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Half Hour Comedies With the Most Episodes |
The following is taken from Longest Running TV Shows: Television Shows With More Than 160 Episodes.I am simply reorganizing his statitics and providing some commentary.Top Ten American Half Hour Comedies with the Most Episodes
My CommentsNote that in the early days of television they would make 39 episodes for three seasons, fall, winter, and spring, and then rerun the best in the summer. These were called summer reruns. Then they started reruning all the episodes, so they only needed 26 per year. Summer reruns became spring and summer reruns, but they were still called summer reruns. So early series did not have to be on as long to rack up high numbers.They further cut the number of episodes from 26 to about 22 today because they wanted to make room for special programing. This is part of the reason so many early series had so many episodes. Another reason is that successful series today do not run is long is that the talent demands more money with each passing season. I suppose they may have had a little of this problem in the early days of television, but perhaps it was not so bad. Every one demands more money until the show is canceled, even though it is still getting good ratings, then no one gets money. Note that the longest running modern series "The Simpsons" does not have on screen talent. Further note that the second longest running half hour comedy of the last few decades was "Cheers". As no one was absolutely crucial to the series perhaps they could have kept it going indefinitely substituting in new bar patrons and employees as needed. While Ozzie and Harriet may have more episodes than any other single half hour comedy series several half hour comedy universes had more episodes. "All in the Family", and its spinoffs "Archie's Place", "The Jeffersons", "Maude", and the spinoff of "Maude", "Good Times" plus three other less successful spinoffs had a total of 780 episodes. You can read more about the largest commedy and drama television universes on another web page I wrote. Other Entertainment Pages on this site |