When "Bewitched" first came to N@N and for years after, they only aired the first two, black and white seasons. For those of you who watched it on N@N, what were your feelings about that? I wasn't a fan at the time, so I didn't really care. Although now looking back, I think it's kind of strange to only show two seasons of an 8 season show.

However, this way they didn't have to deal with two versions of Darrin, Gladys and Louise. And they also didn't go into Tabitha (except for when she was a little baby).

The first time they showed seasons 3 - 8 was during their "Dueling Darrins" marathon week. And then after that, they continued showing all 8 seasons.

That doesn't surprise me in a way, because when N@N began airing Happy Days in the '90s, they wouldn't show anything beyond the seventh season (not that that's a bad thing). But as I recall it was a long time before they went beyond those years.

Maybe they only purchased the rights to the first two seasons or something like that.

the first 2 seasons were the best years anyway but I'm always for showing all episodes of a series no matter how bad they are.

I remember that treatment for "Happy Days." They also had a week long marathon for that too "Chachi-Nated or De-Chachi-Nated". And from then on they showed all the episodes.

I wonder if N@N had shown M*A*S*H back then, if they would only have shown the first three seasons for years.

The reason N@N initially showed only the first two seasons is that for many years, only the color episodes had been shown in syndication -- which meant that many viewers had never seen the first two (and best two) seasons. So N@N bought the first two seasons because they weren't in most syndication packages at the time.

I loved it because they were by far the two best seasons of Bewitched. I remember being mad though when N@N bought the color package in 1998 and stopped airing the B&W episodes in the regular rotation. It kinda defeated their purpose of airing it from the beginning, which was one of their reasons they listed for airing the B&W episodes in their Classic TV Companion book

I remember when N@N started airing it, I didn't even know there were black and white episodes.

....played only the first two seasons of "BEWITCHED" (the black & white episodes) in the mid-'90s was because that's ALL they could get the rights to!!

Don't forget, the color episodes were still playing in syndication [via the "DFS Program Exchange" on behalf of their #1 client, General Mills] AND on "SuperStation WTBS" at the same time. They had the "exclusive" rights to show those episodes, and didn't want the earlier ones (neither did DFS, which left them out of the "package"). Nick At Nite DID, and had to wait until TBS' contract with DFS was up before they could show the rest of the series! Eventually, Columbia Pictures Television struck new "videoprints" of the show, and gave them exclusively to Nick At Nite/TV Land by 2000, which showed ALL 252 episodes available from then on (they still left out two "flashback" episodes from the second season which were virtual duplicates of the original ones, only with new opening scenes).

oh, so THAT'S why N@N just showed the black-and-white shows at first! I THOUGHT it was something like that.