GSN Drops DWTS Reruns from Lineup

I realize this is super, super late, but I think we all got so swept up in the hustle & bustle of season 14 that no one really even noticed this – plus, it happened rather quietly, so I myself didn’t even notice until I was cleaning up my DVR yesterday and saw that there was nothing set up to record on GSN…but it piqued my interest, so I’m sharing it now, and thought I’d get your thoughts on it 🙂

According to Buzzerblog, GSN dropped reruns of DWTS from its lineup starting April 16:

That didn’t last long, did it?  GSN’s most recent attempt at reality shows, exclusive off-network reruns of Dancing With the Stars, are on their way out.  The reruns of ABC’s popular dancing game show, which have proved to be anything but popular for GSN, are leaving the network’s schedule starting the week of April 16th.  GSN debuted the show on Saturday, January 21st.  The debut failed to crack the top 15 most watched shows.  First-run reruns averaged 304,000 viewers and has gone down hill since.  Most recent figures had the show down to 173,000 viewers on average.  Reruns of shows like Family Feud take its place.

I have to say, I’m a little surprised – granted, I was not expecting the reruns to get even a fraction of the ratings that the current seasons get, but with all the publicity they did back in January (and all the hype surrounding GSN buying the rights), I would have thought they would have at least gotten some bang for their buck in terms of ratings, from fans of the show…but 173k is downright meager, especially when you take into account that reruns of Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader? and Family Feud pull in upwards of 500k in viewers for GSN.  And when you take into account that DWTS was the lowest-rated show in a primetime slot on GSN the last week it aired (all the shows below it were in early AM slots, which aren’t expected to pull in a ton of viewers), that’s…pretty bad. I have to wonder if it was just PureDWTS fans that were tuning in, after all the free publicity we gave GSN during the big launch 😉

So I guess my big question is, “What went wrong?” It did seem a little strange that they started off airing season 4, but then skipped ahead to season 12 – did the fact that season 12 only happened a year ago deter some viewers, who would have rather seen an older season? Or were the odds just stacked against them when they aired reruns concurrent with a new season? Or was there just never really a huge demand for DWTS reruns from the get-go? Who knows.  But I have to wonder if reruns might fare better now that they’ve announced that they’re doing an all-star season – perhaps there might be more a demand for reruns, so fans can relive the magic from the first time around? I do think it will be interesting to see what GSN’s next move is – they still own the rights to seasons 4-13, so if they wanted to start airing them again, they could – hell, I think they’d have better luck in a summer slot, anyway, plus they have the boon of the all-star season looming. But will they even bother, given how much of a failure their first attempts at reruns were? I don’t know that there’s really a demand on any other network for DWTS reruns, so I doubt they’d have an easy time selling off the rights to another network, other than BBC America (they own the rights to seasons 1-3, but have yet to actually do anything with them).  I’m just hoping we get at least some of the seasons back on Hulu, so I don’t have to scavenge & beg for pictures everytime I want to do an edition of “Who Wore It Better”? 🙂

So what do you guys think of the whole situation? Are you upset that you won’t catch the reruns…or do you not really care? Do you think GSN should give it another shot…or try and sell the rights to the reruns as fast as they can?