"But now, all of cable TV seems to operate in blocks and I have no freaking idea why. If you're giving me eight straight hours of King of the Hill, aren't you forcing every single non-King of the Hill fan to abandon your channel for the rest of the day to go watch something else?"
So you're curling up on the armchair to watch your favorite show — but the schedule has been changed and yet another airing of the network's most popular (or just favored by execs) show is airing in its place. Your blood boils, but there's nothing you can do — it's the network's pet program.
This is Adored by the Network in a nutshell. An over-promoted, over-aired program that either dominates the entire schedule or gets promoted over every other show on the network or some combination of the two. Whenever networks stumble upon a massive hit show, this show usually gets the most attention and most promotion. Marathons are run, special programming events occur often surrounding the show, and the show is given multiple airings daily.
This usually comes at the expense all the other shows on the channel, particularly the shows on the verge of being canceled. At the very least, they will just be ignored. At the very worst, they can be canceled or re-tooled to make it more in line with the adored show. And at very, very, worst — it could signal the first signs of Network Decay, as the network may add more shows similar to the network darling to the lineup.
Despite the network's fixation on this show, it doesn't fit the nature of being the Creator's Pet because, well, if it's a hit, then many people like it. It may be a critical darling that's loved by all. You yourself may like the show. But you also like other shows on the channel and the overbearing presence of the program just may be too much. Naturally, if a single series is on all the time, it may lead to Hype Backlash through overexposure, since even the people who genuinely enjoy the show may get sick of it. Enough of this can ironically result into the show being considered Screwed by the Network, as it can lead to the show's downfall and cancellation.
Before you add an example, keep in mind this isn't Complaining About Shows You Don't Like. Also, the simple act of airing the show a lot of times doesn't alone qualify it for this trope. The network has to go above and beyond to prop this show up constantly.
See also Cash Cow Franchise, Hollywood Hype Machine (when this happens to actors), Creator's Pet (when this happens to characters and the fans are annoyed), Wolverine Publicity and Network Decay. Contrast Screwed by the Network; also sometimes the result of this trope. See also Network Red Headed Stepchild.
While Naruto was very popular, it wasn't actually on as much as the picture makes it seem. It was only aired for an hour between nine and ten P.M. on weekdays, and on Toonami. The only time it continued for days was celebrating the 100th episode...which went on for three straight days by showing every episode in a row (though Adult Swim still had its normal night programs.
For Christmas Eve and New Years Eve of 2011, Adult Swim aired Bleach marathons. That's right..TWO marathons of the EXACT SAME SHOW for two weeks in a row!
In the late 90's through early 2000's, Cartoon Network loved Sailor Moon.
Digimon was this for the ailing Fox Kids around the time of Digimon Adventure; the love sort of petered off by the end of Digimon Adventure 02. It was picked up by the network in order to compete with Pokémon on Kids' WB! and capitalize on the anime boom. Some Saturday mornings, Digimon would air three times. It supplanted Power Rangers (circa Power Rangers Lost Galaxy) as the most popular show on the block and booted the show from its long-time schedule spots (9am EST Saturdays and 4pm EST weekdays). This still rankles long time Power Rangers fans, as it would retroactively prove to be a foreshadowing for that series sinking even lower under Disney...
The CW4kids themed block "Toonzai" currently airs between two to three hours of Yu-Gi-Oh! content within its six hour time slot on Saturday mornings, plus Yu-Gi-Oh! advertisements for new cards and episodes intermittent between the other shows. They also air Dinosaur King, a series with a similar format to Yu-Gi-Oh!, and advertise Bakugan, which is a competitor complete with card game centric anime itself. Any impressionable mind watching the current Saturday morning block on the CW is GOING to be convinced that people dramatically waving trading cards around is the coolest thing ever. Justified in that Yu-Gi-Oh has recently secured itself in the Guinness Book of World Records (in 2009) as most successful trading card game worldwide, and that there was a theatrical film out recently.
In addition, "Toonzai" commercials advertise shows for an afternoon slot. Starting at exactly noon, "Toonzai"'s out and CW is showing other things (the first of which is "Preachings of the Eucharist" or something similarly titled, which is watching a priest do Sunday Church things). Double Screwing.
Toonami was obviously head-over-heels for Dragon Ball Z which, up until it ended in 2003, (then up until the uncut version stopped airing in 2005) was shown as many times as possible. To be fair, it was highly acclaimed, very popular, and the biggest ratings grabber at the time. And then came a certain show about an orange-wearing ninja... (pictured above)
Dragon Ball Z Kai has now become this for Nicktoons Network, with anywhere from three to six hours worth being shown on any given day in total. This has gotten to such a point that Nicktoons began airing the original Dragon Ball Z movies in an almost completely uncut format, with the only real edit so far being a Hitler scene in Dragon Ball Z: Fusion Reborn getting excised. All blood, violence, and profanity is kept, at aTV-Y7-FVrating no less.
Adult Swim ran Cowboy Bebop every night for something like six years, and since then with very rare exceptions they still show one or two episodes every Saturday night. It's only twenty-six episodes long.
Adult Swim explicitly stated on multiple occasions that FLCL was their favorite anime, and they sure showed it for a while. The high amount of airings was especially notable given the fact that the series had only 6 episodes, which resulted in much replay of each episode.
Both seasons of Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex are also relatively popular on the block, having been a near-perennial feature since it was introduced, and temporarily pushing out the above Cowboy Bebop on Toonami's schedule when they acquired Eureka Seven and Samurai 7.
Animax Latin America was criticized towards its anime-only run because of this. Between 2005 to 2007, shows such as Fullmetal Alchemist and Get Backers (and to a lesser extent, Hunter × Hunter and Pita-Ten, although the latter was removed from the schedule in 2007). To be fair though, both of the former two series did have 52 episodes. When The Twelve Kingdoms premiered, it cluttered most of the schedule in the past few years (It had 47 episodes).
Spanish network Antena 3 's sub-network Neo X might as well be called The Crayon Shin Chan Network, with around over 3 hours of it every day on morning, with weekends tacking in a Shinchan movie after all of that. There aren't that many movies, so after a month they just loop. Eventually they just ditched the movies and had five hours of Shin Chan on weekends. Sure, Spaniards love Shin-chan, but is that overkill really needed? Then again, Antena 3 itself has been showing two Simpson episodes a day.... for well over a decade. The situation eventually calmed down; now they "only" show two hours.
For a time, Jetix would show 24 hour marathons of Pucca at the drop of a hat.
Pokémon for Kids' WB!. Sometimes they would show nothing but the show to promote a special or new movie, and they'd sometimes show it for three hours at a time. Cartoon Network, the show's current channel, doesn't do this nearly as often.
Kids WB's adoration for all things Pokemon even spilled into their promotional attempts for other shows in their lineup. During a Batman Beyond-themed Y2K event, viewers were encouraged to send in their predictions of the future to be read on the air. One of the more notable entries: "In the future, Pokemon will be on every channel all day long." The daydreams of someone truly obsessed with the series, or an early example of epic trolling?
Italian television channel Italia 1 is very, very fond of Dragon Ball. They aired the three series (Dragon Ball, Dragon Ball Z and Dragon Ball GT) continuously since 1998: after GT's ending, they start over again with the first episode of Dragon Ball, then Z, then GT... As of July 2012, we're reaching the end of the sixth rerun of Z (if this number doesn't impress you, be wary that Italia 1 is a general-purpose channel, not an anime-only, and they air one episode per day... This means that for almost twelve years there wasn't a day without Dragon Ball!).
Films — Animation
For a few years at the Turn of the Millennium, there were 24-hour marathons of The Iron Giant on Cartoon Network every Thanksgiving Day. Justified, since viewership was way down (most everyone who's watching TV on Thanksgiving is watching football anyway) and they could write off advertising and let most of their employees take the holiday off.
Before Disney Channel, Disney XD and ABC Family aired the movie, Starz and Encore's kids channels seemed to be quite fond of Toy Story 3.
ABC Family must always play Aladdin every three months or so. The network is owned by Disney, and they don't play their animated classics as often as this.
ABC Family also airs The Lion King often since its 2011 re-release. This happens nearly once every month, save November and December due to all the Christmas movies taking up those slots. On May 5, 2012 they aired the movie 2 times in a row, one airing after another.
ABC Familyreally likes using whatever excuse they can to air their Harry Potter marathons. Upcoming movies, Christmas, Memorial Day, whatever. Between the length of the films and frequent commercial breaks, "Harry Potter Weekends" now last up to five days long, and they're still only up to the penultimate film.
Or they'll pull out some Disney and/or Pixar movies, or teen chick flicks. Out of all such movies, The Princess Diaries is played quite often.
And most of ALL...monthly airings of Holes!! You could recite the movie line-for-line by seeing it so many times!
Matilda. It feels like they show it every three weeks; must be a Roald Dahl fetish...
In some period around 2005, they played Mrs. Doubtfire at least once per month.
Peachtree TV (WPCH, formerly [[TBS) WTBS]], appears to have a particular fetish for certain films which are played over and over and over on a regular basis, and this has been going on for years. Examples include The Hunt For Red October, A Few Good Men, and the Lethal Weapon movies.
For a couple of years one could watch The Breakfast Club just about every weekend by tuning in to this channel, if one were so inclined.
Spike seems to have a Star Wars marathon, showing all six films, roughly every third weekend.
Whichever network currently holds the rerun rights to the James Bond films goes crazy rerunning them as often as possible before the tide changes. In The Nineties, TBS and TNT cornered the market on marathon runs of Bond movies (to the point that there was a joke about it in American Beauty), followed by AMC for a little while at the Turn of the Millennium. Since then, the status of "James Bond Network" has rotated between Spike, the Encore movie networks (in 2012 the main channel showed a different one every night in prime time for a month, while sister channels Action, Suspense, etc. got in on the fun by sprinkling the films throughout their schedules), and G4.
Craig-era Bond seems to have been handed over to USA Network after it decided to retire its longstanding status as The Mummy Network.
In the UK, ITV had them from 1975 through 2012, when they were acquired by the premium channel Sky Movies.... who then proceeded to turn one of its multiplexes into a channel dedicated exclusively to airing the films (and other documentaries/behind the scenes features) in honor of the 50th anniversary of the first Bond film on October 5, 2012. The channel was taken down from the holiday season so it could turn into a Christmas movies channel, until it returned off and on in early 2013.
The summer of 2012 saw the Encore movie networks become addicted to the Christopher Reeve Superman films. It tapered off as the year saw itself out, but well into early 2013, one of them could still be guaranteed to run Superman IV The Quest For Peace several times each month. (The film is extremely short, so it was probably easy to slot into schedules.)
In April 2013, the Encore networks became devoted to the original nine-film run of The Pink Panther series.
There also existed a channel that played the film Rudy for 24 hours straight in some areas.
TBS has an annual 24-hour marathon of A Christmas Story, Christmas Eve night to Christmas Day night. Granted, it's a beloved holiday classic. (It's also used to give most of their employees Christmas off. When that's all you're showing, all you need is a bare bones staff to make sure the building doesn't burn down.)
Men In Black and its first sequel are also adored by TBS.
It seems as if TBS can't go a month without showing Dumb and Dumber.
For years, Telemundo would often use any major holiday as an excuse to play back to back Cantinflas movies. Though this is akin to a Robert De Niro marathon, in that it's not the repeat of the same movie, or the same series of movies, but a bunch of movies with similar flavors.
Until about 2002 it was shocking if a week went by without them airing the 1986 bomb Stewardess School.
Another movie that Comedy Central adored back then was the 1988 film Glitch.
FOX constantly shows Independence Day whenever a big event is happening on another network: Super Bowl, Oscars, etc... In fact, Independence Day on every station that gets the rights to it. There was one time, around 2009-ish, when it popped up every other weekend. TBS played it constantly, and so did WGN.
Every time a Star Wars prequel was released, Australia's Fox-affiliated Channel 10 showed the original trilogy over three weekends and promoted the crap out of it, often bookending commercial breaks with two promos for the same film. It's an older example, but it checks out.
After AMC stopped emphasizing classic movies but before they had original series such as Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and The Walking Dead, the network went through different phases where they played the same movie practically every day for months until they found a new movie to obsess over and the cycle began anew. Examples included (but were not limited to):
TNT and USA are both very bad about going through phases where they'll show the same movie over and over and over again, whether it's The Dark Knight on TNT or National Treasure on USA - if either of them shows the movie once, you know you'll be seeing it again within the week.
Ted Turner adored The Shawshank Redemption. He owned the rights at one point, so after its poor showing at the box office his networks aired it weekly, single-handedly making it Vindicated by Cable.
Have a day off from school or work? Chances are Vantage Point is playing this morning on FX.
Iron Man has started to become a staple movie on FX.
ION Television lovesClint Eastwood movies, playing them practically every other weekend.
Surprisingly, for a Canadian niche channel, Space subverted this in its early years. Someone must have dug through the dusty trash archives of Hollywood to come up with the weird, obscure, "new" movies they played every weekend. The height of this was a month-long event where every weekend they would play three rat-themed horror movies. Most people would be hard pressed to think of one, and someone paid out the rights for twelve of the damn things.
The programming director at Turner Classic Movies must really love the near-forgotten 1963 epic 55 Days at Peking. The film has played at least once every other month since late 2011. This is odd, since it's rare that TCM plays a movie more than a few times a year (owing to its enormous library).
There are also phases when TCM can't get enough of My Fair Lady. It played almost monthly in 2010, and again since October 2012 (with as many as two airings per month).
Doctor Zhivago and Citizen Kane have been getting this treatment for years. This is understandable given their popularity and acclaim. Why the comparatively-obscure The Wind and the Lion gets nearly as much air time is anyone's guess.
It was impossible to watch Fox Movie Channel in 2011 without running into some combination of The Return of Frank James, The Desert Fox and/or Royal Flash.
There was a period in 2012 where Starz seemed to run Friends with Benefits every day.
Professional Wrestling
WCW itself was adored not so much by the network, but by Ted Turner himself. It was his baby/vanity project, as he credited WCW's predecessor, Georgia Championship Wrestling, with helping get Super StationWTBS noticed in its early days (along with Atlanta Braves baseball). The fact that it lost money for most of its existence was of no concern to him since, for someone like Ted, the amount of money that WCW lost was never more than pocket change. If it hadn't been for the AOL/Time Warner merger, WCW would almost certainly be in business. However, WCW was most definitely not adored by an AOL exec named Jamie Kellner, who within a few weeks on the job cancelled all professional wrestling related programming.
Professional sports. Immensely popular, sure, but try to imagine what it's like for people who don't like sports to have a program you have no interest in that can preempt the shows you DO want to watch seemingly at any time, rarely ends at the scheduled time (sometimes causing the next show to begin "in progress" or be skipped entirely), and when it does end and you think your show is about to start... here comes the post game show. And then the other networks only run reruns against it because they don't want to have to compete with the show "everyone" is watching. For that, you can blame Heidi.
This was actually lampshaded by on the Series 16 premiere of Top Gear in January 2011:
Jeremy Clarkson: Can I just say how nice it is to be back where we belong? BBC2, 8:00, Sunday night. Unless of course somebody's organized a snooker tournament, in which case, happy Easter!
Football in the United States. If it's autumn and your network carries the NFL, expect a pop-up ad or commercial every five minutes reminding you when the next game is and who's playing. Even when it's a sports station like ESPN, the NFL will be promoted far more than anything else it carries. Those above problems with preemption? Baseball fans have the same problem when they're waiting for the World Series and Fox won't cut away from James Brown and Terry Bradshaw yukking it up...
Tennis on Eurosport. Go to any forum of a particular sport that isn't Association Football (or Tennis obviously) and you are guaranteed to find that most European fans there absolutely despise Tennis for the sole reason that they've spent large chunks of the last 20 years wanting to watch their favorite sport but not able to, as Eurosport was preempting it with an overtimed Tennis match, usually from the lower rounds of some unimportant tournament. Cycling and Basketball fans are especially prone to fly into a rage from this.
For Canadian sport networks, hockey is the most aired sport on Sportsnet, TSN (The Expy of ESPN) and CBC. This really shouldn't be much surprise in Canada. There are network favourites. Before Hockey Night in Canada switched to a early and late game broadcast in 1995, if you wanted to see any Canadian team aside from the Maple Leafs or the Canadiens, you either had to hope it they were playing in Toronto or Montreal, or that they made the playoffs and Toronto or Montreal weren't playing that night. The absurdity of this is indicated that in the mid-1980s, when Wayne Gretzky and the Edmonton Oilers were the best team in the league, it was almost impossible for someone in Eastern Canada to ever seen them on TV.
Video Games
Valve's obsession with continually updating Team Fortress 2 and expanding the Left 4 Dead franchise has been viewed as taking precedence over making new games, Half-Life 2: Episode 3 in particular, even though separate groups work on each series of games.
This is mainly because TF2 and L4D are their most popular products.
In the late 90s, this seemed to be the reverse case for Blizzard, with all their efforts directed towards Starcraft + Expansions, and Diablo 2 + Expansions. Other than an upgraded re-release of Warcraft 2 that allowed you to play on Battle.net, Warcraft wasn't getting much love until Warcraft 3 was finally released. It's like the company as a whole has tunnel vision on whatever they're developing next.
There is also the fact that Final Fantasy I and II are the most simple games of the saga. They include little to no plot (which means there is no translation), few enemies (for a final fantasy game), few classes (6 in FFI*
Fighter, Thief, Black Belt, and the White, Red, and Black Magi
, none in FFII) and the game mechanics in general are simple. The fact that they have so many ports is most likely due to how cheap making said port actually is. More complex games (except for FFIV/FFVII) hardly ever see the light, most likely since they are not as easy to make as FFI/FFII but not as popular as FFIV/FFVII. This would explain why FFIII is the game with less ports in all the saga.
Understandably, Final Fantasy is a Cash Cow Franchise for Square, and justly widely enjoyed. However, true to this effect, it has a habit of overshadowing other efforts that the company occasionally puts forth. The game Xenogears was hit particularly hard by this, when its budget and production schedule slashed in favor of the soon-to-be-released Final Fantasy VIII, resulting in a sharp decrease in quality and quantity of gameplay in the second half of the game.
Tales Of Phantasia for the Super Famicom has gotten four remakes: first for the PlayStation, second for the Gameboy Advance, third for the PlayStation Portable, and fourth again for the PlayStation Portable with updated battle graphics as part of Tales of Phantasia: Narikiri Dungeon X. Unfortunately, only the Gameboy Advance version, widely considered the weakest version, is the only one that has seen an official English version.
a store where you can buy cosmetic items and emotes
. Most players hate them, but Jagex is in love with them (for obvious reasons) and updates them once or twice a week, giving each update huge amounts of fanfare.
Most games from AeriaGames tend to get this treatment when they first get it...and then goes in the opposite direction once it leaves open, or even closed beta. There are a large number of games with game breaking bugs that don't seem to be fixed for months, driving people away from the game, eventually getting it tossed completely. Very few games escape this fate, and these tend to have a somewhat more permanent spot for this trope. So much, they advertise them and their new games in their dying games forums.
