Stripping

Stripping is an industry term used to refer to the practice of running a syndicated television series every day of the week. It is commonly restricted to describing the airing of shows which were weekly in their first run; The West Wing could be stripped but not Jeopardy!, as the latter is intended to be run daily.

For much of the sixties on into the early nineties, stripping for syndication was one of, if not the primary profit component of the studio production model. A show became far more profitable if it succeeded in getting three full US seasons (that is, 75-odd episodes) or more, as then it was possible to strip it for fifteen weeks (15x5=75) before needing to repeat episodes. Once a series attained five seasons, it would be a full six months before it would repeat. For Star Trek, in particular, this was relevant, as it did not begin to attain its popularity until after a couple years in syndication. If it had failed to obtain a third season (due to a then-unprecedented letter-writing campaign) it would not have been syndicated, and its history might be quite different. Many other shows with lukewarm response in their initial runs became widely appreciated cult favorites as a result of syndication, or helped keep cultural memes associated with them far more widely known than if the shows had only been viewable during their initial timeframe.

Michael Grade was responsible for introducing stripped and stranded schedules to BBC television in his role as controller of BBC One: from 18 February 1985 onward^{[citation needed]} the schedule has consisted entirely of half-hour or one-hour programmes starting on the hour, or half hour (the BBC channels do not carry spot advertising). For example, Grade's new schedule provided at 19:00 the Wogan chat show thrice weekly and two helpings of EastEnders and fixed the national news at 18:00 and 21:00, regional news at 18:30.

Before this date programmes would start at almost any time and programs could have different times on consecutive weeks or even days, for example^[1]:

17:40 60 Minutes (17:52 regional news, 18:15 national magazine)
18:40 Harty
19:05 Cliff!
20:05 Cockles
21:00 News
21:25 Whicker’s World
22:30 Sportsnight.

Compare with a 2007 schedule for the same channel:

18:00 BBC News and Weather
18:30 Regional News Program
19:00 Watchdog
19:30 EastEnders
20:00 Holby City
21:00 Judge John Deed
22:00 BBC News
22:35 Comedy Drama

Stripping has also become an even more common practice on many British channels since the introduction of multi-channel cable and satellite in the 1990s. In many other countries, even new episodes of various series are aired every weekday. For example, if such a station gets the most recent season of a U.S. TV series, the episodes will air in this way for two or three weeks, after which they are replaced by another show in the same timeslot.

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