I have recently started ...
Question: I have recently started watching
Love Monkey reruns on VH1 and have completely fallen in love with the show. (
Tom Cavanagh rules!) I only wish I and about a million other people had started watching the show earlier so that we could all look forward to many seasons to come. My question: Oftentimes, such as with
Love Monkey or
My So-Called Life, other channels will pick up episodes and rerun them for the "cult" fans. Why can't these same channels actually produce new episodes for the show, knowing they already have a large fan base? Is it that difficult to obtain rights to a show that another network has already canceled?
Answer: From what I've read of VH1's numbers for
Love Monkey so far, I wouldn't overestimate how "large" that fan base is, though it certainly deserves one. The basic issue here is that cable networks like VH1 simply don't have the budget to produce costly new episodes of a sophisticated scripted drama (with A-list actors like Cavanagh,
Judy Greer,
Larenz Tate,
Jason Priestley, etc.). Have you seen most of what VH1 produces? Bargain basement would be a compliment. And even picking this up from CBS, which is a corporate sibling, was probably more expensive than it looks. (I've been told one reason Bravo didn't pick up the unseen episodes of NBC's
Book of Daniel was because of the expense of license fees, even though the episodes were already produced.)
