Some Television Reruns Hit Their Prime on DVD

The TV studios love guys like Mike Moore.

A die-hard television fan, the 22-year-old Boston resident has a burgeoning DVD library of favorite series, including “24,” “Family Guy” and the short-lived “Freaks and Geeks.” He rented “The Shield,” an FX cop drama he initially wasn’t crazy about, and on second viewing was “blown away by how good the program is,” he said. He has barely had time to dip into his first-season DVDs of “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” and “Third Rock From the Sun.”

“The more [the studios] pump out, the better chance I will be able to buy a show I love,” Moore wrote in an e-mail. Tops on his wish list: ‘80s shows such as “The Wonder Years,” “Family Matters” and “Perfect Strangers.”

Moore’s enthusiasm may sound extreme to some, but there’s little doubt that the tremendous success of the television series-to-DVD category is changing the way television programs are made, marketed and consumed.

Cult shows, for instance, that yield unspectacular ratings by network standards often have surprising clout, thanks to high DVD sales. In several cases -- such as Fox’s spy drama “24” and animated sitcom “Family Guy” -- DVDs have helped keep on the air shows that otherwise might have been headed for cancellation. “Family Guy” has sold more than 5 million DVD units (in four separate editions); typically a TV series would be considered successful if it sold 500,000 units.

“DVD has been the savior of ‘24,’ where the consumer can control the experience,” said Howard Gordon, the executive producer who is running the show this season. The series’ strong performance in stores, he added, has helped offset some of the problems the show, featuring Kiefer Sutherland as an unconventional and sometimes unlikable secret agent, has had in building an audience in prime time.

Studio spokesman Chris Alexander pointed out that, although its ratings have improved over time, “24” was relatively expensive to make. “DVD revenue is a key component to the show’s overall profitability,” he said. “Without it, the show’s economics might be harder to justify.”

The DVD results encourage studios to produce other “high-concept grabbers,” Gordon said, citing Fox’s new drama “Prison Break” as an example.

Indeed, DVDs are altering the financial model that has governed the TV business for generations. Now, industry veterans say, series no longer need to survive for at least 100 episodes before entering the lucrative syndication market on local stations.

Television DVDs are expanding the nation’s collective pop-cultural memory as well, as long-forgotten shows are resurfacing (anyone up for a double marathon of Buster Crabbe’s “Captain Gallant of the Foreign Legion” and Jeff Altman’s “Pink Lady and Jeff”?).

“Television on DVD is becoming part of the movie-viewing experience,” said Ted Sarandos, chief content officer of Netflix, the online DVD rental service that has 3.6 million subscribers. “This blurring of lines between television and film was something video stores were never able to do” when VHS tapes reigned supreme. “It used to be that [some] video stores wouldn’t even carry HBO shows because [they] were considered second-tier.”

Robert J. Thompson, founding director of the Center for the Study of Popular Television at Syracuse University, noted that at the dawn of commercial television in the late 1940s and early ‘50s, programmers often didn’t bother recording their telecasts. “In half a century, we’ve gone from TV being live, completely disposable programming to [consumers assembling] libraries of these things.”

For major hits such as ABC’s dramas “Lost” and “Desperate Housewives,” DVDs have become a vital extension of the studio marketing machine.

TV shows are also giving a boost to the DVD market generally, which can no longer count on spectacular growth from feature film titles, especially as box office interest has dipped this year and some film DVDs have registered lower-than-expected sales. Earlier this year, DreamWorks Animation and Pixar said DVD sales of their respective animated titles “Shrek 2” and “The Incredibles” would be weaker than predicted.

This year, for the first time, the 499 new releases of multi-disc sets of TV series on DVD through October will outnumber those of recent theatrical films, at 441, according to the trade newsletter DVD Release Report. In the last three months of this year, studios will be churning out TV-related titles at the rate of 18 per week, according to Ralph Tribbey, the newsletter’s editor. TV series on DVD have become the fastest-growing segment of the overall DVD business, netting $1.5 billion in estimated consumer sales so far this year, up 34% compared with the same period last year, industry executives say.

TV-to-DVD “is a business that essentially didn’t exist 3 1/2 years ago,” said Ron Sanders, president of Warner Home Video, which will release the 10th and final season of “Friends” on DVD Tuesday. But “for the foreseeable future, it’s going to be a big and growing business.”

Yet there are those who think the business might be getting a bit too big for its own good. Some studio executives grumble that the flood of TV titles is crowding retail shelves, making it harder for top shows to stand out.

“There’s a limit to how much the market can absorb,” Tribbey said. “You reach diminishing returns.... I don’t see [retailers] knocking holes in the side of the building to accommodate more DVDs.”

For the moment, that’s a minor worry. To kick off the Christmas buying season, the major studios are planning another wave of heavily promoted releases, including the fifth and sixth seasons of “Seinfeld” (Nov. 22), season five of “CSI: Crime Scene Investigation” (Nov. 29) and the seventh season of “The Simpsons” (Dec. 13).

The series-to-DVD category has come a long way since 1999, when Wal-Mart began offering digital videodisc players (the DVD format had been officially introduced four years earlier, but the early machines were too pricey for many consumers).

Because television series had seldom sold particularly well on videotape -- after all, a 22-episode season required a half-dozen or more bulky and hard-to-navigate plastic cassettes -- many experts believed feature films and special-interest titles would dominate the new format, just as they had on VHS. In 2000, 28 multi-disc TV titles were released on DVD, compared with 334 recent theatrical features.

But in the spring of that year, 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment experimented with the first-season DVD of its sci-fi hit “The X-Files.” The seven-disc package was initially priced at $149.98, a king’s ransom by today’s standards, when season packages often go for $40 or less. Sales were surprisingly strong, and Fox quickly brought out the second season that November.

Other studios took notice: Viewers would buy not just individual episodes but entire seasons of their favorite shows.

These days, certain series seem almost tailor-made for DVDs. That’s especially true of serialized science fiction and adventure dramas, which typically feature complicated story lines that bear repeated viewing. Those kinds of shows also often appeal to young men, a key audience for DVDs. “Lost,” ABC’s ratings-challenged spy drama “Alias” and even Fox’s short-lived sci-fi series “Firefly” have all appeared in recent DVD bestseller lists.

A desert-island mystery-thriller with a large ensemble cast, “Lost” “would have been almost impossible to do before” the arrival of DVDs, Syracuse University’s Thompson said. “It practically begs you to go back and look for clues. It’s a game -- a spectator sport.”

To promote the second season of “Lost” this fall, ABC executives worked closely with their counterparts at Buena Vista Home Entertainment (both are units of Walt Disney Co.), according to Bruce Gersh, senior vice president of business development for ABC Entertainment.

The first-season DVD was released Sept. 6, which gave fans and neophytes alike time to bone up on the characters and the complicated story lines before the second season premiered two weeks later -- to huge ratings.

DVDs are having a big effect not only on which shows get made but also on which get remembered. “Family Guy” was dumped by Fox in 2002 after 50 episodes, several time-period switches and a ratings downturn. But strong DVD sales, plus a berth on Cartoon Network’s hip “Adult Swim” programming block, persuaded the network to revive the series this year. Experts say that’s a unique case, but it illustrates the power that DVDs have to tap niche markets.

Fans understand this. Not content with his current library, Moore is chasing other series-to-DVD holy grails, including favorites from his childhood -- the sitcom “Small Wonder” and Nickelodeon shows such as “Salute Your Shorts” and “Kenan and Kel.”

“Everyone my age would know and would buy [those shows] in a second,” he said.