Syndication

While the CW has already made it clear that it’s not interested in a third season of Reaper, the show may not be dead: James Hibberd’s “The Live Feed” reports that the show might be sold into syndication… on the same stations that carry the CW.
The network is facilitating talks between its stations and Reaper producer ABC Studios about the show possibly being used in syndication to fill a spot on Sundays… The move would also keep Sundays a little bit CW-ish instead of going off into an entirely different orbit.
The CW is already planning to stop broadcasting on Sundays, so the idea is that maybe their affiliates can use a CW reject to fill the Sunday night time that the network will no longer fill. Meaning that it would be just like a CW program, and viewers would think it was a CW program, except the CW wouldn’t pay for it. I don’t know if the deal will happen, but it sounds like a strangely reasonable idea; if the affiliates need to find something to put on Sundays, why not use a show that fits in with the shows they broadcast on weeknights?

Like I said, there’s no guarantee that this will happen, but I’d like to see Reaper come back (though how that would affect Tyler Labine, already committed to a new Fox show, I don’t know). And as a fan of retro programming moves, I heartily approve of the idea of more struggling prime-time shows re-emerging in syndication:

Because next week begins its fourth season, and if it completes that season, that’ll bring it up to around 85 episodes — not quite the magic number for syndication, but close. So Fox is selling it into syndication and discovering that it brings a pretty good price for a show that’s never really been a hit. Be interesting to see if it’s as successful in syndication as the studio and syndicators seem to expect. It’s the kind of show you’d think would do well in syndication — a multi-camera comedy with youth appeal — but the quasi-serialized nature of the show and constant references to previous events might bring it perilously close to the kind of show that almost never succeeds in syndication, the show where you need to have seen previous episodes to know what’s going on.