or DVD releases, torrent releases, nothing. Unlike a similar show, Down to Earth, this show doesn't even have any of its episodes released on YouTube, not even its theme song can be found anywhere. It's especially rather surprising that this show is obscure, considering Richard Steven Horvitz played one of the characters. The only trace of this series to be found anywhere is on Wikipedia, where you'll find that the show is so obscure, no one knows what year it ended.
  • Any Saturday-morning preview special falls under this territory. Since they were only made with the intention of promoting that year's Saturday-morning line-up, they never got any sort of home media release, despite some of them featuring unique wraparound content, like ABC's Pac-Preview Party, NBC's Alvin Goes Back to School and WB's Welcome Home, Animaniacs! Your only option is to stumble upon a home VHS recording of such a special's original broadcast.
  • Short Ribbs was not nationally syndicated, but shown on only one Los Angeles station for 13 episodes in 1989. At present, only one full episode and two half-episodes are on YouTube. In April 2022, William Winckler uploaded three episodes to the Internet Archive.
  • 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 afterward 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 United States, 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).
  • Super Sentai:
    • GoGo Sentai Boukenger: Most episodes on original broadcast had 30-second segments of the Boukengers discussing their Super Sentai predecessors, to celebrate the franchise's 30th anniversary. These have never been seen again, not even as DVD extras, so low-resolution (having been recorded in 2006) TV rips with the TV Asahi clock in the corner are the only option.
    • Tensou Sentai Goseiger: Similarly to Boukenger above, before episodes of Goseiger aired, Toei aired old Super Sentai Vs movies, cut into half-hour timeslots, in order to prepare young viewers for the upcoming 35th anniversary celebrations. These airings were bookended by introductions from Goseigers, which also have never been re-released.
    • Zyuden Sentai Kyoryuger and Doubutsu Sentai Zyuohger both featured viewer-submitted clips of fans doing the ending dance for their original broadcasts. These were removed for the shows' streaming and home video releases, replaced by the normal ending dance by the cast.
    • Ressha Sentai ToQger had its ending feature viewer-submitted clips of trains. These are completely gone from the streaming and home video releases of the show. Unlike the dance examples above, there was no "default" version to revert to, so the ending is gone completely from the show, cutting straight from the episodes to the next episode previews, meaning that the accompanying song, "Byun Byun ToQger", is only ever heard in the final episode, where it plays over the final scene.
  • Superior Court: Another dramatized court show in the 1980s never released on DVD since it last aired in repeats on USA Network in the early 1990s.
  • Takeshi's Castle:
    • The final season of the Gag Dub Most Extreme Elimination Challenge never appeared on DVD, and the "Real Monsters vs. Commercial Mascots" episode on the Season 2 box set was subjected to Clumsy Copyright Censorship and is also unavailable on iTunes, Amazon Instant Video, and Hulu.
    • And for that matter, the Almost live Special that kicked off Season 3, and the two Season 4 Clip Shows were also left out of the DVD releases.
  • This Is the Life and other religious dramas from the 1950s through the 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. YouTube didn't get any episodes until around 2011, when three episodes, one from the original ABC run and two others from the early-to-mid 1960s were uploaded there; no episodes have been 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, and that the Aesops too often represented the teachings of the era.
    • Related: Insight, a syndicated anthology drama series by Paulist Productions, which ran from 1960 to 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 sectarian 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 25 years of the show's run (250 episodes), only ten episodes are available 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 possible reason is that the show represented Catholic theology of its time and may no longer represent current Church doctrine on a lot of issues.
      • Paulist Productions has uploaded a number of episodes to YouTube.
  • Tracker (2001) only had a DVD release in the form of a cobbled-together pseudo-"movie" of a couple of episodes. Fans refused to buy it, and Lions Gate never saw the point of a whole series DVD release. Cue the fan-made DVDs.
  • Both the Hawaiian and Cinar English dubs of the Ultra Series show Ultraseven, due to Tsuburaya’s ongoing legal battle with Chaiyo Productions/UMC. Tsuburaya currently owns the three surviving episodes of the Hawaiian Dub (21, 22, 35), and all the audio and visual materials from the Cinar Dub. Tsuburaya has released the three Hawaiian Dub episodes as a DVD bonus feature, and for years fans have been circulating taped episodes of the Cinar Dub since it went off the air on TNT.
    • It's not dubbed - only subtitled - but Ultra Seven (And Ultra Q) did see a release from Shout! Factory.
  • The 1993 produced-in-Canada TV version of The Untouchables with Tom Amandes, William Forsythe, and John Rhys-Davies.
  • The Norwegian julekalender Vazelina Hjulkalender is unavailable on streaming services, and its DVD is out of print (it never got a Blu-ray release). The show was temporarily rescued by a re-broadcast in 2021 after being absent since 2009, but it went back to being unavailable once it stopped airing.
  • 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.
  • Saban's VR Troopers has not been rerun since its initial airing, and some episodes are extremely rare in that the full episode only aired once.
    • In "Field Goal", Footbot's football bomb was caught and passed back to him near the end of the battle, which is why he was smoking before JB used the laser lance on him. He also initially was impaled like most monsters and threw his arms up in surrender
    • In "Troopers Out Of Time", despite what later edits would lead you to believe, the laser lance did NOT finish off Fanbot, in fact, it did next to nothing except distract him from sucking up JB because it TICKLED. After the distraction was over, the previously goofy Fanbot decided to get serious and prepared to suck JB up permanently before he had to use the VR Technobazooka to finish off the robot (normally reserved for air assault), but for some reason powered up the laser lance again (probably to take out the nearby skugs). This wasn't American footage, either, the original Metal Heroes episode suffered the same fate.
    • In the episode where they went back in time and Ryan was left in the present to battle Lizbot, there's a missing scene where he battles and destroys Lizbot. She was destroyed in an unusually violent manner that ended with her coughing up whatever blood they have and was cut from rebroadcasts for obvious reasons.
    • In the last episode, when Grimlord is trying to drain the new robot Galileo, the scene before he crashes the computer is longer.
  • Detroit independent WGPR-TV produced three different music shows in the vein of Soul Train during The '70s, The '80s, and The '90s, first The Scene, then Contempo, and finally The New Dance Show, the latter of which was cancelled soon after the station was sold to CBS and became WWJ-TV. Not surprisingly, none of these programs have seen rereleases outside of YouTube uploads of varying quality despite people having fond memories of each, though as of 2020 The New Dance Show is being rerun on local low-powered station WHPS-CD.
  • A UK-voiced variant of World's Most Amazing Videos was produced, initially for Flextech's Bravo, and went on to air on Channel One (previously Virgin 1), but ever since the closure of those channels in January 2011, no other UK TV channels have aired the series. As a result, episodes of the UK variant of the show are hard to come by online.
  • 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.
  • For the French puppet show Les Minikeums, don't expect an official reissue of all the old material to be released anytime soon. Just trust devoted fans. And God help you if you want to find the obscure younger-kid-oriented spinoff Les Zamikeums.
    • The 2017 revival was cancelled in 2021, and all of the sketches that were uploaded on the show's official YouTube account were deleted.


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