Repeats? It's all about television math

A reader recently e-mailed me a question — the kind of question I've gotten relatively often over the years:

"Why would the one really good drama ('The Good Wife') I like to watch show reruns (like tonight) and other times in the last several months? I thought reruns were for the late spring and summer?!!"

The quick and easy answer is that it's a matter of math. A standard full-season order for a network television series is 22 episodes. That means that over the course of a year, there are 30 weeks for pre-emptions or repeats.

If "The Good Wife" was capable of producing episodes quickly enough to air 22 consecutive originals, it would be through with its season by the third week of February.

Again, this is generalizing, but network television works sort of like this. You launch a show like "The Good Wife" the third week of September, and you want to get at least four, five or six episodes on to start the run and build some momentum.

And then there are the sweeps periods in November, February and May. That's when the Nielsen Co. measures ratings in every local market across the country, and those measurements are used by local stations to set ad rates.

Sweeps aren't as important as they once were, because Nielsen measures more of the country electronically (and less with diaries filled out by viewers), but they're still important. And networks want to keep their affiliates happy and make money with the stations they own in various cities.

So between the fall launch and the three sweeps periods, you're talking about between 15 and 18 episodes right there. That leaves relatively few episodes to sprinkle on the schedule for the rest of the season.

Four decades ago, shows produced more episodes per season. I just got a DVD of the second season of "The Patty Duke Show" (1964-65), and there are 36 episodes.

That's never going to happen again. And we probably don't want it to — it's better to get 22 good episodes of a series than stretch and get 36 mediocre ones.

These days, some of the better shows on TV produce far fewer than 22 episodes per season. "Mad Men" has been doing 13 per season; "Big Love" has done as few as 10.

It's a changing dynamic. And it's not likely to change back in the foreseeable future.

THE FEBRUARY SWEEPS start on Thursday, and most years, we'd have lots of original episodes of our favorite series to look forward to.

Not quite so much this year, however. NBC will have coverage of the Winter Olympics Feb. 12-28, so competing networks will air more repeats than usual.

Again, it's an economic decision. Why throw expensive programming — an hour-long drama costs more than $3 million to produce — up against the Olympics just so it can get trounced in the ratings?

The good news is, of course, that fewer original episodes in February will mean more original episodes after February.

e-mail: pierce@desnews.com