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This entry is trivia, which is cool and all, but not a trope. On a work, it goes on the Trivia tab.

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Adored by the Network

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"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?"
— Cracked, "5 Ways Television Went Crazy Since I Quit Watching in 2003"

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 of 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. This may lead to even the people who genuinely enjoy the show may getting sick of it. Enough of this can ironically result in the show being considered Screwed by the Network, as it can lead to the show's downfall and cancellation.

As of The New '10s, the trope has exploded across all networks, due to the changing landscape of television due to the meteoric rise of streaming services. Ratings for live viewing have fallen dramatically, particularly for networks aimed towards children and young people. Most of a network's day schedule usually consists of one or two shows that are dependable for ratings and ad revenue, with premieres airing erratically. Adored By The Network has now become the de facto standard for much of television.

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 Marathon Running (where whole marathons can be dedicated to a single show), Cash-Cow Franchise, Hollywood Hype Machine (when this happens to actors), Creator's Pet (when this happens to characters and the fans are annoyed), Repeating Ad (when this happens to commercials), Wolverine Publicity, and Network Decay. Network to the Rescue is a sure sign of this. Contrast Screwed by the Network; also sometimes the result of this trope. See also Network Red-Headed Stepchild, Renewed Before Premiere.

Example subpages:

By medium

By network/show

Other examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Anime & Manga 
  • Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba, from just the initial good reception of a special theatrical cut of the first 5 episodes in Japan, the series aired in more than 20 stations at first, and when its gargantuan success had been solidified Fuji Television who initially rejected the series, thinking it wouldn't be any special, had to beg for the series' broadcasting rights, airing on a prime time slot, getting great results in its rerun; after that, constant reruns became common.
  • 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: The Series 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...
  • Before it was replaced by E/I programming, the CW4Kids themed block "Toonzai" aired 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 aired Dinosaur King, a series with a similar format to Yu-Gi-Oh!, and advertised Bakugan, which is a competitor complete with card game-centric anime itself. Any impressionable mind watching the Saturday morning block on the CW at the time was convinced that people dramatically waving trading cards around was the coolest thing ever. This was all justified in that Yu-Gi-Oh! had secured itself in the Guinness Book of World Records in 2009 as the most successful trading card game worldwide, and the fact that a theatrical film was released during this time period.
    • Yu-Gi-Oh! was this no matter what The CW called its kids' block in the pre-One Magnificent Morning era. It was also true when The CW was The WB. Even as other shows got moved around, screwed around, and didn't get to complete their runs even when they were far from Long-Runners, the original Yu-Gi-Oh! and at least one of its sequels never failed to air multiple episodes every Saturday ever. Even a new or new-to-CW show that was treated half as well as YGO reruns would have been a sign of the apocalypse, unless that new show was a YGO sequel.
  • Dragon Ball Z Kai was this for Nicktoons, with anywhere from three to six hours worth being shown on any given day in total. It got to the point where Nicktoons began airing the original Dragon Ball Z movies in an almost completely uncut format, with the only real edit being a Hitler scene in Dragon Ball Z: Fusion Reborn. All blood, violence, and profanity were kept, at a TV-Y7-FV rating no less.
  • Animax Latin America was criticized for its anime-only run because of this. Between 2005 to 2007, shows such as Fullmetal Alchemist (2003) and Get Backers (and to a lesser extent, Hunter × Hunter and Pita-Ten, although the latter was removed from the schedule in 2007) were being overplayed. 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).
  • Animax Asia averts this at first, with a lot of variety in the anime shown until somewhere around 2012 to 2014 the channel has aired nothing but Hayate the Combat Butler and all three seasons of the Pretty Rhythm franchise.
  • Spanish network Antena 3 's sister channel Neox 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 Crayon Shin-chan on weekends. Sure, Spaniards love Shin-chan, but is that overkill 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.
    • Spanish kids channel Boing loves Doraemon so much that broadcasts at least eight episodes every day, and it's very strange to put the channel and find that they are not broadcasting Doraemon (or, for a time, earlier seasons of Adventure Time). Sadly, the logic effect of this has been the disband of all the grown-up fans who came to the channel attracted by its broadcasting One Piece and Naruto Shippuden, which now belong to a past era of Boing.
    • Ditto for the Italian version of Boing, to the point that is one of the very few things they air that is not a Cartoon Network show.
  • Pokémon: The Series 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 and Disney XD don't do this nearly as often.
    • Kids WB's adoration for all things Pokémon 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, Pokémon will be on every channel all day long." The dreams 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!).
  • Italia 1 also adores Hello! Sandybell. In 2018, it was marathoned for all of September, even taking up a timeslot that was originally meant to go to the re-broadcast of Georgie!.
  • It's hard not to turn on the Japanese version of Animax and see a show that's not named Chibi Maruko-chan or GeGeGe no Kitarō. Whenever a show gets cancelled, they replace it with one of these shows.
  • Animax Central Europe adored Shōnen series over all other genres, Naruto in particular, of which at the time of their decline, they aired two episodes daily, and another two on Wednesdays (since the channel was only on the air from 8 PM to 2 AM, that's a lot). The lack of variety in their anime series is seen as one of the reasons why the channel was terminated.
  • From 2015 until 2017, the Japanese children's channel Kids Station loved Yo Kai Watch so much that it aired five and a half hours of the show every day. Justified, though, as it was one of the biggest Cash Cow Franchises in the demographic.
    • Kids Station also has a fondness for Anpanman, airing at least three episodes a day and holding special events based on the show at least once a month.
  • Crayon Shin-chan and Doraemon are adored by Hungama TV in India, airing both multiple times everyday.
  • When Sailor Moon was popular in Canada, YTV aired the show sixteen times in one week. It also helped that the show fulfilled Canadian content requirements since the show was dubbed there.
  • Sonic X was absolutely beloved by 4Kids; even as their block changed identities, moved to different channels, and cycled through shows, Sonic X always had a spot on the lineup, despite having gone through its entire run dozens of times on Saturday morning television. Furthermore, as of July 1, 2017, Sinclair Broadcast Group's "KidsClick" syndicated block has picked the show up and given it slots on both the weekday and weekend lineups, despite it being fourteen years old.
  • Black Clover became Crunchyroll's favorite when the anime was released, and the site is pushing hard for it to become the next Naruto, famou0sly calling it "the next king of Shonen". But hey, at least on Crunchyroll you can choose what to see.
  • Central Park Media's president John O'Donnell loved the obscure late '80s OVA MD Geist, making Geist the "company's spokemecha" and having him feature in the compan
y indent, having Jason Beck (Geist's English dub VA) be the voice of the company's voicemail, funding not only a "director's cut" of the OVA but also a full-blown sequel, and commissioning a lavish DVD and multiple mangas and other merchandise, etc. O'Donnell's obsession with MD Geist reportedly baffled and annoyed his subordinates, as detailed here by former employee Justin Sevakis.
  • Taiwanese kids' channel My Kids TV airs PriPara for three and a half hours each day.
  • Magical Princess Minky Momo.
    • In Japan, it was originally meant to have 50 episodes, but the Periphery Demographic led to extending them to 63.
    • Arabic channel Space Toon re-ran Minky Momo in 2020 and 2021, and every day during February 2023.
  • Space Toon:
    • Due to operating on a limited budget, old animes like Perusha or Kobo-Chan are often re-aired in the ill-fated Indonesian branch that only lasted for 8 years unlike other TV stations which managed to last up to present day in Indonesia.
    • Himitsu no Hanazono was re-run in 2016 and 2020. It is often featured on advertisements and promo images, because Germans Love David Hasselhoff.
    • They also frequently ran Minky Momo (see above).
    Comic Books 
  • Batman: Despite Superman being the defining superhero, it's Batman who is the most pushed by DC, up to the point that the company is literally named after the comic that he debuted in. Any Bat-Event will usually be billed as the big event, and more often than not, the Bat-books (Batman, Batgirl, Nightwing, etc.) will outnumber the collective total of every other Justice Leaguer. This was especially noticeable during the New 52 reboot, when DC wanted to have 52 titles... and filled out 25% of the lineup with Bat-books, either starring Batman himself in a starring or supporting role, or showcasing several characters related to him, leaving other characters scrambling to be noticed in any way, shape, or form. This is also noticeable in terms of the creative teams — more often than not, DC will put popular and big-name writers on the Bat-books.
  • Captain Marvel: The Carol Danvers incarnation of Captain Marvel. Because Marvel have historically lacked prominent superheroines whose film rights they owned, the 2010s saw Carol Danvers adopt the Captain Marvel moniker and receive a huge push as their flagship female character. She has since never been without a solo series, was put on more than a few teams, and usually was an important figure in their events. This is probably due in part to the massive appeal Carol (and her merch) have outside of traditional monthly comics sales, with many people owning t-shirts, jackets, water bottles, and other official paraphenalia bearing her logo. The company loves her and continue to market her as their main female character at the expense of most other, more well-established characters like Invisible Woman and Storm (although these are usually chalked up to Marvel giving more and more exposure to The Avengers at the expense of the FF and the X-Men as the decade went on, due to the aforementioned lack of movie rights).
    • It's also possible that this is due to rights concerns with DC, as both companies have used the Captain Marvel name, but copyright law dictates that there can only be one comic called Captain Marvel; meaning if Marvel doesn't put one out, DC might and Marvel wouldn't be able to use the name as a comic title anymore (and unlike with DC's Captain Marvel, there's no easy alternative name).
  • The Inhumans: The Inhumans were heavily pushed by Marvel in the 2010s, receiving big promotional pushes and involvement in crossover events. This stems from Marvel not owning the film rights to the X-Men, thus Marvel CEO Ike Perlmutter wanting to use the Inhumans in their place as the naturally superpowered minority allegory. Although their film was scheduled to be developed, increased awareness of the brand and more stories to draw on for adaptations and merchandise was required, as well as more popularity in general given how obscure they are, and so they were given more shots than would normally be warranted given just how poorly they sold (their sales were usually always under the usual Marvel/DC cancellation threshold). This subsided when the Inhumans' TV adaptation bombed, the film rights to the X-Men were reacquired and Marvel was eventually restructured to minimise Perlmutter's influence, which saw an almost instantaneous decrease in the Inhumans' promotion. Media outside of comics that began production after the return of the X-Men film rights noticeably lacks prominent Inhumans elements, with even their Breakout Character Kamala Khan, being introduced into the MCU with the Inhumans elements removed. The last episode of Ms. Marvel (2022) even reveals that she's a mutant.
  • Suicide Squad: The Suicide Squad has been pushed to a degree far surpassing its sales totals. Prior to 2011, there had only been one ongoing Suicide Squad series that ran for a respectable 66 issues in the late 80s and early 90s, but it was given a huge push by the New 52. Counting New Suicide Squad, there have been five Suicide Squad ongoings since that period—each time the book falls below a threshold that most books would get cancelled at, it simply relaunches with a new creative team. It also has a noticeably outsized presence in events, most notably Justice League vs. Suicide Squad, which by its very name puts the team on level pegging with DC's traditional A-listers. This isn't even mentioning cross-media projects, such as the team getting a live-action film adaptation, multiple direct-to-video animated films, and a big-budget video game from the same studio as the Arkham games. This is despite the fact that it's never been an especially strong seller—for instance, its first post-New 52 series, a year after launch, sold only slightly more than Justice League International, which was cancelled that same month and has yet to return since.

    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. That said, Cartoon Network has been known to flood their timeslots with The Iron Giant on other holidays too, such as Memorial Day, supposedly because it's Ted Turner's favorite movie.
  • The Shrek films, specifically the first two, are played to death on Turner networks, particularly on Cartoon Network and Atlanta station WPCH-TV (Peachtree TV). The latter in particular airs the first two movies on what seems like almost every weekend.
    • Ditto for fellow DreamWorks film Shark Tale, as it pops up on CN and Peachtree TV quite often.
  • HBO Family seems to love playing The LEGO Movie, on most weekends and holidays. Before that, any of the latest Dreamworks Animation films.
  • Before Disney Channel, Disney XD and ABC Family aired the movie, Starz and Encore's kid's channels seemed to be quite fond of Toy Story 3.
    • Starz Kids also adores Astro Boy.
    • Starz also gave this treatment to Inside Out after its premiere on February 26, 2016. They aired it every single day for two weeks in a row, a feat which no new-to-the-channel Disney or Pixar movie was able to accomplish beforehand.note  Like the Lion King example on the Disney page, they often aired the movie twice in a row, which happened the day it premiered. But after a month or so, its exposure began to taper off, so Inside Out only aired once every four days, and only during the early morning or prime time. They reversed this in September of 2016, when the movie started to air on every weekend possible (with the first airing in a while playing the same day Disney on Ice Presents Follow Your Heart - which heavily features the main characters of Inside Out - made its world premiere). It took until December 23rd for Starz Kids to bring it back into daily rotation.
    • Ever since December 2018, the channel has aired the An American Tail movies every other day, sometimes twice in the same day.
  • The Hub:
    • They used to like airing Monster House nearly every month before moving on to The Nightmare Before Christmas. Planet 51 was another victim of this trope.
    • When they got the rights to Wakko's Wish, they would usually run it every other weekend. This died down around the time they got the rights to the series it was based on.
    • Shortly before the name change to Discovery Family, they aired My Little Pony: Equestria Girls on every major holiday, which isn't surprising since it's a channel half-owned by Hasbro. The tradition still continues to this day, to the point where as of November 2019, the movie will air every other weekend.
      • The Equestria Girls films in general are adored by Discovery Family. Every weekend, the channel airs at least one of the movies.
    • As of July 2015, Discovery Family loves airing Race for Your Life, Charlie Brown. They will air it twice or more every week. During Christmas vacation of 2015, the movie aired once a day two weeks in a row!
  • Encore Kids and Family went through a phase in 2016 where they would run Thomas and the Magic Railroad every month.
  • FX just loves showing off some DreamWorks Animation movies every chance it gets. The first How to Train Your Dragon movie, the Kung Fu Panda movies, and the entire Madagascar trilogy are frequent favorites.
    • Just like its predecessor's example (shown here) Despicable Me 2 seems to be another favorite on the FX networks.
    • FX will alternate between showing animated movies and those of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (or sometimes both) every single weekend, to the point where these two types of movies will occasionally show up on weekdays, usually during the summer months.
    • From December 22-27, 2019, the channel showed Trolls and The Secret Life of Pets, with Trolls occasionally getting a second airing, usually during the late night hours.
  • Not even airlines are exempt from this trope:
    • American Airlines has kept Sing in their in-flight entertainment library for a longer time than any other film they have offered on their service. Usually, new movies on it will get removed two to three months after they are added, but Sing has stayed on the service for almost half a year. They also treated Inside Out, Ferdinand and Sherlock Gnomes in the same way.
    • Ever since 2015, Delta Airlines will have The Lion King (1994) as a featured movie for their Sky Kids library, usually when there's only one new kid's movie release to show.
  • Italian channel K2 airs cartoon movies every Monday night, with reruns during Saturday lunchtime and Sunday morning. With a few exceptions, most of their movie airings are either Alvin and the Chipmunks Meet Frankenstein, Alvin and the Chipmunks Meet the Wolfman, Monsters vs. Aliens, any Pokémon movie starting from Pokémon Ranger and the Temple of the Sea, the Lucky Luke films Daisy Town and Ballad of the Daltons, or a compilation of the various DVD-only shorts based on DreamWorks movies (plus the ones made for The Smurfs and Despicable Me, for some reason).
  • UK channel ITV and its sister channel ITV2 are known for frequently showing the Despicable Me films.
  • Showtime's networks love airing The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie more than any other animated film. This treatment has lasted since they got the rights to show the movie partway through the Turn of the Millennium.
  • Regal Cinemas, an American movie theater chain, loved showing Jonah: A VeggieTales Movie every year as part of the Free Family Film Festival. It showed as part of the program for eight years in a row. This was likely because (up until 2012) the program paired G-rated movies with PG-rated ones, the fact Regal didn't show Disney movies as part of the program (as is standard procedure with free or cheap kids' summer movie programs of this type) and because G-rated movies were becoming rare at the time.

    Films — Live-Action 

TV Channels

  • RTÉ At one point in the early to mid 2010s Spider-Man 3 was aired at least once every 2 weeks.
    • Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory is another favourite of RTE with frequent reairings. It is a guarantee that this film will be aired on that station sometime during any Christmas or Easter.
    • At one point, they were showing Demolition Man every three months.
  • HBO once stood for "Hey! Beastmaster's On!". And it aired so often on TBS that it earned itself the nickname "The Beastmaster Station".
    • HBO Zone really seems to like The Dark Knight Rises since they can't go through an entire week without showing it at least three times.
  • Back in the early to mid-'90s, TBS also used to show Clash of the Titans what seemed like every Saturday and Sunday.
  • TBS and TNT were notorious up until the late-2000s for overplaying Road House (1989).
  • It was almost impossible to turn on HBO in the early 1980s and not see Scavenger Hunt or The Black Hole.
  • A Canadian example is Family Channel (Canada's Disney Channel, not to be confused with the original name for ABC Family), who went through a period at one point where the only movie they seemed to ever play was the Around the World in 80 Days (2004) remake with Jackie Chan.
  • In 2013, Mrs. Doubtfire became CMT's favorite movie. Apparently, four other networks that year couldn't get enough of Robin Williams' cross-dressing shenanigans, which led it to become the most frequently played film on basic cable in 2013, with 66 airings!
  • Local Atlanta station Peachtree TV (WPCH, formerly 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 few years, The Breakfast Club was shown on the channel every weekend. There was even a joke about it on an episode of How I Met Your Mother.
      • Ever since Labor Day weekend of 2018, Paramount Network will show The Breakfast Club not only every weekend and as a No-Hoper Repeat during holidays, but to fill time during the late-night hours of the day that they cannot fill with more reruns of COPS or Bar Rescue. Battleship and to a lesser extent Unstoppable are also given the same treatment.
  • From 2005 until 2013, Spike frequently showed Star Wars marathons, showing all of the first six films, roughly every third weekend. In later years, it was during holidays (such as Thanksgiving, Christmas, Easter, etc.), or to promote some new Star Wars-related products (such as The Old Republic). Following Disney's acquisition of Lucasfilm in 2012, Spike chose not to renew their agreement for the movies, causing them to be left off the air for several years while Disney tried to shop the package around. As of September 2016, the Special Editions of the films are now airing on TNT and TBS after Disney and Turner inked a deal for the package (a separate deal for A New Hope had to be inked with 20th Century Fox due to the Copyright Act of 1976).
    • There was one point where the channel had a fascination with The Day After Tomorrow.
      • As of October 2015, the network will show the entire Back to the Future series every weekend, as well as on holidays and days when kids have school off.
    • After the network rebranded to Paramount, it began absolutely saturating its schedule with the Indiana Jones series, and to a lesser extent Beverly Hills Cop.
      • Ever since the fall of 2020, they'll take any weekend they can to air The Godfather trilogy.
  • Freeform:
    • Freeform milked Harry Potter marathons even more frequently than Spike did with Star Wars. In almost every season of the year, there is a Harry Potter marathon. They would often take it to the max whenever another Harry Potter film was being released to theaters. In 2018, the title of The Harry Potter Network shifted to USA Network and some of its sister networks within NBCUniversal as part of a new rights deal.
    • During the annual "13/31 Nights of Halloween", Freeform loves to play repeat airings of Hocus Pocus; for the 2019 edition, Freeform will air Hocus Pocus 36 times, with a repeat marathon on All Hallows' Eve.
  • Whichever network(s) currently holds rerun rights to James Bond films goes crazy running them as often as possible before the tide changes. In The '90s, 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. After that, the status of "James Bond Network" rotated between Spike, the Encore movie networks (at least three times, 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. As of 2016, they're being batted between MGM HD, BBC America, and, to a smaller extent, ION Television. Note that this package generally covers the first 20 films plus the unofficial entry Never Say Never Again, so even if networks have to split them up, they aren't just rerunning 3-4 films over and over.
    • Daniel Craig-era Bond movies seem 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. They then took Adored by the Network to its obvious conclusion in October 2012 by turning one of its channels into Sky Movies 007, dedicated exclusively to airing the films (and other documentaries/behind the scenes features) in honor of the 50th anniversary of the Bond movie franchise and the release of Skyfall. The channel was temporarily taken down in November 2012 to make way for its annual all-Christmas movies channel but came back off and on throughout 2013. ITV has since got the rights back.
  • 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. That film is extremely short, so it was probably easy to slot into schedules.
    • The Encore networks (particularly Encore Family) were devoted to the original nine-film run of The Pink Panther series in 2013.
  • There also existed a channel that played the film Rudy for 24 hours straight in some areas.
  • Die Hard: The films (especially the original) get this nearly every year. Heck, even Spike aired the original couple years back with a 24-hour marathon!
  • Since the late 1990s, TBS has aired an annual 24-hour marathon of A Christmas Story, Christmas Eve night to Christmas Day night. Granted, it's a beloved holiday classic that was Vindicated by Cable in the first place. 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...
    • ...and The Hangover, but nearly every channel has the rights to both.
    • TBS will show The Wizard of Oz every Thanksgiving and Christmas. Sometimes, they will show it TWICE during the same week.
  • Speaking of Men in Black, every channel adores airing the movie itself, including the sequel to a lesser extent.
  • 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.
  • For some reason, Disney XD has an inordinate fondness for the Arthur and the Invisibles trilogy.
  • BET used to air Love & Basketball frequently and with very little provocation, and seemed obliged to do so every Valentine's Day. However, after Monica Wright and Kevin Durant split, the novelty cooled off, and demand for the movie's broadcast followed suit.
  • Several cable channels in the U.S. and U.K. (Encore, AMC, and Sky among them) have aired 24 hours of Groundhog Day on Groundhog Day. This actually makes sense considering what the film's about!
  • Early Comedy Central had a deep and abiding love affair with Monty Python and the Holy Grail in the mid-1990s.
    • 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.
  • For years, Independence Day was Fox's go-to movie whenever a big event was happening on another network: Super Bowl, Oscars, etc. In fact, Independence Day airs often on every station that gets the rights to it, especially the Viacom channels (A&E, CMT, Spike, VH 1), E!, and AMC. Around 2009, TBS, TNT and WGN America played it constantly while MyNetworkTV ran it as a Sunday night movie and The CW on a Saturday afternoon.
  • 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 book-ending commercial breaks with two promos for the same film. It's an older example, but it checks out.
  • IFC really loves the Hostel movies, The Shining, and the first Alien.
  • At the Turn of the Millennium after AMC stopped emphasizing classic movies but before they had original series such as Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and The Walking Dead (2010), 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):
  • Britain's ITV channels have a few favorites:
  • 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.
  • FX adores the original The Day The Earth Stood Still.
    • 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.
      • Practically every movie based on Marvel Comics are FX staples.
  • ION Television loves Clint 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.
  • From late-2011 until early-2013, the programming director at Turner Classic Movies was obsessed with Nicholas Ray movies, and played his near-forgotten 1963 epic 55 Days at Peking at least once every other month. This was 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 seems as though they're doing the same with Lawrence of Arabia. And Now, Voyager.
    • Leave Her to Heaven has also been getting a lot of airtime on the channel. Considering that it's one of TCM host Robert Osborne's favorite movies, that alone may be the reason for its overexposure.
    • TCM has so much fondness for Barbara Stanwyck that her movies play hundreds of times per year.
  • 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. In 2013, it became The Amazing Spider-Man; in 2014, its sequel.
    • In Starz' defense, they don't seem to have as many licensing deals with movie studios as HBO does.
  • For a while, it seemed as if E!'s only defense against a day of dead air is rerunning He's Just Not That into You sandwiched between multiple rerun blocks of Kardashian shows and Sex and the City.
  • VH1 showed Ghostbusters (1984) and Ghostbusters II on a frequent basis for years after they started broadcasting more programs not dedicated to music. They usually showed the movies in cropped formats, meaning their pictures were not shown in their entirety (the second movie was usually shown in the 16:9 aspect ratio unlike the first movie, which was usually shown in the 4:3 aspect ratio, even after VH-1 started showing the second movie on a frequent basis).
  • Spanish cable channel Canal Hollywood based its two or three first broadcasting years on Close Encounters of the Third Kind reruns.
  • The Blue Lagoon has gained infamy in Brazil, due to constantly being broadcast on the country's biggest network for several years, to the point of Memetic Mutation.
  • The Canadian Bravo channel has a fixation with the Bourne movies.
  • Ever since The Hub got its hands on Good Boy!, they would show it once a week like clockwork.
  • Australian TV network "ten" developed a great fondness for Terminator 2. Before that, it was Ghostbusters (1984), and it used to play The Devil Wears Prada once a month at least.
  • Is today the day before a major holiday? Then chances are that TV Guide Network has an airing of The Mirror Has Two Faces planned.
  • Since at least the fall of 2014, Viacom cable channel programmers have been suffering from an Elf obsession, telecasting the film frequently across CMT, MTV, and VH1, even when the holiday season is over. (CMT even played it in September!)
    • And now even Nickelodeon is airing the film when it's not Christmas as of March 2019!
  • As of June 2015, the LAFF network has been devoted to airing The Love Bug and its sequels on a frequent basis.
    • As of October 2016, Laff's go-to movies include the Chris Elliott comedy Cabin Boy and the forgotten Holy Man starring Eddie Murphy.
    • As of July 2019, Laff's obsession appears to be the obscure indie romcoms Love's Kitchen, A Date with Miss Fortune and For the Love of George, most likely due to them being very inexpensive to air. The 80s Mark Harmon vehicle Summer School pops up almost every other weekend. And since Warner Bros. started licensing some of their movie titles to the network, every weekend Laff airs the first Police Academy movie and/or Blazing Saddles.
  • Encore Family seems to really love the 1969 movie My Side of the Mountain.
  • Ever since they got the rights to the Look Who's Talking trilogy in December of 2015, Starz Kids will air at least one film from the series a day, with the second one being the most frequently shown. It got to the point where they aired nothing but the entire series of films for 48 hours during New Year's.
  • Nick at Nite: Their “Thursday Night Movie” block as of March 2016 seems to adore as many "not quite hit, not quite Box Office Bomb" movies as possible, from Garfield: A Tail Of Two Kitties to Scooby-Doo and its sequel (ironically the latter two movies are Scooby-Doo ones, a franchise that is usually adored by Nick's competitor and their sister channel). It’s gotten to the point where Direct to Video productions such as Open Season 3 have aired.
  • Just about any Tyler Perry movie- or more specifically, any Madea movie is played ad nauseam, all across cable. Madea's Witness Protection, Madea's Big Happy Family, and Madea Goes to Jail in particular are played to death, but it's also common to see the movies where she is not the central character (e.g. Diary of a Mad Black Woman). Even the two Boo! movies and A Madea Christmas are played frequently throughout the year- keep in mind, these are holiday films. For a while, the Turner networks, namely TBS, TNT, and Peachtree TV were particularly fond of them, but as of the late 2010s, the Viacom channels (particularly BET) have taken that mantle.
  • Ovation often shows various movies from The '80s and The '90s such as Romancing the Stone, A Few Good Men, Gross Pointe Blank, and most bafflingly, Legends of the Fall note .
  • Going along with the aforementioned examples of premium channels above, said channels in general will constantly air the same films over and over to the point that they can be seen every week, if not every day. If a movie premieres on one of the channels (typically on Friday), you can expect it to air several more times throughout the weekend into the next week.
  • Every other week on FXX, the channel seems to love showing the famously tearjerking film The Fault in Our Stars, particularly before marathons of The Simpsons reruns.
  • Ever since it made a Channel Hop from the premium channels to TBS and TNT, the latter have shown Ant-Man almost every single week, usually on Fridays and the subsequent weekend. Ditto for Avengers: Age of Ultron.
  • If there is absolutely nothing for them to air at all in terms of actual events, Golf Channel will often fall back on Tin Cup or The Legend of Bagger Vance like clockwork.
  • Nine Network shows Can't Stop the Music once a year on New Year's Day; unlike in most of the world it was a box office hit in Australia back in the day.

Others

  • In France, the movie theater chain UGC loves Christopher Nolan, so much so that in their annual "UGC Culte" cycle of re-releases, there's invariably two Nolan films (something no other director usually gets), one of which is invariably The Dark Knight (the other is often either Inception or Interstellar).
  • Ever since The Sponge Bob Movie Sponge Out Of Water, Paramount films aimed at families have been heavily promoted by US movie theater chain Regal Cinemas. Chances are if there's a film coming up by them, not only will they put the trailer on every family film, but they will also use it to advertise the Regal Crown Club card. Perhaps the most noteworthy example was Dora and the Lost City of Gold, which not only got the usual "trailer on every family-oriented movie" and Regal Crown Club treatment, but it was also the sponsor for that year's Stars of Hope program, had featurettes play in the Noovie preshow, was featured in their 2019 Regal Unlimited ad and even had the trailer play on several movies not aimed at families, most notably Hobbs & Shaw.
  • Not even airlines are exempt from this trope. As of July 2023, Air Canada has had You Will Remember Me, a 2020 film about an academic who begins to suffer from dementia, in their New Releases tab long after all the other films from 2020-21 were phased out of the tab. Given that it's a Canadian film and the airline, like most other entertainment services across the country, needs to fulfill a minimum amount of Canadian content, this is justified.

    Music 
  • Nick Drake: When Joe Boyd sold his Witchseason Productions to Island Records, he stipulated that Nick's albums had to remain in print. The arrangement apparently carried over when Island was bought by Polygram, despite the low sales figures. His albums remaining in print is cited as one reason why Nick built up his posthumous cult following over the years.

    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 SuperStation WTBS 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. It operated at a mild loss for years while garnering steady viewership, which made it a fair investment in terms of ratings (most television shows don't have a potential income stream besides advertising, so any profit WCW made from tickets and pay per view buys was basically a bonus from the network's perspective). However, WCW was most definitely not adored by an AOL Time Warner exec named Jamie Kellner, who within a few weeks on the job cancelled all professional wrestling related programming. By that time, ratings had plunged below many syndicated shows and the company itself was losing $50+ million per year with no end in sight, which for an executive looking to cut costs from unprofitable divisions, made WCW look like a big shiny target.
  • TNA on Challenge in the UK certainly seemed to be this at one point- they couldn't stop talking about it over the end credits of every programme (usually re-runs of game shows, some of which might not necessarily share the same audience as that TNA wrestling would appeal to).
    • After the company was bought by Anthem Sports and Entertainment, the company's programming has become a mainstay on "Live TV" streaming services targeting cord-cutters (that is, people who want to stop paying for cable), such as Pluto TV, Fubo, and YouTube TV. All of these services have dedicated TNA channels, and in some cases they're the only wrestling content available on the basic tier (or even at all). This makes sense from a business standpoint for both the streaming services and TNA. The apps, who want to air wrestling as part of an "all-in-one" entertainment package, get a large library of programming and name recognition that's leagues cheaper than other companies who have exclusivity deals with certain networks and companies (such as the WWE's deals with Fox and Comcast and AEW's deal with Warner). TNA, meanwhile, gets a wider reach: in a lot of countries their programming is either on higher-tier cable package or doesn't air at all, meaning that these deals are a good way to get the company's programming in places where it doesn't air.

    Sports 
  • Professional sports in general. 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. Justified in many cases as networks pay A LOT of money in rights fees to air these games (the NFL's current rights deals are worth a total of $110 billion), so they need to get every penny they can in return.
    • This was actually lampshaded on the Series 16 premiere of Top Gear (UK) 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. Those above problems with preemption? MLB fans have the same problem each year when they're waiting for the World Series to start and Fox won't cut away from Curt Menefee and Terry Bradshaw yukking it up. Even on a general sports station like ESPN, the NFL will usually be promoted far more than anything else it carries.
    • When it comes to college football, ESPN practically runs the show; they have lucrative broadcast deals with many of the Power Five Conferences in Division I FBS (with a particular adoration towards the ACC, SEC, and most recently, the Big 12), and many mid-major conference games on streaming or other channels such as ESPNU. ESPN chooses the kickoff times for its games, meaning nearly all of the college schedules at the start of the season have the time TBA everywhere. They even coded software used by the majority of the teams to help build their game schedules.In 2011, ESPN started an entire cable network devoted to the Texas Longhorns, then created the SEC Network in 2014, ACC Network in 2019, and also acquired the third-tier rights for almost all other Big 12 teams to form a "Big 12 Now" channel on its subscription ESPN+ service). During the post-season, they have broadcast rights to all but three bowl games (including the all-important College Football Playoff that also stole Fox's sole bowl game, the Cotton Bowl Classic, away from them, as if losing the BCS to them was bad enough) and even run fourteen of their own. Of the non-ESPN bowls, CBS has been long-time broadcaster of the Sun Bowl, Fox has the Holiday Bowl (it also had the Foster Farms Bowl before it became effectively defunct), and Barstool Sports has the Arizona Bowl. CBS lost the Cure Bowl to ESPN because ESPN Events bought the game, while CBS Sports Network previously had the Arizona Bowl. NFL Network airs some of the all-star games with potential NFL prospects, such as the Senior Bowl).
      • Speaking of which, ESPN has a fondness for the likes of top SEC football teams such as Alabama, Florida and Georgia, and to a lesser extent, Auburn, LSU, Tennessee and Texas A&M, but tends to dislike the other teams (including Kentucky and Ole Miss, who have been having better seasons in the last several years). Historically, ESPN has also frequently given the Mid-American Conference mid-week primetime games to the point of Memetic Mutation among its fans.
      • The same can also be said for ESPN's coverage of men's college basketball games with Kentucky, Duke, North Carolina, Kansas, and to a lesser extent, Indiana and Ohio State who are being featured more often than other teams. For example, just about every ESPN Super Tuesday game features Kentucky versus whichever team Kentucky is facing that day.
  • Since (re-)acquiring the rights to NBA coverage in 2002,note  ESPN has devoted a very large amount of its programming to the league; not just actual game coverage, but extensive NBA discussions on its studio shows, plenty of in-game promos on other events, etc. As you might expect, this tends to draw considerable criticism from viewers who aren't NBA fans. Baseball fans, in particular, haven't been able to help noticing the degree to which ESPN's increased focus on the NBA has come at the expense of the network's once-substantial MLB coverage.
  • Speaking of baseball, due to its then-extensive coverage of MLB's October postseason, there was a stretch of time starting around the turn of the millennium in which Fox had to delay the season premiere of many of its shows until after the end of the World Series to accommodate its coverage. This meant that fans of The Simpsons and The X-Files, for example, had to wait until November to see new episodes. Starting in 2005, the network returned to launching its major shows in September — but the Series still prevented The Simpsons' annual Halloween Episode from airing until after the holiday had come and gone. To rub salt in the wounds of American Simpsons fans disinterested in baseball, some countries even had a Short Run in Peru by airing the Treehouse of Horror a few weeks before the American airing, such as when "Treehouse of Horror XXXI" first aired on Canada's Citytv on October 18, 2020. Since 2006, almost the entire postseason is now cable-only: as of 2014, when MLB's current TV contract was signed, the Fox Sports 1 channel splits the Division Series and League Championship Series with TBS (alternating between the American League and National League each year), with the only postseason games still broadcast on "Big Fox" being the World Series and the opening game of whichever LCS Fox Sports 1 is covering.
    • Note that even Canada isn't immune to this, given that the rightsholder to first-run Simpsons episodes there is Citytv, owned by Rogers Communications, which also owns both MLB's Toronto Blue Jays and Sportsnet, itself an example of this trope as Sportsnet is the sole rightsholder to all Toronto Blue Jays broadcasts in Canada and Sportsnet considers anything related to the Toronto Blue Jays the highest priority for them. If the Toronto Blue Jays were to make the World Series while Fox's World Series contract is active, then per simsub rules, Treehouse of Horror would also be pre-empted by the World Series on Citytv using the Fox feed, albeit with Canadian commercials, while Sportsnet would use its own broadcast.
  • Certain cities get this too. If you're watching a national TV game in any team sport in the U.S. it's a pretty safe bet one (or both) of the teams will be from New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, San Francisco, or Boston.
  • 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.
    • Spanish public channel Teledeporte is even worse than Eurosport. Not only do they air lots and lots of tennis matches but, when tournament day is over, they rerun the same matches you have previously seen. In occasions, they even have show delayed official matches of Spanish national teams (Handball, Hockey, Waterpolo...) to broadcast a live first-round tennis match between two unknown non-Spaniard players. So, it's not strange that many people give the channel the nickname Tele Tenis.
  • In Canada, ice hockey has pretty much always been the most-aired sport on CBC, Sportsnet, and TSN. This really shouldn't be much surprise in Canada. What's more, there are network favourites among the teams. Before Hockey Night in Canada switched to an early/late game doubleheader broadcast in 1995, if you wanted to watch any Canadian team that wasn't the Maple Leafs or the Canadiens, you either had to hope they were playing against Toronto or Montreal, or that they'd made the playoffs and Toronto or Montreal weren't playing that night. The absurdity of this is indicated by the fact 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 see them on TV.
    • In a more specific example, TSN has always hyped the IIHF World Junior Championships (the top international under-20 competition, which traditionally begins on the day after Christmas), as being Canada's holiday sports tradition (much like ESPN's endless bowl games of varying significance). The profile of the tournament had already begun to grow after the infamous 1987 edition, where Canada and the Soviet Union were ejected after a slash on Theo Fleury resulted in a 20-minute line brawl — getting both countries kicked out of the tournament, and denying Canada a gold medal in the processnote  Canada has won the tournament 20 times, with two stretches of having won five consecutive tournaments in a row. It's gotten to the point that any game involving Team Canada, especially if they are playing Russia or the United States, reach the final, or reach the final, playing Russia or the United States, is guaranteed to have a good television audience. When the tournament is hosted by Canada (which happens quite a bit), these scenarios frequently result in sell-out crowds, especially in the three aforementioned scenarios.
      • By contrast, the Ice Hockey World Championships (its counterpart for professional players) is generally not considered to be as important in North America as it is elsewhere because it falls during the NHL's Stanley Cup Playoffs. Top American and Canadian players typically remain committed to their NHL teams if they make the playoffs, and a chance to make the men's national team tends to be a consolation prize for losing in the first round or not making the playoffs at all. This worked to Canada's advantage in 2015, as star player Sidney Crosby was able to join the national team when Pittsburgh got eliminated in round 1. They promptly crushed every opponent they met, including Russia in the final: critics were quick to point out that Canada's dream team would be impossible to form in the NHL because it was way over the salary cap. While they do compete for attention, most IIHF championship games are scheduled for the afternoon and evening hours in Europe, and do not directly compete with most NHL playoff games (which prefer primetime windows).
  • Cricket in Australia, especially Test cricket. For those who don't know, Test cricket matches can last for five days straight. They'll always be there on Seven and Fox, every summer, and the breaks will usually be filled with highlights/recaps/analyses.
  • That football/soccer gets this in Brazil shouldn't be surprising. But this wound up starting to make Formula One Screwed by the Network in The New '10s, as whenever the races started overlapping with the Brazilian Championship the broadcaster would send the race to its pay TV sister channel.
  • NBC and its related networks have been the exclusive U.S. television home for the Summer Olympic Games since 1988, and for the Winter Games since 2002. They're contracted to keep airing them through at least 2032.

    Toys 
  • Goodsmile Company really, really love their Nendoroid line. The chibi art style and how small they are make them perfect for the Japanese market, while the ease of manufacturing and lack of engineering make them easier to make than other figures/figurines. If you're into poseable figures, you'd be forgiven for thinking it's all GSC make, because they generally neglect their Figma line these days.
  • Hasbro has a handful of action figure lines aimed at adult collectors, but their baby is and will always be Transformers, specifically Generations and Studio Series. Since Transformers is a Hasbro creation, there's no licensing cost involved, and they can do what they want with the property without any oversight. Because the brand has a wide-ranging appeal and is very long-lived, there's always an audience for a character and a deep well to pull from.
  • McFarlane Toys:
    • The company really likes Spawn, for obvious reasons. Spawn figures ended up hijacking the Mortal Kombat 11 line before a proper Spawn line was created.
    • For their DC Multiverse line, the company loves Batman. There are more figures of Batman, his allies and rogues than the rest of the line combined, to the point that it's become a surprise when the company goes a month without announcing a new Batman.

    Video Games 
  • Over the years, the console makers have shown obvious biases towards specific third-party companies during specific eras. Examples include Nintendo favoring Konami and Capcom during the days of the NES and SNES, Sony Interactive Entertainment heavily promoting Square Enix's titles during the PS1 and PS2 eras, and both Nintendo and Xbox Game Studios giving indie developers such as Yacht Club Games (developers of Shovel Knight) and Studio MDHR (creators of Cuphead) lots of attention during the days of the Xbox One and Nintendo Switch.
  • For close to a decade, Valve Software treated Team Fortress 2 as its flagship property, releasing new major updates every few months and at-least-weekly patches to deal with the pileup of bugs and balance issues that inevitably resulted. The flow of new content only increased after they launched the Mannconomy Update, which gave members of the community the opportunity to create new items for the game. This, combined with the sequel to Left 4 Dead that was rushed through development in less than a year, eventually led to accusations that they were abandoning their other franchises (mainly Half-Life) to focus on the most profitable ones.
    • Ironically, once Dota 2 and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive released, they quickly took over as the company's main focus, to the point of eventually abandoning Team Fortress 2 itself to updates that consist solely of community-made content. Infamously, this led to the game being overrun by bots that would blatantly cheat and votekick any real humans that tried to join, rendering it completely unplayable unless you had a private server to play on.
    • It should be noted that both Dota 2 and Counter-Strike have active competitive scenes, with Team Fortress 2 still holding on in that department as well. On a meta level, Valve is often seen as focusing on the e-sports scene to the exclusion of all else—for example, when Counter-Strike 2 was released as a replacement for Global Offensive (and we do mean replacement; it completely erased Global Offensive from players' computers), it only included the standard 6-vs-6 gamemodes that are played in tournaments. No Arms Race, War Games, or Danger Zone. And even at the height of Team Fortress 2's bot scandal, Valve continued promoting the e-sports events that were conveniently unaffected by the issue.
  • Blizzard Entertainment was seen to suffer from this as well, as they worked on various Warcraft games and expansions for almost a decade straight before StarCraft II and Diablo III were announced. (The one StarCraft product in the making, Ghost, became Vapor Ware.) Lately, they've completely flipped this trope on the head, and seem to be just gushing new games — Reaper of Souls, Hearthstone, and Heroes of the Storm all within a year of each other.
    • 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 II: Tides of Darkness that allowed you to play on Battle.net, Warcraft wasn't getting much love until Warcraft III: Reign of Chaos was finally released.
  • Square Enix is fond of the Final Fantasy franchise, Final Fantasy VII in particular.
    • As well as Final Fantasy and Final Fantasy II, which have been ported or remade for MSX2, WonderSwan Color, PlayStation, Game Boy Advance, mobile phones, PlayStation Portable, Virtual Console, PlayStation Network and iOS. This is perhaps due to both games being are the most simple in the series. They include little to no plot, a few enemies (for a final fantasy game), a few classes (6 in FFInote , none in FFII) and the game mechanics in general are simple. In contrast, the more complex games hardly ever see the light, most likely since they are not as easy to make as I or II but not as popular as IV or VI.
    • Final Fantasy IV is another example, it being ported or remade for PlayStation, WonderSwan Color, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS, Virtual Console, FOMA 903i / 703i and PlayStation Portable.
    • Understandably, Final Fantasy is a Cash-Cow Franchise for SE, 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.
    • And starring in 2015, Life Is Strange has become this, and marked their admiration of episodic games.
  • Ubisoft:
  • Tales of Phantasia for the Super Famicom has gotten four remakes: first for the PlayStation, second for the Game Boy 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 Game Boy Advance version, widely considered the weakest version, was the only one that had seen an official English version until the since-removed iOS version, which isn't thought of too fondly, either.
  • Runescape has the Squeal of Fortune note  and Solomon's General Store note . 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 Aeria Games 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.
  • Nintendo really loves all its big franchises, probably because it can make them under the company's family-friendly guidelines without complaints from the publishers — but it really seems to love Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, Kirby, and Pokémon. Especially Mario, being that he's the mascot and all.
    • EarthBound (1994) is especially notable. After performing below expectations in its original 1995 release (due in large part to a...misguided marketing campaign), Nintendo's international branches had treated it like the company's red-headed stepchild for many years. While the series has always had representation in Super Smash Bros., neither of the other games would see an English release until 2015 when MOTHER—whose English localization had been finished since 1991—finally made it onto the WiiU's Virtual Console under the name EarthBound Beginnings. EarthBound (1994) itself had only made a Virtual Console appearance two years prior. Mother 3 is still a no-show.
    • Back in the third generation of consoles Nintendo of America loved Acclaim and Konami so much that Nintendo of America allowed them to release 10 games a year on the NES instead of the usual 5 a year that all companies had to follow later in its lifespan. They only had to keep it secret for other companies. Thus Konami created the Ultra Games brand and Acclaim bought out LJN Toys to release 5 other NES games under their label.
    • Nintendo's "second party" developers aren't immune to this either - Intelligent Systems seems to absolutely adore Fire Emblem, much to the chagrin of those waiting for a Panel de Pon sequel. Nintendo is more than happy to encourage this, placing a number of Fire Emblem characters in the roster for Super Smash Bros..
    • Of their newer and more recent IPs, Splatoon has easily gotten a large amount of love from Nintendo, with holographic concerts featuring the Idol Singer groups from each game being held in Europe and Japan, regularly holding invitationals at E3 and livestreaming tournaments, and copious amounts of post-release support.
    • Nintendo is also very supportive of PlatinumGames' original endeavors (whereas companies like Konami and Square Enix had them work on games based off of their preexisting IPs), by providing funding for not one, but two sequels to Bayonetta when Sega wouldn't do so, as well as for The Wonderful 101 and Astral Chain. This good relationship between the two is why Nintendo allowed Platinum to fund and publish ports of The Wonderful 101 for Steam and PlayStation 4 in addition to the Nintendo Switch port, despite Nintendo being the copyright holder of the IP.
    • ARMS has been shown a lot of love from Nintendo. Revealed during the Nintendo Switch Presentation in January 2017 and confirmed to be releasing only a few months after the Switch launched, Nintendo advertised the hell out of it, holding tournaments, an open beta, and even dedicating an entire Nintendo Direct to it. Most of this is likely due to the fact that Splatoon has released only a couple years prior, and Nintendo was eager to promote new IPs after Splatoon ended up being a Sleeper Hit. While ARMS didn't reach the same levels of success as Splatoon did, it nonetheless accumulated a dedicated community, and Nintendo continued to show interest in the game in the year afterwards, most notably by including Min Min as DLC for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.
  • A similar case to Nintendo can also be said for Sega towards its own mascot, Sonic the Hedgehog, who happens to be Sega's biggest Cash-Cow Franchise, and the only one with more popularity in the West than it does back in Japan. This is actually enough to annoy some Sega fans of other franchises, especially since unlike Nintendo's Big 3, Sonic is the only franchise Sega has with this treatment, and this tends to come at the cost of sales for other Sega franchises due to the lack of marketing and exposure for them that was instead put into the latest Sonic game. In the late-2010s and early-2020s, Sega has been trying to avert this, with the Like a Dragon games seeing a large rise in popularity on both sides of the Pacific, as well as reviving several older properties in a new initiative to bring them mainstream.
  • Rockstar Games and Take-Two Interactive love to constantly update Grand Theft Auto V (especially with its Online Multiplayer Counterpart), to the point it's received Updated Re Release(s) twice as the seventh and eighth generations of consoles reached the end of their lifecycles. News of a sequel wouldn't drop until late 2023, and in the meantime they've only released one other game.
  • Towards the end of the Atari 800 era, English Software milked popular games by including them on several "Atari Smash Hits" compilations — "Jet Boot Jack" on volumes 1, 2 and 3, "Chop Suey" on 4 and 5 and "Elektra Glide" on 5, 6 and 7.
  • God of War is adored by Sony Santa Monica. Naturally, since it was their Breakthrough Hit. However, this adoration comes at the expense of games entrusted to them from other Sony studios. Fat Princess, Twisted Metal, and Starhawk were all screwed because of this, and it took a fandom revolt to save Playstation All Stars Battle Royale from suffering the same fate.
  • Atlus and their Shin Megami Tensei series, but especially Persona 3, Persona 4 and Persona 5. Persona 4 was a Breakthrough Hit (so much that Atlus USA finally stopped dolling it up with the Shin Megami Tensei brand after Persona 4: Arena). Persona 5 was an even bigger Breakthrough Hit, becoming Atlus' highest-selling title ever. All three got anime adaptations, and more merchandise than the rest of the franchise combined.
    • To put it into perspective, when the series celebrated its 20th anniversary, the first three Persona games (1, Innocent Sin, and Eternal Punishment) were essentially footnotes. When Atlus had a panel at the 2014 anime con, it was literally just Persona 3 and Persona 4 - their other IPs didn't even get so much of a nod. This has caused somewhat of a Broken Base - people who like the first two games, people who wish Atlus would stop treating them like Canon Discontinuity, and people who like them but are getting fatigued at the constant milking.
  • Farsight Studios, the creators of The Pinball Arcade, seem to adore the games from Williams Electronics, and three designers in particular: Pat Lawlor, Steve Ritchie, and Barry Oursler. Somewhat justified in all three cases, as they are widely considered the top pinball designers of the modern era.
  • Sega also loves its Sakura Wars franchise, which started as a video game in 1996. It has since gone on to spawn five sequels, as well as video game spin-offs, OVAs, a TV series, an anime film, and several stage musicals.
  • One of the most common criticisms aimed at Capcom is that they tend to hyperfocus on one or two franchises at a time while neglecting or ignoring all of their others. During the mid-2000s, it seemed there was no shortage of Mega Man spinoff games or Devil May Cry titles, while 2D fighting games such as Street Fighter and Marvel vs. Capcom stayed locked away with many fans wondering if those games would ever return. Eventually, they did, only for Mega Man and Devil May Cry to take their place and be demoted to primarily re-releases and collections of old games. As of the mid to late 2010's, they are now being accused of doing the same to the Resident Evil franchise after Resident Evil 2 (Remake) and Resident Evil 7 were received with public and critic acclaim, ignoring all their other franchises.
  • Super Fighter: A somewhat unusual example. Even though this Street Fighter II clone was created by the Taiwanese company C&E, it was the American video game company Super Fighter Team who have given it this treatment, even adopting the name of this game for their company.
  • EA Games publishes a lot of games, some acclaimed indies and some big blockbuster franchises, like Mass Effect, Dragon Age and Battlefield being the biggest and most enduring of their own properties, and one of the biggest of all, Star Wars. But it's their sports games that they care the most about — and among them, Fifa Soccer is the top dog. When the development of Dragon Age: Inquisition was going through hurdles thanks to Bioware's unfamiliarity with the Frostbite engine, they weren't given the help of DICE, the developers who made the engine... because they were helping the FIFA team. The process repeated when Anthem (2019) — a property EA hyped up as "their next big IP" — faced the same issues, and EA once again instead had all staff who were familiar with Frostbite — including those who were already working at Bioware — moved to work on FIFA. This is because FIFA is huge around the world, and it always outsells EA's other games. Not only that, but its microtransactions rake in insane amounts of money, and because players of FIFA tend to not be as ingrained in gaming culture and discourse, they generally are not talked about or face as much scrutiny as microtransactions in other games.
  • While they certainly haven't been slacking off on that other franchise they own and even launched a new IP, Bethesda Game Studios has become infamous for rereleasing The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim on every platform under the sun, sometimes multiple times, while simultaneously offering no information on the development of its sequel. To the point where it became a joke that every new game announcement from them would just turn out to be Skyrim again. And then the meme where everything turned out to just be Skyrim in disguise.

    Websites 
  • The Wikimedia Foundation seems to put most of its fundraising money towards Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, but that's justified, as hardly anyone knows of, say, Wikibooks.
  • YouTube gave an unusual amount of attention to The Irate Gamer for a couple years, including naming him one of the first YouTube Partners, despite his status as a controversy magnet whose videos didn't get very good ratings. Internal reports suggest this was because they noted the popularity of The Angry Video Game Nerd, but found his Cluster F-Bomb style and Vulgar Humor to be too caustic for advertisers, and so decided to uplift a channel with a similar focus but considerably less swearing.
  • Brian David Gilbert was picked up by video game journalism outlet Polygon in 2017 — a time coinciding with the departure of former major personalities like Nick Robinson and the McElroy Brothers — and swiftly achieved rapid popularity as a mainstay of the site with his Unraveled series. When he chose to part ways in 2020, he admitted that the move was partly motivated by the support and attention he received from Polygon being disproportionate to his coworkers, opening his desire to continue producing independently while allowing his former coworkers their moment to shine.
  • Trope Overdosed and Trope Overdosed Franchises both exist to determine which works are adored by TV Tropes.
  • The Escapist treated Zero Punctuation with an almost exclusive level of prestige and security after picking up creator Ben Croshaw in 2007, reliably keeping him and the show afloat for 16 years even following massive scandals with other creators, ranging from skimping out on paying creators like the Extra Credits team and abruptly laying off all their content creators except for Croshaw in 2017. Croshaw eventually resigned from The Escapist in 2023 (along with every other creator since added to the site, this time voluntarily) following the sudden firing of then editor-in-chief Nick Calandra, all regrouping on the newly-formed, employee-owned network Second Wind, with Zero Punctuation being relaunched as a Creator-Driven Successor, Fully Ramblomatic (a result of The Escapist owning the Zero Punctuation IP). This was done both as a show of solidarity, but also because of his increasing disillusionment with The Escapist, which included frustrations of having to carry the site following its earlier mass exodus.

Alternative Title(s): Adored By The Studio

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