Remarkably, both cable services have been extraordinarily successful at revitalizing television series that have long been in syndication and would thus seem to have exhausted their appeal. The key to this success has been a series of innovations in marketing and scheduling. For example, Nick at Nite has attracted a large viewership by packaging these series as “family television,” appealing to anxious parents with programs from a more “innocent” time. For parents concerned about the viewing habits of their young children, vintage sitcoms from the network era provide safe material insulated from the often more provocative programming of the post-network system. Appeals to Baby Boomer and Generation X nostalgia are also strong, a strategy epitomized in TV Land’s recycling of not only vintage television shows, but vintage commercials.

Along with this “family” appeal, however, Nick at Nite/TV Land has also quite successfully promoted their library of old shows as both “camp” and as a shared TV heritage. Each network surrounds its “timeless” and yet potentially repetitive catalogue of reruns with clever, complex, fast-paced, and ever-changing promotional campaigns, interstitial materials that serve continually to repackage old television for new audiences. Often, these campaigns play on and reward the viewer’s familiarity with the programming by parodying certain plot conventions, pointing out inconsistencies and continuity errors in individual episodes, and generally celebrating the naïve “unreality” of vintage television’s now increasingly distant and alien worldview. One campaign, for example, tallies the total number of times Dragnet’s Joe Friday can be seen not wearing his trademark gray suit and black tie. Another spot observes how every episode of The Munsters includes at least one sequence in “fast-motion,” and then considers the comic appeal of this familiar device. These promos have proven so popular and crucial to the networks’ profile that the TVLand website allows Internet users to relive their favorite promotional campaigns. The most successful marketing strategy, then, may well be each network’s ability to recast the lowly re-run into the collective cultural heritage of TV- Land—a fantasy world where all of television history (or at least, that controlled by Viacom) coalesces into a mythic parallel universe to the real world.

Related to this, Nick at Nite and TVLand have also pioneered a number of innovative scheduling strategies. For example, each network has made extensive use of block programming, adapting it in ways not seen in the network system. In its various “Block Party” promotions, the networks will run ten or twelve episodes of the same series back to back (on at least one occasion, The Donna Reed Show ran 24 hours a day for an entire weekend). Such scheduling indulges the dedicated fan (who has an opportunity to tape the series in its original sequence) and creates an “event” around an otherwise shopworn show. Other scheduling schemes have included nights devoted to a common sitcom theme (across several series) and blocks devoted to showcasing a “minor” character on a famous series (such as a “Floyd Night” of The Andy Griffith Show).