Broadcast Series Average Age On Air Triples Since 96/97

Fred Silverman, as head of CBS programming in 1973, with his programming board when schedules really mattered.

CBS via Getty Images

This past week was “upfront week” in New York when the broadcast networks unveiled their new schedules, announced all their new shows and cancellations, and surprised the vast television public with what’s to come. Well, that’s what used to happen. Upfront week was formerly very important to TV fans, but that import has evaporated.

Today, pure play streamers and tech companies play a larg role, most programming news comes out well before the second week of May, and, for broadcasters, the upfront is now only a way to show advertisers they are still relevant.

Nevertheless, the programming on NBC, CBS, ABC, and Fox still really matters. Streaming originals have almost zero asset value, meaning years from now viewers will not rewatch even the most popular SVOD series of the mid 2020s, such as Wednesday, Landman, Stranger Things, or Only Murders in the Building, over and over as they still do with Seinfeld, Law & Order, NCIS, or Blue Bloods. The dramas and comedies of Fall 2026 that will be aired by the big four networks will have a much better chance of being popular reruns in 2036 or 2046 than anything made for Netflix.

A key reason for this is that many of the TV seasons being made for the broadcasters are of existing, proven series which have been on the air long enough to enter the syndication marketplace and perform well on liner and/or streaming.

On average, the broadcast entertainment series in the upcoming TV season will be nine years old. This is three times older than thirty years ago, in the 1996/97 season, when the average was just three years.

The reason for this significant change is clear. In the mid 1990s, when there was no streaming competition and cable was still young, the networks commanded most of the viewing attention. They could introduce new shows regularly as older ones became tired and ratings went down because they knew many people would try new series, especially if they had a very popular show as a lead-in.

Today, the longest-running series are among the most popular because broadcast viewers crave the comfort of the characters and stories they have watched for decades, and are not necessarily looking for something new on linear. That fix is more often supplied by streaming. Given the difficulty in getting new viewers, it is a better gamble to order season 21 of an enduring favorite than a new program, especially if it has no ties to existing IP.

Additionally, while a lot of noise was made about “pilot season” coming back because NBC made eight pilots, that is not the case. In the 96/97 season, according to an article published in the Chicago Tribune at the time, “there were 143 pilots commissioned by the six television networks for the 1996-97 season.” Eight pilots is not meaningful change. This is not a criticism, just a point of fact.

The tripling of years on air for the prime time lineup is spread across many, but not all, genres.

The newsmagazine has gone from eight years old on average in 96/97 to more than fifty in 26/27, because in the 1990s there were eight newsmagazines on the air. Next season, there will only be two, 60 Minutes and 20/20, which are the oldest shows on TV at fifty-nine and forty-nine years respectively. For this analysis, Dateline and 48 Hours are considered true crime.

The clip show category is just America’s Funniest Videos, which is still on the air thirty years later and has therefore quadrupled in age.

The unscripted competition series was not a category in 96/97 but, but next year, the average age of those programs will be the fourth-oldest because of such mature series as Survivor, The Voice, Hell’s Kitchen, The Bachelor, and Dancing With The Stars. These series, which often have two cycles per season, are only counted once per year.

The medical drama has an average age of ten years now, driven by Grey’s Anatomy and Chicago Med, but also features new series such as Best Medicine and Doc. Thirty years ago, ER was the number one show on all of TV, but it was only in its third season.

Sitcoms were far more plentiful thirty years ago. There were sixty (!) comedies on the 96/97 schedule compared to just 19 in the season ahead. The raging success of Cheers, Seinfeld, Friends, Home Improvement, and Roseanne inspired a flood of clones. Most of those series failed, which is why the average age of the sitcom in the mid-1990s was only three years. In the upcoming slate, the comedy average is eight years. The oldest shows in the category are animated, including The Simpsons, Family Guy, and American Dad!. The next tier contains series in the middle single digits for age, like Abbott Elementary, Ghosts, and Animal Control. There are also young and new comedies like Scrubs and Eternally Yours.

The crime drama is more popular now than it was in 1996/97, with 25 series compared to 19, but the programs on the air now are only three years older than they were in the past. Law & Order: SVU and NCIS are more than twenty years old, and Chicago PD will be starting season 14, but there are six new crime dramas coming next season and six going into their second season. In 1996, the oldest show in this category was Law & Order at seven years, and the franchise era had not yet begun.

Taking a network-by-network look at some of the key genres of content next season, we find the following changes have occurred across three decades.

NBC was the true comedy titan in the mid-1990s with Friends and Seinfeld dominating the Nielsen rankings and twenty sitcoms on the schedule. It is still the top genre for the network from a volume standpoint, but tied with crime dramas, thanks to Dick Wolf’s procedural finesse, at five each.

ABC also had a large number of comedy offerings in 96/97 including high-rated titles such as Home Improvement, Spin City, and Ellen, but it tried really hard to find its own mega-hit by airing 18 comedies that year. This was three times more than the number of crime dramas. In 26/27, ABC is scheduling more crime dramas than anything else, all of which are held for mid-season, which is surprising for a network that had been shirking away from cop shows and dramas overall. It is the most evenly distributed network for 2026/27 from a genre point of view.

CBS’s 96/97 slate was equal parts comedy and drama, but over time, it has morphed into a purely cops and robbers channel, which is no surprise to even the most casual television observer. This transition started when CSI launched in 2000 and initiated a franchise quest that, next year, will include shows from the universes of NCIS, FBI, Fire Country, Blue Bloods, and The Big Bang Theory. The one science fiction show on CBS in 1996/97 was Early Edition.

For a network that programs fewer hours than the other networks, Fox has an astonishing number of shows on deck for next season, 33 to be precise. This compares to 22 for CBS, 19 for ABC, and 16 for NBC. More than half of Fox’s 33 series, 18, are unscripted programs from either the competition or game category. Despite that abundance, it still ordered 14 scripted shows across comedy and drama, including a reboot of Baywatch, classified here as a rescue drama.

While the broadcast networks might seem anachronistic to some in an ecosystem next to Netflix, YouTube, and TikTok, they have found a way to survive, even if they do not thrive. By filling their schedules with long-running, mature series that fans do not want to see end, while also fielding some new programs in the hopes of finding new breakouts, they are threading the needle to stay relevant.

The dirty little secret most insiders either don’t realize or do not want to admit is that the entire TV eco-system rests on the shoulders of these networks. They are the only platforms that produce programming that have a chance at being repeatedly rewatched over the next several decades, and that is where the real money is made in television.