Kids Today Will Never Understand Network TV’s Most Powerful Hype Machine

By Robert Scucci
| Published 16 seconds ago

Sit down around the fire, my lads, and let me enlighten you on the relic of ancient media known as clip chows. Back in my day, cable TV ruled the landscape, and sitcoms ran for 22 to 26 episodes a season. Week after week, we’d go on a new adventure, wondering what kind of trouble Homer Simpson, Ross and Rachel, Tim “The Tool Man” Taylor, and Jerry and the Seinfeld gang would get themselves into. But toward the end of any given season, there wouldn’t be a new adventure. Instead, we’d get the dreaded clip show.

I call the clip show “dreaded” because most people didn’t like them. I had no strong feelings either way. The idea of reusing content under the guise of a new episode never really bugged me so long as it served a purpose. As long as the episode was framed in a way that was palatable, I was all for it. I always saw it as a greatest hits reel, and if there was a solid framing device, it was a great way to revisit some of the best moments from any given series.

But there’s more to Clip Shows than meets the eye. They were important to a series’ health in a world where DVDs weren’t yet ubiquitous, and home media consumption hadn’t exploded into what it is today. In the streaming era, the idea of a clip show is rightfully preposterous. That’s why Friends, which concluded its run in 2004, used them often, while How I Met Your Mother, which debuted in 2005, mostly avoided them outside of the occasional flashback-heavy episode.

What’s The Point Of A Clip Show? 

Home Improvement had some of the best Clip Shows because they were framed around Tim Taylor’s horrible decision-making. Season 4 featured two back-to-back clip shows, “Tool Time After Dark: Parts 1 & 2.” The series had just hit its stride and quickly became appointment viewing for millions of American families. But writers get tired, cast and crew members need downtime, budgets get stretched thin, and the show must go on.

So how did Home Improvement handle it?

Tim eats too much Polish food, gets laid out on the couch, and spends both episodes wrapped in blankets, drinking antacid through a bendy straw while watching reruns of Tool Time. It’s a clip show done right. It’s essentially a bottle episode that only really required Tim Allen on set for a majority of its runtime, saving on payroll toward the end of Season 4. It’s also a clean framing device that lets casual viewers catch up on the show’s best moments.

Budget And Back-End Sales

Clip Shows served two very specific purposes: saving money and marketing.

Star Trek: The Next Generation’s first and only clip show, Season 2’s “Shades of Gray,” was famously hated by fans, but it was born out of necessity. The showrunners spent so much of the season’s budget building elaborate set pieces for episodes like “Elementary, Dear Data” and “Q Who,” that they didn’t have enough funds to properly finish the season. The result is an episode centered around William T. Riker experiencing flashbacks to earlier events in the series. It’s widely considered one of the show’s worst episodes, but those earlier episodes helped introduce the Borg into franchise canon. Sounds like a fair trade-off in the grand scheme of things

Series like Home Improvement, The Simpsons, and Friends used Clip Shows differently. This was the sitcom golden age, when serialization wasn’t required. Sure, there was continuity from season to season, but for the most part, you could jump into a random episode and follow along just fine. It was during a time when clip shows ruled the land.

Clip Shows Thrived In A Pre-DVD Era

Clip Shows offered a crash course in a series’ best moments for casual viewers. Circling back to Home Improvement in its fourth season, anyone just getting into the show had to decide whether they wanted to start from scratch with reruns through syndication. DVDs were introduced in the U.S. in 1997, but most households didn’t adopt them until the early to mid 2000s.

And why would they? After decades of collecting VHS tapes, switching to an unproven format meant dropping a significant amount of cash on something that wasn’t yet proven by the market. Early, primitive DVD players cost up to $600, and then you still had to buy the DVDs in order to watch anything on them.

Networks wanted more eyes on their shows, and VHS tapes could only hold a handful of episodes. The Simpsons had specialty tapes like Treehouse of Horror collections, but full-season releases weren’t really a thing yet, and if they were during the VHS era, we’d all have to rent storage units to contain them. If you were tuning into Home Improvement for the first time and caught “Tool Time After Dark” by happenstance, you’d get everything you needed. Tim’s reckless habits, his ongoing dietary mishaps, and a highlight reel of Tool Time disasters.

Clip Shows were a sizzle reel. They were basically saying, “If you like any of this, there’s plenty more where that came from. Stick around.” Clip Shows were the greatest hits albums of network television, and in this context they thrived.

Changes In Consumption Habits Killed The Clip Show

Once DVDs proved they were here to stay, Clip Shows disappeared almost overnight. There was no need for them. Consumers could buy entire seasons at a reasonable price and own them forever. If you wanted to turn someone into a fan, you didn’t need a sampler platter. You could just show them a handful of great episodes from your DVD collection.

Then, in 2005, YouTube launched. Early on, it was mostly home videos and clips from shows like Family Guy that people wanted to pass around via email; it made sharing standout moments even easier.

As home media became more accessible, Clip Shows became unnecessary. Good shows marketed themselves through word of mouth. The streaming era brought us shorter, more serialized seasons, making them even less practical. They worked in an episodic format where you could mix and match, but when you’re dealing with season-long story arcs, there’s no clean way to justify them.

These days, If I want to introduce a friend to The Simpsons, which is nearing 40 years worth of episodes, I’m not throwing on “So It’s Come To This: A Simpsons Clip Show.” I’m pulling up Disney+ or digging through my physical media and making them watch “Bart on the Road,” “You Only Move Twice,” and “Duffless.”

But kids today, watching a clip show out of context on streaming, will never understand how differently we consumed media in the 90s and early 2000s, or how necessary clip shows were for getting people hooked on a series in the first place.