“Contemporary” Medical Series’ Lack of Staying Power in Reruns

[cd637299]

I have been thinking….. We all know that there are advances in medicine by the hour almost. For that I am thankful to the Lord.

The downside, if you wish to call it that, is that these advances render contemporary medical shows—-NOT that one set in Korea that MeTV endlessly shows—-almost never last in reruns.

Where’s Marcus Welby? Where’s Dr. Kildare? Ben Casey? My goodness, even “ER” with all those awards—what happened to it? Will Grey’s Anatomy have a rerun life?

I could include sitcoms here as well. Any scripted series….

IS IT the advances, that render these series “obsolete”? I figure so.

i remember when the story broke that RetroTV (GetAfterItMedia) purchased 4,800 episodes—not 48, not 480, but 4800—of the soap opera “The Doctors.” They still run it, I have seen, but the time slots, AND the number of daily episodes, are shuffled around a lot, it seems. Soap lovers cannot keep up!

Thoughts?

BTW, I thought I had read in 1998 when the PAX network was almost ready to go, they were going to run “Medical Center” with Chad Everett (a heartthrob during the original run) and James Daly. It never appeared at sll.

cd

[Dream Canteen]

ER had a decent run on TNT and in weekend off-network broadcast syndication for about a decade, but the show largely disappeared from reruns for a good eight years right around the time the series finale aired on NBC.

However, Pop aired reruns multiple times a day from 2017 through 2025, and the show is highly successful on Hulu and HBO Max — even more so now that The Pitt has become such a phenomenon.