Originally Posted by Jeffhs
I don't even get RTN where I live. The nearest television station in Ohio that has this network on one of its subchannels is in Toledo, over 100 miles away (I'm near Cleveland). I have a subscription to Netflix and a few of my own DVDs, so I do have ways of getting my favorite old shows from the 1970s without cable. I may well eventually downgrade my cable eventually to bare-bones basic (local channels only) and use my DVD player and VCR for other programming.
I don't know why RTN is doing what you say it is, unless it's doing the same thing (or something similar to it) as TV Land the last couple of years. Television networks do this all the time; witness how the commercial broadcast networks copy one another in technology, stories covered, etc. RTN seems to be copying TV Land's way of doing things (without the movies and original programming, for the time being anyhow), but that's how it goes in the television industry these days. No originality anymore, just every network doing what everyone else is doing. I watch very little broadcast TV these days for just that reason; the programming outside the news on every network is just as unimaginative, IMHO.
The cable system here hasn't carried Emergency! in years; the last time I saw it in reruns was last year, when I rented the DVDs of a couple of its seasons from Netflix. I remember Emergency! when the series was new on NBC in the '70s (almost all of my favorite shows are from that decade, as that was when I was growing up).
The television landscape is changing, and the TV networks know it. They put shows on that draw decent ratings; I guess in RTN's case, Emergency! wasn't drawing quite the ratings the network had expected, so the program was canceled. Many of today's TV viewers are far too young to have remembered Emergency's first run on NBC, and wouldn't understand the program today--another reason RTN canceled it. People acted, spoke, and thought differently 30+ years ago; this all but baffles today's young people because that kind of lifestyle is foreign to them. The TV networks and Hollywood realize this all too well, which is why their shows must keep up with the times in which we are currently living.
Remakes of 20-30-year-old series such as Knight Rider fail for the same reasons. I saw a couple of episodes of the new KR when the series began its ill-fated run on NBC and was disappointed. It was nothing like the original Knight Rider, which was science fiction but still drew decent ratings in prime time. The ill-fated new Knight Rider, which ran on NBC for only one season, IIRC, obviously wasn't drawing the same ratings for NBC Universal (the original Knight Rider was on the old RCA-owned and operated NBC television network) as the original did, so.....after one season, poof. The show was canceled and probably will never be seen again on broadcast television, although it may be available on DVD eventually; that seems to be how a lot of prime-time shows are going these days, even programs that are still running on their networks.
I'm not sure, but I think Emergency! may be available on the Internet through Hulu, veoh and other online video services. I haven't looked at Hulu lately and veoh won't run on my nine-year-old Windows 98SE computer, so I don't really know what's on these services today. I'll take a look after I finish this post; I might be surprised and could wind up eating my words.
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