Viacom Scales Down ‘Cosby’ Rerun Prices

When reruns of “The Cosby Show” went into syndication a year ago, they were expected to hit TV like a megaton bomb, giving the 187 stations that bought them the kind of immense lift that NBC got from the original broadcasts of the series.

Expectations for the reruns were so high that stations bid feverishly for the show, paying unprecedented prices that totaled more than $600 million in overall sales. In Los Angeles, KCOP-TV Channel 13 shelled out about $300,000 per half-hour episode for rights to the series for the initial 3 1/2-year rerun cycle.

But the rerun miracle of “The Cosby Show”--the big blowout--never materialized.

Despite doing very well--the Bill Cosby comedy is at the top of off-network programming--the series is drastically dropping its price with sales now under way for the second cycle of reruns, which will begin in 1992 or 1993, depending on how many episodes are available.

“Everybody that bought ‘Cosby’ paid too much,” said KCOP station manager Rick Feldman, who, like other buyers, ignored Wednesday’s deadline on new sales set by the syndicator, Viacom. He said he’s in no hurry to renew.

Several station sources said Viacom has dropped the price for “The Cosby Show” by one-half or more, depending on how the series fared in individual markets.

At KCOP, where “Cosby” runs at 7 nightly, Feldman said bluntly: “Everybody’s going to pay less. Those prices people paid, you’re not going to see again. The prices that many stations paid for ‘Cosby’ were two or three times more than they ever paid for any program. So ‘Cosby’ has to come back down to reality.”

Added Feldman: “TV has changed. It’s just tough to get huge ratings when you have VCRs and so many new channels to compete with. You buy shows years ahead, and by the time they air, the business is different. It’s not ‘Cosby’s’ fault. It’s tremendous. But the TV landscape is altered.”

A spokeswoman for Viacom said the show “has performed extremely well,” but acknowledged that the other point is whether “it is performing at a level of what the price was.”

Viacom says the series “has doubled the number of stations that were ranked No. 1 in their time period.” But some stations are threatening not to renew “The Cosby Show” at all. That would have seemed inconceivable a year ago, and still is surprising -- the series remains a huge hit on NBC.

A new development has also complicated matters: Viacom has paired “The Cosby Show” with its spinoff, “A Different World,” as a rerun package, which has turned off some buyers. And realizing it’s dealing with stations that think they got burned the first time around, Viacom is even offering, at no added cost, five extra episodes of “Cosby” each week to stations that take the two-show package.

Under Viacom’s two-show proposal, stations could take one or both of the series, turn down the entire deal or make counter-offers.

Did “The Cosby Show” live up to KCOP’s expections in its first rerun season? “No,” said Feldman. “It did about a point less in the ratings than what we thought it would do, but the demographics were good. Network affiliates that bought it as a lead-in to the news got hurt the most. It turned out not to be a good lead-in. But it is tops off-network. And for independent stations like us, it did really well.”

What was expected, however--especially for the huge prices charged--was a rerun blastoff that would be a franchise-maker, turning around the entire fortunes of stations, the way “MASH” repeats did.

“ ‘MASH’ didn’t cost much to buy in its first rerun cycle,” said Feldman, “but it took off in renewals. The show did incredible demographics almost anywhere you ran it in the schedule over a long period of time. It’s definitely No. 1 in the syndication hall of fame.”