For quite a few years now, it was guaranteed that in the two hours before prime time you could turn to your local independent/Fox/UPN/WB/CW/MyTV station and get an alternative to news, celebrity gossip, Pat and Vanna and Alex in the form of syndicated reruns of sitcoms--the good, the bad and the mediocre.
Well, in Chicago at least that's not the case anymore. As new syndicated shows start to pop up this week, the only station where you can watch a sitcom at dinnertime is Weigel's CW affil WCIU, where you can watch "The Neighborhood" at 6 and 6:30 p.m. As if you wanted to watch it first run on CBS Monday nights. The 5 p.m. hour on "CW 26" is filled with "Judge Judy" reruns (as you may know, her first-run judging is now on Amazon's Freevee streamer). Well, what's on the other non-Big 3 station? On Nexstar indie WGN, it's two hours of news, as it has been for many years now. On Fox's WFLD, it's an hour of news at 5 and an hour of "Family Feud" at 6 p.m.--they didn't renew for "Big Bang Theory" and WGN picked it up for prime time. And on sister station MyTV affil WPWR, it's *another* hour of "Family Feud" at 5 p.m. (seems to me Debmar-Mercury feeds six "Feud" episodes a day) and two new game shows from Fox First Run at 6 (they both ran test shows either last year or earlier this year): "Person, Place or Thing," a not-bad update of "20 Questions" appealingly fronted by Melissa Peterman, and "Who the Bleep is That?", a celebrity identification game produced by Fox-owned TMZ, which may be all you need to know. Of course, with the changes afoot in television lately, it seems unlikely that there will be more shows coming down the pike to get to the 100 episode number, although "The Conners" will probably make it (and what are they going to do with those first season episodes with Roseanne Barr?) and those involved are rooting for "Ghosts" and "Abbott Elementary"--and also, the stations seem to prefer multi-cams to one-camera shows--good luck on that. The Fox-owned stations seem to think that the future is in game shows, I guess with "Jeopardy!" and "Wheel" going through the host changes recently and next year,the fact that "Modern Family" and "The Simpsons" are their only remaining sitcoms and Disney will probably want more money to renew them--along with "Feud" and the two new shows, they've picked up reruns of Game Show Network's "People Puzzler" (based on the crossword puzzle for idiots in People magazine) and in-house "25 Words or Less" and in-house-CBS Media's "Pictionary" continue (but Big Jaw's reboot of "You Bet Your Life" isn't, presumably because of Leno's recent accidents). And you'll find sitcom reruns in late-night against the talk shows--oh shoot, there's another dying genre. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "TVorNotTV" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tvornottv/6c4f5f08-392e-47b2-a6b4-7ff44c748ad8n%40googlegroups.com.
