Keep Circulating the Tapes/Live-Action TV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Trope Namer

Mystery Science Theater 3000 is the Trope Namer. The phrase "keep circulating the tapes" was a line in the credits from Seasons 1-4, inserted to give a winking consent to sharing tapes with others in order to popularize the show; it was removed in Season 5 for many of the legal reasons this entry concerns itself with. During the show's run, the hosts would give a Shout-Out to fans in places where the series wasn't aired (including a group of tape-sharing aficionados in Paris, France during the third season). Although many of the movies shown fall into the Missing Episode category and are unlikely to see wide release due to copyright issues, a fair number are available for purchase legally. In this case, the problem is the reproduction rights to the movies since nobody expected there to be such a market for home recordings down the line, so movie rights were only secured for the show's on-air run. Episodes are released on DVD as the rights issues are ironed out. Many episodes were uploaded by Best Brains themselves to Google Video - many others are uploaded to YouTube at random, with some having been pulled by NBC Universal.

One of the creators has actually said "Keep circulating some of the tapes," meaning fans should buy the episodes available on DVD, but the others are fair game...which is what most of the dedicated fans do anyway. Special mention should be given to The Amazing Colossal Man and Godzilla vs. Megalon, released but quickly withdrawn due to rights issues.

ABC Television

  • Better Off Ted has had its first season released, but physical second season DVDs are still nowhere to be found (though the episodes are streamable on Netflix and available for purchase on Amazon).
  • China Beach is yet another show where music-licensing issues meant it was long thought it'd never get a DVD release. Time-Life released the complete series in May 2013. Only 17 of 300+ original tracks used in the series were not able to be licensed.
  • Cupid: The original, not the remake. Poor copies can be found and enjoyed, but not even the remake seems to have prompted anyone to put it on DVD.
  • Happy Days: While the entire series has been rerun endlessly for the past 30 years in syndication, only four seasons have – to date – been issued on DVD. Those that have replace the original 1950s rock songs with generic 50s music (because of copyright/royalty issues). If you don't want generic music, you can always try The Hub and INSP.
  • In Justice, which has the bonus of being difficult to search for since its title is a common phrase, was a fairly well-done "Law and Order" type show on ABC in 2003 with a big subversion: most of their clients didn't do the crime and were wrongfully imprisoned, so the lawyers had to unravel the clues to find the real perp and free the innocent convict. In one memorable episode, a man faced execution for a murder he probably did not commit. A Genre Savvy viewer may be surprised by the ending: he was put to death anyway.
  • Aside from a few VHS releases in the 1990s, the 1991 remake of Land of the Lost has yet to see an official DVD release. Still, there's bootleg DVD sets, torrents, and YouTube.
  • Less Than Perfect had Seasons 1-2 released on DVD, but not 3-4. There is a bootleg DVD of the entire series (including the Season 4 episodes unaired in the U.S.), but it's over $100 and there don't appear to be any online sources. So fans are out of luck for now.
  • The remaining three seasons of Life Goes On.
  • Mork and Mindy: A Season 4 episode (more importantly, part of the three-part Grand Finale) has a joke about Mork not leaving the car until he finishes singing along with the last "Na-na-na-na"s of "Hey Jude". That would be no problem on its own, if not for the fact that Mork then enters the room singing said song. Since using songs from The Beatles catalog is near-impossible these days and the scene wouldn't make sense with the joke dubbed over or cut, it's unknown whether or not Season 4 will ever see the light of day on DVD. So hold on to your recordings...or just search for "Mork & Mindy Season 4" on YouTube. And keep an eye on The Hub, which started airing reruns in April 2012.
  • NYPD Blue following Season 4 (of 12).
  • Season 3 of Once and Again, thanks to music licensing issues.
  • The Practice only a saw a release of Season 1 (and nothing else) back in 2007. This is a show that won awards every year it was on, was showcased in ABC's 50th Anniversary Celebration special, aired in the coveted post-Super Bowl spot in 1999 and spun off the highly-successful Boston Legal (which had all of its seasons released). The status of further DVD releases is unknown.
  • Two Guys, a Girl And A Pizza Place for some strange reason never got its official DVD release (it stars Hal Jordan and Malcolm Reynolds, after all!). There are DVD copies from TV recordings available, though.
  • Vengeance Unlimited.
  • The Wonder Years, due primarily to music copyright issues. The entire series is on Netflix, though, and The Hub's giving it a rerun treatment.


BBC

  • The 1982 production of Bertolt Brecht's Baal featuring David Bowie as the title character has never been released on video. A tie-in EP with Bowie performing fully-orchestrated versions of its songs was released on vinyl and cassette tape, but only two of the five songs made it to CD (via best-of collections).
  • Blakes Seven is not available on Region 1 DVD (although it has been released in the UK).
  • Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe, "a show all about television", will never be released on DVD. Brooker claimed as much himself because of the licensing issues related to all the shows and music played during the course of its current six-season run. In one episode, Brooker discusses the "fair use" clause, and how the BBC can use certain assets from television and music for free. He is known to (highly unofficially) support efforts to Keep Circulating the Tapes.
  • Dick and Dom in da Bungalow; not rights issues here, as they did all the music in-house. Perhaps parents aren't keen to shell out for DVDs of anarchy and gunge? Snippets are on Youtube, and there's been a Clip Show, but most of the madness has disappeared into the ether.
    • There was in fact a DVD release which contained highlights from Series 3 (broadcast 2003- 2004), but this was released way back in Autumn 2004 and has since gone out-of-print. The 20 clip show episodes from 2009 contain a resonable amount of highlights and the such, but there is still a lot that has disappeared, particularly the first two series (only shown on Digital CBBC when it was still in its infancy).
  • The thirtieth-anniversary Doctor Who charity Reunion Show "Dimensions In Time" will never be officially released on home video: the actors and crew all gave their time for free on the contractual agreement that it would be broadcast once and never be made available again in any form. Nobody actually minds much, as it's notoriously one of the most embarrassing things to ever happen in connection with the show.
    • Another Doctor Who example: The BBC are happy for people to openly distribute audio-plus-still image "reconstructions" of destroyed episodes on video tape, as long as they don't do it on digital formats that might get file-shared.
  • Fist Of Fun and This Morning With Richard Not Judy have vanished into the BBC archive. Given the recent revival in popularity of Stewart Lee and Richard Herring on the stand-up circuit and on TV, perhaps they might emerge one day...
    • Go Faster Stripe is your friend. Official legal DVDs of Fist of Fun season 1 with lots of lovely special features. If it sells well, more will follow. (Herring and Lee will be selling them at their gigs so you can get them signed, too.)
  • The 1988 BBC-produced mini-series Game, Set, and Match, starring Ian Holm and based on a series of novels by Len Deighton, has never been officially seen since its initial airing because Deighton so despised it that he has barred any future release. High quality bootlegs are available (for instance, a remastered DVD set), but they're not cheap. Or you could always look for a torrent.
  • The Goodies is seldom shown in reruns (except, apparently, in Australia). There were episodes on YouTube that have all disappeared. There are 16 episodes available on DVD in Australia, and they come with some commentary and extras too. It's not great, but it's better than fourth-generation copies...
    • There were some butchered reruns on UK Gold and UK Arena in the 1990s. There have been four official Region 2 DVD releases (including all of the ones made by LWT after they ChannelHopped), but that still leaves lots of BBC episodes missing. They can be found as torrent downloads, but only as individual episodes...and even then it requires a lot of time and effort to get them.
  • Have I Got News for You has a compilation DVD covering the first twenty-three series (albeit with some extras including a commentary the whole way through with Paul Merton and Ian Hislop, which isn't bad at all for a TV DVD from 2002). Then there's another compilation covering just the next year, but with four extended complete episodes including a double-length version of the first Boris Johnson-hosted one and some more special features, and a third compilation of the two years after that, with a single but lengthy behind-the-scenes special feature and a nearly triple-length version of the second Boris episode. If they won't put out more than five complete episodes, they at least know the way to our hearts. (And yes, this show too can be found online in its entirety.)
    • The same applies to other topical panel shows such as Mock the Week and 8 out of 10 Cats (who have similar releases compiling highlights and Too Hot for TV material).
  • Horrible Histories, the CBBC live-action series, at least for fans outside of Region 2 DVD coding. Fairly easy to find online though; besides an official YouTube channel with a good selection of the best sketches, full episodes are available for all of Series One and Two, part of Series Three and the six-part Best Of version hosted by Stephen Fry.
  • The Phantom of the Opera: Behind the Mask is an excellent 2006 documentary on the original London production of Andrew Lloyd Webber's musical (which had just hit its 20th anniversary). It features interviews with many of the original cast members, creative team, and otherwise on top of vintage rehearsal, show, and news footage, and yet is unavailable on video. In the U.S., it occasionally airs on the cable channel Ovation.
  • QI is available on DVD in the UK (only Series 1-3, unfortunately), but due to copyright issues for the images they use it will never be shown or released elsewhere. One estimate puts the international image rights for one episode at over £10,000.
    • Yet it's being shown in Australia on the ABC, so at least Australian fans can watch it legit. This probably has something to do with the longstanding legal detente that Australia has due to close legal and cultural ties with the UK. Unfortunately, fans in the US have to find alternate means (it's not even shown on BBC America).
  • Rentaghost: Only season one has been released on DVD.
  • Robot Wars. Only one VHS and five DVDs were ever produced. The first was a guide to the First Wars, the next three were clip shows and technical information from the teams about specific popular robots (Chaos 2, Hypno-Disc, and Razer) while the fourth was about the house robots and the fifth was a release of the First World Championship, the only episode to get a commercial release. While certainly interesting to watch, it's a far cry from what should have been released.
  • The retrospective BBC news series The Rock 'n' Roll Years, a montage of news coverage set to popular music of the year, included hundreds of licensed music tracks that would need clearing for any kind of DVD release. It has turned up very occasionally on BBC Four.
  • Rutland Weekend Television, Eric Idle's post-Monty Python show. It won't get a release because of music rights issues and because Idle considers it something of an Old Shame. He's partly justified — some skits are pretty dodgy, but others are quite funny, especially the musical numbers. Just look up "George Harrison [yes, him] on Rutland Weekend Television".


Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

  • The Beachcombers. Aside from being one of the longest-running Canadian drama series ever made, the series basically redefined the concept of "CanCon" (Canadian-made programming). Part of the problem may be the show's length; it ran for an astounding 19 seasons (plus a pair of made-for-TV movies). The only way you can watch the series right now is via old reruns on Canadian specialty stations.
    • Even then, the reruns are only of the last few seasons. The first decade or so (considered by many to be the best years of the show) is still locked in the vault. The CBC has been refusing to release them for years, for unknown reasons.
  • Seasons 4-7 of Da Vinci's Inquest have not been released on DVD, nor the spinoff series DaVinci's City Hall or the TV movie The Quality of Life (which in itself was a victim of Executive Meddling). The only legal releases were DVD sets given out to the cast and crew. It's believed that low sales are to blame for the missing seasons, which is surprising, considering that the program was consistently the most-watched show on Canadian television for most of its run. Thankfully the syndicated rights are so cheap in the United States you can find it from a good American friend willing to record it off RTV, WGN or syndication for you.
  • The Friendly Giant. The show ran from 1958 to 1985, but aside from scattered video tapings from syndicated airings, very few episodes have ever been released in their entirety. CBC doesn't have any shame in marketing merchandise based on the show (or using the puppets in lewd sketches, as evidenced by a controversial 2010 Gemini Awards broadcast), though.
  • While Made in Canada (aka "The Industry") is still aired on some US public television stations, only the six-episode Season 1 was made into a DVD, which is now out-of-print.
  • Mr. Dressup, a children's program that was to Canada what Mr. Rogers Neighbourhood was to America. The series ran for almost 40 years, and inspired entire generations of Canadian children. Ernie Coombs even won several awards for his work. Yet, aside from a one-off "Tickle Treasures" collection of 4 random episodes (picked by two of the show's puppet co-hosts) and a smattering of online episodes on Youtube, the series isn't available to buy anywhere.
  • The landmark sketch comedy show SCTV. Seasons 1-2 (filmed in Toronto), most of Season 3 (shot in Alberta), and Season 6 (aired on Cinemax) still haven't been released in any way, shape or form. Seasons 4-5 (broadcast on NBC) were released by Shout! Factory after a long period of music rights clearance issues, but sketches were dropped because the rights couldn't be cleared.
  • Sesame Park. Yes, there was a Canadian version of Sesame Street produced on CBC in 1996. The show ran for six years, and consisted of almost-entirely Canadian content with unique Muppets created specifically for the show, including Basil The Bear, Chaos and the wheelchair-bound Katie. Despite the fact that it was a critical darling during its run, the show was unceremoniously cancelled, and nothing has been said of it ever since.
  • DVD releases of This Hour Has 22 Minutes stalled after the second season due to unknown reasons. This could possibly be because of low sales - the show never really hit its stride until the 1996-1997 season, which saw the cast start interacting in increasingly outlandish ways with Canadian politicians. This one's less painful than most, because you can still catch repeats of later seasons of the channel, but if you're looking for the famous incidents like Rick Mercer's "Doris Day" petition or Paul Martin putting Greg Thomey in a headlock, you'll have to go search it out on Youtube or try iTunes.
    • In the same vein, the one-off special Talking To Americans (where 22 Minutes co-host Rick Mercer travels around the United States getting random U.S. residents to verify ridiculous statements he makes, simply because he claims to be a journalist). It was the highest-rated special in the channel's history. It propelled Mercer to the big leagues. Had him making fun of future President George W. Bush and Mike Huckabee months (and years) before they would reach the national stage. Won several Gemini Awards. Got repeated in syndication for years afterwards. Online copies of the special still get tens of thousands of hits. Yet, the special still hasn't been released because Mercer feels it was in bad taste after the events of September 11, 2001. You can still watch it online, though.


CBS

  • Beakman's World is available to stream in its (almost) entirety on Netflix Instant, but there is still no full DVD release forthcoming. I guess we're stuck with the "Best of" set made after the first season...
  • Seasons 5-6 of The Bob Newhart Show are completely unavailable because of low sales for Seasons 1-4. Newhart himself has pointed out the idiocy of using a partial release to test sales when people know that there's a strong possibility that they'll never get the rest of the show on DVD.
    • Bob Newhart's other show, Newhart, has had its first season released on DVD, but not the rest of the show. The first season is very different in tone from the rest of the show, and also was not particularly funny, but the rest of the seasons have not been released as of yet.
  • Central Park West, a primetime soap opera about a pair of siblings (played by Madchen Amick and John Barrowman) living it up in the world of rich, backstabbing New York socialites. The show, produced by Melrose Place co-creator Darren Star, was an attempt by CBS to cash in on the success of Melrose Place and featured major stars as part of the cast (including Mariel Hemingway and Lauren Hutton). It floundered in the ratings, though, and disappeared without a trace after a disasterous Retool. It still hasn't been released on DVD, even though it had two seasons.
  • If you try to buy Rodgers and Hammerstein's Cinderella on DVD, you could find the original version, with Julie Andrews, even though it only aired on TV once since its initial performance. You could also find the 1997 Wonderful World of Disney remake. What about the first remake, which starred Lesley Ann Warren and became the most popular version after numerous re-runs and VHS releases? Sony pulled the DVD out of print after a few years. Old copies at Amazon can cost as much as $70.
  • Close to Home was a legal drama that ran from '05 to '07. And nothing has been said of it since. Fans believe that the backlash that resulted when the main character's husband was killed off resulted in the studio deciding not to put any effort into releasing it.
  • Cold Case used roughly five popular songs per episode. Unfortunately, removing them would ruin the flashback sequences, which are the whole point of the show.)
  • Early Edition was a victim of this for a long time, though Seasons 1-2 have since been released. No word on the last two, though.
  • Fresno, a miniseries that parodied Dallas and shows like it (it was set in Fresno on a raisin plantation), only aired once on broadcast TV and has never been released in hard copy.
  • Lou Grant: Unavailable on DVD.
  • Only Season 1 of Mamas Family has been released on DVD, and the episodes are the cut-down syndicated versions. According to John Hamilton, the rights holder and son of the show's producer, he doesn't hold the rights to the uncut versions. TBS stopped airing the show in 2006 and ION did the same in 2008, so it looks like fans are out of luck for the time being.
  • Murphy Brown. Thanks to music rights tangles (and low sales — buy the season, fans!) everything after Season 1 is stalled. That's 200+ episodes sitting around collecting dust in a Warner Bros. vault. It's not in syndication. Even when it was, it was usually shoehorned into horrible middle-of-the-night time slots. The only way to have a semi-complete viewing experience is through torrents and downloads, which happen to be plagued by at least five missing episodes and the occasional removal of certain scenes for syndication (such as Mike Wallace's appearance in the Grand Finale). Since you can torrent 90% of the series, that already makes this situation better than most...but be prepared for long waits if you want to try, since the torrents rarely have seeds.
  • Now You See It (Chuck Henry) — he won't clear his run as he wasn't pleased with his work. Many fans think he's being way too hard on himself.
  • Phyllis: Unavailable on DVD.
  • The Price Is Right — there's a number of theories why (CBS doesn't want reruns up against first-run shows/is asking too much for it, Fremantle Media is asking too much for it, Bob Barker has some say in the matter, etc.) With the GSN repeats and BCI/Mill Creek DVD set, there was a moratorium on certain episodes by Barker, including but not limited to those where fur coats were given as prizes [1] and apparently those with certain models with whom Barker had fallouts. It's also best not to ask how Dennis James' five-year syndicated run falls into this mess.)
  • Rescue 911, though immensely popular in its own right, has yet to see a DVD release (likely due to the true stories involved). However, that hasn't stopped people from posting various episodes online.
  • Rhoda: Seasons 1-4 on DVD, Season 5 MIA. Season 4 was an online exclusive release from Shout! Factory, and all the DVDs have episodes that were Edited for Syndication. Uncut episodes of Season 1 will remain a hot item. That said, Shout! Factory deliberately delayed the release of later seasons to get as much original footage as possible.
  • Silk Stalkings after Season 5 has not been released, and the DVD releases of the first 5 seasons have gone out of print.
  • The Star Wars Holiday Special, quite likely the most notorious bootleg ever circulated, and even moreso for the story surrounding its creation and reception by fans in recent years. George Lucas disowned it and washed his hands of it, but at least one part of the special (the Boba Fett cartoon) is still considered canon, and characters have been made into action figures in the last few years. Whether it will ever be officially released is still unknown.
  • The White Shadow: Seasons 1-2 on DVD, Season 3 MIA.
  • Wiseguy. The second half of Season 2 was the "Dead Dog Records" arc, and of course it involved a lot of music.
  • Without a Trace, Seasons 3-7.
  • WKRP in Cincinnati: Only Season 1 on DVD. This is possibly the best example of music rights problems preventing the release of the show on home media. Every single episode used at least one original artist song. Many of those songs were a set-up or the punchline for a joke or skit. Taking out the song, or replacing it with a different one, weakens or ruins the joke. As one commentator put it:

"That means the choice came down to our getting the show (a) in a compromised version, (b) in a set priced too high for any reasonable business model, or (c) not at all. For years the "not at all" option reigned, but the fan clamor was loud and persistent enough that something had to be done. So here we have a three-disc set that even before it hit the streets caused a furor.


Channel4

  • Channel4's cult smash As If (2001-2004) has completely disappeared off the face of the earth, seemingly due to the perennial licensing rights for the soundtrack problem. They'd mostly fixed this issue by the time Skins (basically As If with younger people and more MDMA, and in Bristol not London — they still paid just as much attention to the soundtrack, though) happened, although there's still a few tracks where they wonked out (the replacement of Lily Allen's "The Fear" with Katy Perry's "I Kissed A Girl" in series 3 being the most Egregious).
  • The only DVD products of the US Whose Line Is It Anyway? available are Season 1 Vols. 1-2 and a "Best of". For the British version, there's only one set of Series 1-2 on both sides of the Atlantic.
    • A&E, the company who released the Region 1 British boxset, has let it run out of print and no longer acknowledges its existence. There's no legal way to watch seasons 3-10 in America anymore, since BBC America took the show off their lineup a long time ago (and even then, they only showed seasons 6 and later, because, since the American version gained popularity, they thought no one would want to watch Whose Line without Ryan and Colin). British fans get to watch the whole thing through 4 On Demand, but they lock out foreign IPs. And, until very recently, the vast majority of episodes you could find on the internet were either from Comedy Central broadcasts or BBC America broadcasts — which were all edited for time and often for content (remember, these aired before South Park became popular).


Comedy Central

  • Battlebots. Only two DVDs/VHS tapes were ever released, neither with actual seasons on them (one was a clip show, the other showed one of the 1999 Pay-Per-View events). Not only that, but most of the episodes were only run two or three times. Season 5 episodes were only aired once.
  • The Chappelle's Show DVDs are missing about half of the live music performances (probably because of rights issues). However, Comedy Central periodically reruns the episodes, so resourceful viewers can get copies of these.


Discovery Channel

  • Emergency Vets was a popular reality/medical series on Animal Planet that ran from 1998 to 2002 with a follow-up episode in 2005 and a special in 2006. There has never been official video/DVD release of any of it. Very few full episodes exist online.
    • Later, a spin-off show, E-Vet Interns, started airing in 2007. It lasted more than a whole season, with only three episodes made in the second season before production stopped. It hasn't been released either.
  • The 2005 Discovery Channel documentary series It Takes a Thief has this problem, as well. It was received fairly well (with the hosts making occasional rounds to various cable news channels) and lasted two seasons. Then, in 2007, it mysteriously disappeared and hasn't been released by Discovery on DVD. This is strange, as Discovery usually releases almost anything it shows on DVD. It gets stranger, as the network decided to rebroadcast the whole series in 2009...in full High Definition for both seasons.
  • Monster House (no, not that one) vanished off both the Discovery Channel and the Internet with little fanfare and hasn't been heard from since. Which is puzzling, given that its older-sibling series Monster Garage is available.


Disney

  • Adventures in Wonderland never got a DVD release, much to the annoyance of the fans. Currently, it can only be obtained through old VHS releases.
  • Bear in the Big Blue House was released heavily in the United States on both VHS and DVD, but many episodes were never given a U.S. release. Still want them? Your best bet is to try and source a DVD copy of the episodes from a foreign website.
  • Bunny Town, due to lack of popularity, only received one DVD release and has been off the air for a long time.
  • Earth Star Voyager, a little remembered but underground circulated Wonderful World of Disney special that was intended to be a backdoor pilot, but poor ratings canned that. Disney fails to even acknowledge the film's existence, but various levels of VHS recordings and transfers to circuits via the usual questionable means.
    • That Disney fails to acknowledge its existance is interesting considering that on its original airing it was introduced by none other than Michael Eisner himself with the characters in roleplay (including a guest appearance by Mickey Mouse).
  • Flash Forward (not the 2009 ABC show), which starred a pre-Firefly and Space Cases Jewel Staite and Ben Foster, and featured a few guest appearances from Ryan Gosling. Not only did the Disney Channel stop rerunning episodes around 2001 when Lizzie McGuire took off, it's nigh impossible to find any clips of it anywhere online.
  • Honey I Shrunk the Kids. While all three films have been released on DVD, the TV series never has. At least it's being shown on The Hub...
  • Johnny and the Sprites, a puppet/live-action hybrid featuring John Tartaglia, only ever received one DVD release and one music album. It still airs in some non-U.S. markets, but has been off-air in the U.S. for a couple years now.
  • Kids Incorporated on DVD would be a fan's nightmare — every single song (barring the original ones) would have to be cut; that said, since all the songs are performed by the kids and aren't the original recordings of the songs, so it'll be easier to clear rights. There's one other issue, though — the rights are split between MGM (the show itself), Disney (holders of the physical tapes), and 20th Century Fox (MGM's DVD distributor).
  • Out Of The Box was a Playhouse Disney classic - a live action children's TV show featuring a man and woman named Tony and Vivian and a group of kids who got together every day to do arts and crafts projects, story segments and musical numbers. It had a couple of VHS and very scant DVD exposure.
  • So Weird.
  • Lizzie McGuire did get a season box set release, albeit after its target demographic forgot about it.

FOX

  • The circumstances surrounding the holdup of the 1960s Batman TV show are numerous, even compared to other works. The prints of the series are owned by 20th Century Fox, but the characters are owned by DC Comics, which is owned by competitor Time Warner. Fox went to court in 2008 to battle Warner Brothers regarding rights issues with the then-unreleased Watchmen adaptation, of which the acquisition of the rights to the Batman series was a key sticking point. That case is still tied up in court, but even if 20th Century Fox regains control of the series, they'll have to deal with many other factors. This includes clearance rights for the cameos in each episode(some of which were fictional characters from other shows like Lurch and Colonel Klink), music rights, writers' residuals, a prior lawsuit that was filed by the Dozier estate (of Charles Dozier, the creator of the series) for residuals, and copyrighted designs that were unique to the series. Things have gotten so bad that Adam West basically said "screw it" and gathered up the remaining living writers, producers, and actors in order to produce his own Behind-The-Scenes DVDs about the series in the form of roundtable discussions of each two-part episode. The only way to see the episodes is download a torrent or watch the episodes on The HUB, or if you live in certain areas, ME-TV.
  • The Bernie Mac Show beyond Season 1, likely due to music clearance.
  • Brimstone.
  • Good luck finding the original Fox run of Don't Forget the Lyrics, as the only episodes airing anywhere on television are the 2010-2011 syndicated version.
  • Galidor: Defenders of the Outer Dimension. An oft-forgotten Saturday morning sci-fi series that aired on Fox Kids during the 2001-02 season (their final season as Fox Kids), which had a surprisingly good plot to it. Unfortunately, the show has yet to see a DVD release due to a lack of interest, because few people remember it. (The toyline from LEGO, which consisted of straight-out action figures with interchangeable parts, was canned after extreme backlash from Lego fans...so that doesn't help.)
  • Mad TV had its first season released on DVD. However, thanks to poor sales, it seems doubtful that Fox and Warner Bros. will release any of the remaining 13 seasons, despite the fact that a DVD release of Season 2 was promised in the Season 1 box set.
  • Music rights were cited as the reason fans of Malcolm in the Middle are unable to obtain DVDs of Season 2 onwards, with no one entertaining the possibility of simply replacing the contested music. Seriously, FOX, it's not going to break our hearts if Sum 41 is removed from the soundtrack.
  • Models Inc., a spinoff of FOX's Melrose Place focusing on Amanda Woodward's (Heather Locklear) mother, Hilary, who ran a modeling agency. Aside from a marathon airing on E! Television, the show has never been officially released.
  • The 1990s hip-hop cop drama New York Undercover probably won't make it to DVD (and will take years if it does) because of music rights. Like Cold Case, they use a lot of popular songs; removing them would damage the show. NYU also featured a lot of live performances by top artists of the period (Keith Sweat, Boyz II Men, and Notorious B.I.G. among others). In most episodes, they were shown at the end once the case was solved, and so cutting those might not hurt the integrity of the show...but for episodes where the artists performed in the middle of the show, cutting them would mess things up. At least you can watch reruns on TV One.
  • Interestingly, despite its immense popularity and a surge of nostalgia thanks to old fans reaching their twenties, Power Rangers DVD releases are very hit or miss. They did have them for a while, usually five seperate DVD's of five episodes each (covering 25 episodes of a season that stretched anywhere from 32 to 40 episodes.) Full season releases never happened outside of Europe (Germany and the UK, to be specific). All 700+ episodes are available on Netflix, however.
    • It has been recently announced however that Shout! Factory purchased the rights to create DVD season sets for the first 17 seasons (Mighty Morphin through RPM) and possibly the Mighty Morphin recut in the US.
    • In addition, it has also been recently announced that Lionsgate Entertainment has purchased the DVD and Blu-Ray rights to Samurai and presumably all future Power Ranger seasons for the US. Volumes are currently on the way and season sets are presumed to eventually follow.
  • Saban's Masked Rider has had very few episodes released on DVD. What's surprising, though, is the lack of online availability. For a series that debuted in the mid-90s and was a spin-off of the phenomenally popular Power Rangers, the fact that a good chunk of it has only recently seen widespread circulation is unbelievable.
  • So You Think You Can Dance. The legal issues surrounding the music involved make a DVD release next to impossible. Fortunately, most of the individual dances, if not full episodes, can be found on YouTube.
  • The War at Home surprisingly got a DVD release of Season 1, but not 2, which is currently only avalible online.
  • Werewolf was one of the first shows the FOX network aired, and lasted two seasons. Unfortunately, it featured some popular music, and music rights are reportedly the main holdup on getting a DVD release. Airings on cable channels have included some, but not all, episodes because of this.


ITV

  • Art Attack. Yeah, the arts and crafts show. The show ran through more than a decade and was eventually cancelled in 2007, yet there's not much left, not even in the web. A few sporadic VHS releases (like the Top 20 Art Attack) are the only remnants of the show available. Even Disney Channel (well, it was Disney Channel Spain) confirmed that there's no such thing as Art Attack DVDs for sale. There was a short-lived magazine, a set of "games" to make different crafts and even a room with the huge painbrushes and other giant material in Disney Land, but no way to find the show itself.
  • The first 246 episodes (covering Seasons 1-6) of The Bill are available for purchase in Australia. The company that produced the DVDs folded after that, and the copyright passed over to Village Roadshow, who have decided to sit on it and do nothing. 246 episodes might sound impressive until you realise that there have been 2,422 episodes produced in 27 years. The UK releases are still ongoing, but they're moving at a much slower pace.
    • The DVD release rights in Australia have since been taken over by Shock DVD, who seem to be continuing with the releases. As of June 2012, series 1-8, which comprise 502 episodes, have been released.
  • Globo Loco, a childrens game show from CITV, regarded as much as to be nominated for the 'Best Kids Entertainment Show' award. There's one episode on Youtube from its second series and a snippet or two, but that's it.
  • Knightmare came to an abrupt end in 1994, and probably will never see the light of day again. A terrible shame, given how much fun it was and how important it was for its pioneering use of Chroma Key and virtual-reality technology. It reran on Sci-Fi Channel (UK) during the 1990s after it went off-air from CITV, and on Challenge TV in the early 2000s. It has never been released on video or DVD, except illegally.
  • Police, Camera, Action!, an extremely popular ITV show, has bootlegs floating around on torrent sites but has never had an official DVD release. Add the fact that fans want all versions, including the Edited for Syndication copies, and it looks impossible, but not unlikely. Copyright of police footage comes into play here. Music rights are an often-cited theory as to why the show hasn't been released.
  • Police Stop, which kicked off the police genre in The Nineties, was a VHS-only release between 1993-1995, and then aired on television 1996-2002, before returning on ITV 4 in 2008. Now, you can't get it at all unless you get the first episode via illegal downloading. Old worn VHS tapes can be found on eBay, but no digital copies.


MTV

  • Human Giant got a DVD release for Season 1, but Season 2 has yet to be released. It stopped being re-run quite some time ago and season 3 is in Development Hell, so the only way to watch it at all is the "sneak peek" bits on the season 1 DVD. You'd think a series that stars a veritable All-Star Cast of comedians would be a little higher up in the release queue.
  • Jackass currently[when?] does not have a proper release for seasons 1-3 and only exists in a "best-of" style box set; with intros excised, nothing presented in episodic order and some sketches removed (most notably the "Keep God out of California" bit) along with broadcast censorship. To be fair, the bonus disc has some previously unreleased content, including the Gumball Rally special in its entirety and a good chunk of promo content, and the regular discs have commentaries from the cast. This was averted to a degree with a "Lost Tapes" DVD that included some of the removed sketches (including almost the entire "Self-Defense Test" sketch) and more promo content, along with all the intros. This is the result of some unique legal shenanigans where Dickhouse (the Jackass production company) retains complete creative control over any shows they produce, but MTV/Paramount has final say over what goes on broadcast and DVD releases. The movies, however, are not subject to the agreement and have been released normally.
  • The Sifl and Olly Show aired from 1997-99, and has yet to see an official release. Unlike other MTV series, S&O didn't include recorded music; most of the music was original, with a few covers here and there. The only episodes to see a DVD release were the unaired Season 3, published by co-creator Liam Lynch.


NBC

  • ALF is a very special case. The entire series has been released — but only the chopped-up versions that were Edited for Syndication. The producers have insisted that it would be too expensive to compile the original episodes for DVD release. However, that hasn't stopped Europe from getting an uncut version of the series.
  • Concentration — NBC Universal hasn't touched the format in nearly 20 years, and won't authorize cable reruns or a DVD release.
  • The Days And Nights Of Molly Dodd: A 1987 show that aired on NBC and was rescued by Lifetime when NBC cancelled it and ran till 1991. It hasn't been syndicated since 2002, and has never been released on DVD or even VHS. Even nigh impossible to find online.
  • The Gong Show — likely music rights. USA Network showed repeats in the 1980s, and GSN has aired episodes of the NBC, Barris syndicated, and Bleu syndicated versions; it's very possible that GSN still has the rights to broadcast it, so if people want to see it they should start campaigning hard).
  • Hill Street Blues: Seasons 1-2 on DVD, Seasons 3-7 MIA. This said, all seven seasons can be watched for free on YouTube courtesy of Channel 4's on-demand service, albeit only to viewers with a British IP address. Fortunately, this isn't difficult to circumvent.
  • Hit Man — the 130 educational films used during the show's 13-week run were only licensed for one showing apiece, and Jay Wolpert has been unable to renegotiate.
  • Joey the Friends spin-off had its first season released in the U.S., but not the second (including the episodes that never aired in the U.S.), which was only released in Canada. That normally wouldn't be a problem since Canadian DVD releases are Region 1 and will work on any U.S. DVD player, except for the fact that season 2 has been out of print for several years and as such is rather pricey now. However, the season 2 episodes are readily available online.
  • Journeyman aired its short (13 episodes) run on NBC back in 2007, got nixed by a combination of a late airtime (meaning lower ratings) and the fallout from the writers' strike, and never got released on DVD.
  • The Match Game Hollywood Squares Hour — dual ownership of the two formats, and maybe Gene Rayburn not wanting the series to be seen because he wasn't pleased with it.
  • Name That Tune — music rights.
  • Night Court fits this from Season 5 onward (season 4 was released on the Warner Archive DVD-R service in 2010). You'd think NBC would want to put out a full show set for a series that spent most of its life as part of their legendary Thursday lineup alongside The Cosby Show and Cheers. And this was the show that earned John Larroquette four consecutive Emmys for Best Supporting Actor — a record that still stands to this day.
    • NBC has no control whatsoever over DVD releases of Night Court, as they don't own ancillary rights, given that they were only responsible for broadcast. Ancillary rights for Night Court are held by Warner Bros courtesy of co-producing the show with Starry Night Productions, the production company of series creator and executive producer Reinhold Weege.
    • The biggest problem here is that most of the show's popularity came during the middle of its run. The show arguably didn't come together until Season 3 because of a LOT of early cast changes brought on by actor deaths (Selma Diamond and Florence Halop) and prior contracts (Markie Post appeared as Christine Sullivan in one Season 2 episode, but was still doing The Fall Guy and couldn't join the cast regularly until Season 3). It's a catch-22: many of the show's fans don't care for Seasons 1-2 because half the cast they loved isn't present, but the studio won't consider releasing the rest of the series until the sales for the first two DVD sets improve.
  • Police Woman: Only the first season of this 70's Angie Dickinson crime drama is on DVD.
  • Both American versions of Red Dwarf (the aired pilot episode and pitchfilm). They've been circulating for years, and master-quality clips of #1 were even used in an official DVD featurette devoted to the Americanization. #2 was available on YouTube in an edited form whose only change was cleanly removing all clips of the British cast.
  • Remington Steele only saw a release of Season 1 in UK and other non-American territories.
  • Saturday Night Live. Season sets finally saw the light of day in 2009, with the music rights sorted out for each episode to air uncut. However, the boxsets have stalled at Season 5 (with no word on how they'll handle the next couple of seasons, which constitute Old Shame on NBC's behalf) and Lionsgate released a (now sadly out-of-print) massive compilation of the best musical performances that originally aired as a quartet of specials for the show's 25th Anniversery back in 1999.
    • Every episode of every season is currently available to "Watch Instantly" on Netflix. It'll cost you at least eight bucks a month, but that's a small price considering the entire set would cost hundreds of dollars anyway.
  • St. Elsewhere: Only Season 1 on DVD, although this is another one that UK folks can enjoy via Channel 4 on Demand.
  • Seasons 3-6 of Third Watch.
  • If you're looking for a DVD of most of the NBC's TNBC Saturday Morning lineup, you're going to be waiting awhile. While Saved by the Bell and California Dreams eventually got releases, Hang Time, City Guys and several others haven't. (It doesn't help that most of the shows were canned after one season.)
  • The Tonight Show, hosted by Conan O'Brien...and nearly everything he did with the network for the foreseeable future. Following the whole debacle in 2009-10, NBC has scrubbed nearly all evidence that Conan has ever been employed by the network — even going so far as to replace his picture on the famous Rockefeller Plaza mural with Jay Leno.
  • Viper has no reruns no DVD release. The only way to find it is on YouTube. A few people have put most of the better episodes up, but they're typically in VHS quality; the presence of local-station logos may be a point of contention.
  • Wheel of Fortune — a King World representative stated in August 2006 that the Chuck Woolery era (1975-81) was wiped along with early Pat Sajak shows. Further, GSN has only ever rerun select seasons of the nighttime version.


Nickelodeon

  • All That has yet to see any home release, likely due to the musical acts. Even in reruns, the K-Ci and Jojo performance was removed from its episode.
    • Its spinoff, Kenan and Kel, also hasn't seen an official video release yet.
  • Animorphs only had 12 episodes released on VHS, and nothing else. Fans have taken to uploading the rest of the series online, even though most consider it a bad show.
  • Are You Afraid of the Dark? was never released on DVD in the US, but did receive complete season sets on Region 1 DVD in Canada by Cookie Jar (after its initial airings on YTV). Said sets are now out of print and go for upwards of $100, so occasional late night Teen Nick airings are the only way to see them without breaking the bank.
  • The rights to The Donna Reed Show, an inescapable fixture of the early days of Nick At Nite, were partially reclaimed by the estates of Reed and onetime husband/producer Tony Owen in 2008. The Reed and Owen estates now hold the rights to the first five seasons, while seasons 6-8 are still held by Sony, making rebroadcast rights snarled enough that the series is currently unavailable to air. DVD season sets actually are starting to come out, but getting all of them isn't exactly guaranteed in the new order of things.
  • My Brother and Me.
  • Salute Your Shorts.
  • Space Cases.
  • You Can't Do That on Television, while airing on Nickelodeon and whose American distribution rights are owned by said network, has not seen any release outside a "Worst of" tape in 1989. Further compounding matters is that various changes in management at CJOH (where the show was produced) over the years have resulted in a lot of paperwork getting lost, particularly concerning which (if any) cast and/or crew members would be entitled to royalties/additional usage fess/etc. were the show released on DVD.
    • The final nail in the coffin of an official video release came in February 2010 with a devastating fire at the CJOH studios in Ottawa, which meant the loss of most, if not all, of the surviving master tapes.


PBS

  • Bill Nye the Science Guy continues to be a much-beloved science show that is still played in classrooms across the world, yet it has never received a proper commercial DVD release. Nye's own website doesn't sell it, there are only a few (overpriced) single episodes being sold through the official Disney store, and the first two seasons have been released in outrageously expensive sets that are only sold to schools and educators (and, on average, cost over $1,500 - yes, you read that right). However, this is somewhat mollified by the massive VHS release that proceeded it (which had all the episodes). In addition, there are certain websites that only teachers can access to watch episodes, if it helps.
  • Mister Rogers' Neighborhood: Episodes from the show's first run (1968-76) have not aired on PBS since 1995. They were taken out of the rotation because, by then, there were a year's worth of episodes from the second run (1979-2001) in the can. It was also said that these episodes could confuse children since they looked different and had some different characters (although the 1974-76 episodes were more similar to the later ones).
    • The first (black and white) season has probably not aired anywhere since the early 1970s. The first color season (1969) has not aired since 1983, and the 1970-76 seasons were gradually phased out between 1989 and 1995. 20 episodes from this era can be bought from Amazon, but many more remain unreleased, including all of the 1969 and 1972 seasons. Meanwhile, nearly all of the 1979-2001 run has been released.
    • There is also one Missing Week from the second run: the 1983 "Conflict" week. It was originally created to help children cope with the war-related themes of The Day After miniseries, but was deemed inappropriate to air after 1996 because of real-life wars. This week has not been released on Amazon.com.
  • Many classic Sesame Street segments can be found online and on compilation DVD's. However, only 21 complete (or at least near-complete) episodes from 1989 on back have been officially released on DVD or digitally, including a test pilot.
    • Also, the episode with the Wicked Witch is very hard to find, since it only aired once due to the fact that children were afraid of the witch and refused to watch the show. Good luck finding a copy now.
  • Shining Time Station appears to be headed for this, likely never to get a DVD release despite having been nominated for three Emmy Awards and having Ringo Starr and George Carlin playing the Conductor. Luckily, episodes can still be found online. Rights issues are likely the problem, since it used footage from Thomas the Tank Engine and Friends, whose rights currently resides with Hi T Entertainment.
  • Square One TV
    • Same for 3-2-1 Contact. Broadcasters actually encouraged taping of the show. A handful of episodes were commercially released on VHS, but they're very expensive now. Worse, the first season is older than VHS, so many of its episodes, especially those that weren't rebroadcast later, have been lost forever.
  • There was a 1990s PBS miniseries called The United States Of Poetry that featured poems being read by the authors and widely varied cinematography like artistic music videos. You may be able to find a VHS copy languishing in your local library, but otherwise it's gone — although, oddly, its very dated website is still being hosted.
  • Where in the World Is Carmen Sandiego??, and all of the original tunes by Rockapella that its episodes included. Ditto its successor series Where in Time Is Carmen Sandiego??
  • WonderWorks was a joint PBS/Disney series that created short made-for-TV movies based on acclaimed children's books, such as Jacob Have I Loved, Bridge to Terebithia, and The Hoboken Chicken Emergency. It also brought several BBC miniseries adaptations of classic kidlit to the U.S. Despite most of the films seeing release on VHS (some were also fixtures of The Disney Channel in The Eighties, such as The Boy Who Loved Trolls and How to Be a Perfect Person in Just Three Days), only a few have seen the light of day on DVD, and never under the WonderWorks banner. (These include the first two titles mentioned and the BBC adaptations of A Little Princess and The Chronicles of Narnia.)
  • If you like either Zoom series and want to see them on DVD? Well you're out of luck. The 90s series only had a "Making Of" VHS and a "Party With.." VHS while the original 70s had a single "Best Of" VHS release.
  • Saludos, a old show similar to Sesame Street that teaches Spanish, is very hard to find, and only survives in the tapes of those that recorded this. This troper's teacher said she couldn't find a higher quality version of the show, which shows how hard to find it is. You can only find articles about it.


SKY UK

  • The Strangerers (sic) was a science fiction comedy drama made for Sky 1, starring Mark Williams and Jack Docherty and written by Rob Grant. Desite the fact that it had good writing, nicely quirky acting and some excellent VFX, Sky cancelled it because they didn't think it fitted in with the rest of their rubbish programming, and there's never been a DVD.
  • Ten Minute Tales: A series of shorts run over 11 days on Sky Television over Christmas 2009. Despite having some of the best actors around and some of the best writers (Neil Gaiman being one), the network has no plans to put it on DVD, so those who want to re-watch (which you will, as most of them are pretty deep and require several viewings to fully understand them) and/or those who don't have Sky will have find them elsewhere.


The WB / The CW / UPN

  • Kevin Hill, an oft-forgotten series starring Taye Diggs and a pre-Mad Men Christina Hendricks, which focuses on a lawyer who is suddenly forced to care for his deceased cousin's ten month old daughter, Sarah. The show was cancelled after its first season due to low ratings, and it has since disappeared into the ether.
  • Legend. Richard Dean Anderson and John DeLancie in a Steampunk version of The Old West. Anachronisms left and right, but it's a fun ride. Too bad it only lasted one season.
  • The short-lived WB series Tarzan suffered this fate. You can still find it online, though the quality is debatable.
  • Everything after Season 1 of What I Like About You. Warner has no current plans to release the other 3 seasons. On the Season 1 set, the theme song was replaced with some completely irrelevant other tune. Fortunately the rest of the episodes are all availible online.


YTV

  • The Adventures of Shirley Holmes has been all but forgotten by Credo/Forefront, despite being very popular during its four-season run on YTV and gaining significant critical acclaim. More than a decade after the last season ended, the episodes are no longer being rerun, and there is very little hope of an official release in the future. Bootleg DVDs can be found online if you look really hard for them, though, and a few dedicated fans are working on uploading the episodes to the web.
  • The Big Comfy Couch ran for seven seasons on YTV (over a period of 14 years), but it has never received a proper DVD release. Time-Life Video released many episodes of the series on VHS in the mid-90's, but releases have been all over the place as far as DVD goes. The series got a release of several early episodes featuring Alyson Court (the original actress who played Loonette) in the early 2000's, which subsequently went out of print. The "remake" season in 2006 is still incomplete despite receiving a partial release, and the only way to see the rest of the episodes is to catch a repeat on Treehouse TV.
  • The YTV series Catwalk, about a group of young adults trying to establish themselves as a musical group. The show was notable for starring a pre-Party of Five Neve Campbell, and the episodes dealt with mature subject matter and themes, and was very progressive for its time. Despite the success of the first season, the show was cancelled in 1994, and half the episodes were never broadcast. It's never been released on DVD, likely due to a lawsuit arising between the show and a Connecticut-based band (also named Catwalk) regarding the name of the show.
  • Maniac Mansion, the Canadian television spinoff of the Lucasarts game of the same name, hasn't been seen in North America since it stopped airing in syndication in Canada on YTV in 2002. Despite the level of critical acclaim the series received when it first debuted, the fourth-wall breaking humor, and a cast made up of alumni from the Second City Theatre Company, none of the three seasons have ever been released in their entirety on DVD (two Season 1 episodes were released on VHS more than a decade ago). You can find the complete series through torrents.
  • Stickin' Around was a well-loved animated series that aired on the network from 1996 - 1998, and ran in syndication for almost a full decade afterwards. A proposed Region 1 DVD release collapsed in 2000, and the only official release the series had was in Australia. The only way to find the episodes now is to hunt for the old VHS releases (which had all the episodes) or look up episodes on YouTube.
  • System Crash, a sketch comedy series about a group of students in a media club at the fictional Lambton High School, aired from 1999-2002 and garnered a significant amount of popularity. However, it disappeared after the network began transitioning its programming block to younger audiences. It never received an official DVD release, and the only remnants of the series are occasional episodes that float around on YouTube or torrents.

Soap Operas

The vast majority of soap operas (especially of the Long Runner Anglo variety) simply have far too many episodes to ever be released.

  • Australian company Shock Entertainment are bucking the trend by actually beginning to put Neighbours to DVD - so far, DVD releases have been of the type that are collections of special episodes, but on April 4 2012 Shock released "Neighbours: From the Beginning Vol 1" which comprises the first 56 episodes (of nearly 6500 to date). Vol 2 is expected in November 2012, and will probably be of a similar length.
  • Dark Shadows (TV series) has a VHS release in the early 1990's, and has also gotten a recent DVD release, including an Special edition with a coffin-shaped box to house the whopping 131-disc release.
  • Latin Telenovelas, who are shorter and more self-contained than Anglo soaps, suffer of the same unreleasebility problem but for different reasons. In theory, having less episodes would mean their producer could whip out a boxset if they wanted to. In practice, Telenovela producers make their money from advertising, syndication, the occasional merchandise like soundtrack discs, and the selling of rights for the eventual Foreign Remake. While many companies has finally gotten that people want to see their favorite classics again (prompting the existence of cable channels like TLNovelas), not all of them had grasped that people may want to have physical copies of their beloved classics. Also, a lot of telenovelas were produced under weird production schemes, and many production companies folded without no-body stepping on the rights, so good look to see tape circulation of those.
    • For a while, Televisa did release DVD versions of their most beloved telenovela classics. Unfortunately, they were severely compressed version of them (usually 60 chapters on DVD vs. 180 from the original broadcast), with many important scenes left out, and all them seemed to be edited by a monkey high in mescaline.
    • The tape circulation is most prone on Narconovelas, a recent, Colombian-born genre about the life of high profile drug traffickers and the people related to them one way or another, peppered with high doses of violence and sex, that in its native country are broadcast after the Watershed. Unfortunately, the Media Watchdogs believe that these soaps are promoting such a lifestyle and block them to be shown one way or another, so in many places the only way to watch them is buying them to pirate DVD sellers.

Other

  • Before YouTube and Google Video, in the 1990s and early 2000s, Episodes of random TV programs were on various websites via download on QuickTime, RealVideo and DivX formats which predated the later MP4 and HTML5 formats of today, Clips of TV programs were downloaded on MPEG-1 and AVI formats respectively, TV programs were on FTP servers that predates Peer-to-peer networks. For streaming, TV programs are put on a playlist on Microsoft Netshow.
  • There have been Best Of compilations of American Bandstand [2], The Midnight Special, Don Kirshner's Rock Concert, and Soul Train...but aside from the last show being rerun on Centric, seeing full-season releases or full-show reruns doesn't seem to be in the cards, mostly because of the cost and effort involved in securing the rights of musical and (in Midnight and Concert's cases) stand-up comedy performances.
  • Anglia Television miniseries adaptation of Alice in Wonderland.
  • Mostly due to the fact it was a local (Seattle) show and the station that created it is now part of a larger station group, Almost Live! has also never seen the light of a DVD box set...despite the fact that you could probably convince half the city to give up espresso for a month just to get one. For those outside Seattle, Almost Live was what established "Bill Nye the Science Guy", and his Almost Live colleagues made appearances on the show. Also well worth it to see the "Science Guy" in some amusing but definitely-not-for-kids stuff like "The Street Walking Lawyers of Aurora Ave" and "Ree-bok Cross-dressers".
  • Baywatch only had the first three syndicated seasons (1991-1994) released on DVD in America, and the "River of No Return" two-parter wasn't included in the season 2 set because it got a standalone release which has long been discontinued. The sets featured music edits too (including the iconic theme song!). The entire series got released in Germany, though.
  • Beat The Cyborgs was a CITV entertainment show broadcast in 2003, so for such a comparatively recent series it's disheartening to see not just a lack of VHS or DVD, but NO online clips of the show (just one trailer, all there is as visual representation on YouTube that this show existed). It can't be revived due to the tragic death of Mark Speight, who was the Borgmaster.
  • The 1987 TV movie Casanova, directed by Simon Langton, written by George Macdonald Fraser and starring Richard Chamberlain, Faye Dunaway, Ornella Muti, Sylvia Kristel and Hanna Schygulla has never been released on VHS or DVD in the United States other than a severely edited 122-minute VHS version in 1992. A much longer version with nudity has been released on VHS in various European countries and Latin America, but there has never been an official DVD release anywhere. The best available version appears to be a Japanese laserdisc of the original U.S. broadcast version of the movie (with Japanese-language subtitles).
  • In 1998, CNN aired an amazing 24-part special on the Cold War. It was released on VHS, but then 9/11 happened, and large amounts of footage from the later episodes, which dealt with the USA's interventions in the Middle East, were re-classified. But those episodes were never recalled, so if you get your hands on them, you can legally watch classified footage (which bits are the classified bits are unknown, of course). Copies still float around online, and the series is shown in many history, international relations and foreign policy classes.
  • Conquest, a show hosted by Peter Woodward on The History Channel a mere six years ago. The History Channel's website doesn't even list the show anymore and acts like the 28 episodes they made and aired never happened. Which is unfortunate, because it was a great show that depicted many classical weapons and their history/use.
  • David Lynch's 3-episode miniseries Hotel Room.
  • Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives: Seasons 1-4 on dvd; seasons 5-11 are MIA.
  • Doom Runners, a TV Movie from Showtime, is only available on VHS — and even then in fairly limited supply. Since the film is hardly more than a blip on the nostalgia radar, the chances of it seeing any kind of release ever are slim.
  • Any of the E! True Hollywood Story specials. Aside from the understandably daunting task of trying to release 14 seasons worth of unrelated media (ranging from TV and film stars to celebrity scandals and popular culture), many of the episodes have music or footage clearance issues. That said, many of the episodes could (and should) have been released as extras on DVD sets that didn't have any in the first place (Miami Vice, Married With Children, and others). This isn't helped by the fact that E! has only released a scant few episodes to Emmy Award voters only and has since limited reruns to episodes that feature reality TV famewhores. Thankfully in syndication, but mainly as late-night filler for TV stations and edited to fit a half-hour and remove E! branding.
    • They (or at least Comcast) have also seen fit to pull down any uploads on YouTube for no apparent reason. Considering the above, don't expect to see most of them any time soon.
  • The CTV news drama E.N.G.: Not only did this show (about a team of anchors at a politically-charged news station) run for five seasons, but it was one of the most watched programs on the channel it aired on. It won a whopping ten Gemini Awards (including Best Dramatic Series four years in a row) and practically swept every other Canadian series critically and commercially when it was on...until it was dumped from the network without explanation. Twenty years later, and it still hasn't been released.
  • The bawdy game show Everything Goes, which ran on Escapade (1981-84) and the Playboy Channel (1984-88), has nothing other than a "Best of" tape in 1983 covering Seasons 1-2.
  • Freddy's Nightmares — A Nightmare on Elm Street: The Series. Five episodes were released on VHS in the 1990s, which are long out-of-print. There was also a DVD set in Region 2 which contained the first three episodes, but alleged poor sales kept it from being released anywhere else and stopped any more episodes from being given a DVD treatment.
  • Game Shows pretty much across the board. With GSN constantly moving away from showing the "classics", it's become increasingly hard to find episodes of even iconic shows such as Wheel of Fortune (mentioned above), Family Feud, Pyramid or Press Your Luck. And this isn't even getting into the countless series that have been wiped.
  • Glasgow Kiss, an extremely well-done six-part series about a Glaswegian sportswriter and the financial management planner he falls in love with (played by Iain Glen and Sharon Small, respectively), has yet to appear on DVD. It can be found on the internet, but requires considerable effort to hunt down.
  • Infinity Limited , by the Australian Broadcasting Commission, 1980-84.
  • Intensity, a two-part miniseries from 1997 based on the Dean Koontz book of the same name, starring John C. McGinley from Scrubs. Hey, who needs Intensity when you have the French ripoff High Tension?
  • It's unlikely that Iron Chef will ever be released on DVD, due to a combination of length (there were over 300 episodes), copyright issues (much of the music was from Backdraft, Glory, and Dragon: The Bruce Lee Story), and licensing issues between Japan, the US, and Australia. Also, many episodes never left Japan in the first place.
    • Iron Chef America has no excuse. Despite that, only the Battle Of The Masters was released on DVD.
    • Iron Chef Japan is still being shown on The Cooking Channel.
  • The very popular Dutch 1960s series Ja Zuster, Nee Zuster is only available now as fragments and as recorded songs, not due to copyright issues but because most of the master tapes were lost.
  • About half of Kaze no Haruka is available to view online. Much searching has not revealed any part of the series to have been released either on DVD or for download.
  • Kometto-san (Señorita Cometa in Spanish), a 1960s Widget Series mixing live action, puppets and animation that aired in Mexico through the 1970s and mid-1980s. Probably due to the earthquake of 1985 the series was Lost Forever, since tapes were not so common then.
  • The Canadian-produced sister series to Kung Fu, Kung Fu: The Legend Continues. Despite starring David Carradine and running for four seasons in syndication, the show still hasn't been released on DVD. It is available online and on torrents, though.
  • There hasn't been a single DVD of the UK or US versions of The Magic Roundabout. The last release was a "best of" on VHS in 1993.
  • The horror TV series Monsters. If you have the Chiller, you can catch it, usually via marathons.
  • Memphis Beat, never released on DVD (entire two seasons) after it's cancellation by TNT in 2011.
  • MTM Enterprises seems particularly cursed. The studio was synonymous with "quality television" in the 1970s and 1980s, producing some of the most critically-acclaimed series in American TV history, but none of them (with the exception of The Mary Tyler Moore Show and Remington Steele, the latter no doubt thanks to Pierce Brosnan's megastardom) have seen anything close to their complete runs getting out on DVD.
  • The New Adventures of Robin Hood, a kitschy 90's series from TNT in the vein of Hercules and Xena, has only the first season available on DVD, and that not until 2010. The remaining three seasons are completely unavailable.
  • The Made for TV Movie Oil Storm received a lot of attention after apparently predicting Hurricane Katrina. However, as it is a mockumentary made up in part from various forms of archival footage, it is unclear if it will ever be rereleased.
  • Out of This World not only has DVD distribution tied up in limbo due to legal issues with the showrunners (They are blocked from making any more money from the show.) this prevents the show from airing on American television where reruns were last aired in the mid-nineties.
  • Pop Up Video is presumably stymied by music rights issues (although it saw one VHS / DVD compilation release in 1999). A select few videos can be found on VH-1's website and YouTube. All the full reruns still air on VH-1 Classic, but unless you have a higher-tier satellite package, you likely won't see the show's complete run ever again.
    • Speaking of VH-1: Any I Love The _____ series. More movie, television, and music clip rights issues than you can shake a stick at.
  • Professional Wrestling: In the pre-VCR/cable television era, most local or small regional promotions that were fortunate enough to have their own syndicated television programs have been erased to history. First, videotape (prior to the 1980s) was an expensive commodity, and promotions that were able to afford it simply reused the tapes when recording their material. Second, due to (perhaps) a perceived lack of future rerun potential, many promotions and/or television stations destroyed the tapes (or more likely, films) once they aired or wore out, their (wrestling) companies ceased their promotional activities or other reasons. This means that – with the exception of those having foresight or individuals who recorded the show and still have the tapes stashed away somewhere – the history of these promotions no longer exist in video form, much less in broadcast quality (due to degregation).
    • World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) is a notable exception, having hundreds of thousands of hours of videotapes and films of classic programming available for broadcast or on-demand download; this includes programming from promotions the McMahon family has acquired the rights to, including the NWA, WCW, ECW and AWA. But even in this case, it is possible that individual episodes of syndicated programs (especially those prior to the late 1970s) have been recorded over or otherwise have been destroyed for various reasons.
  • The AMC period sitcom Remember WENN, an unfortunate casualty of the pre-Mad Men era, is not on DVD and not in syndication.
  • Most of the Japanese live-action Sentai series have never seen release in the United States. This includes the classic Goranger, which essentially kicked the genre off in the mid-1970s.
  • Sightings, a paranormal news program that aired in syndication during the early-to-mid 1990s.
  • The award-winning, four-season syndicated TV show Starting Over (not the movie with Burt Reynolds).
  • Spectreman. BCI-Eclipse, the company that released other Toku series like Ultraman and Iron King in the US, actually stated that they wanted to release it but were unable to determine who currently owned the rights to the English dub of the series.
  • Takeshi's Castle was only shown at 7:00 AM on Virgin 1's cable channel. Those with basic Freeview could only see it at 4:00 AM.
  • Tracker only had a DVD release in the form of a cobbled-together pseudo-'movie' of a couple of the episodes. Fans refused to buy it, and Lion's Gate never saw the point of a whole series DVD release. Cue the fan-made DVDs.
  • This Is The Life and other religious dramas from the 1950s through early 1980s were once a staple of Sunday morning television. In a nutshell, these Christian dramas – underwritten by a Protestant or Catholic synod – would present a story where the main characters faced a moral dilemma and attempted to resolve it through their own secular means before turning to the Christian solution; the host would then review the situation at the end, provide a brief commentary on how the lesson can be applied to the viewer's life, and give appropriate Scripture reading. Many of these programs starred both established actors and then-unknowns prior to their first big break. Since the last of these shows – the Missouri Lutheran Synod-underwritten This Is The Life, circa 1988 – ended first-run production, these Christian anthologies have virtually vanished. None of these shows have been uploaded to YouTube or offered for sale on home video (not even in the 1980s by Christian-based ministries, during or after first-run production), and finding any station that has saved the tapes may be more difficult than the proverbial camel passing through a needle's eye. The most likely place to find any of these shows would likely be a church that might have old off-air VHS recordings of the show in its library, or a rural public access station that has old tapes in its archive and are running them as filler, but even in remote rural areas, most public access cable TV stations don't publish their broadcast schedules. Many religious cable networks won't air them these days because their 'for everyone' morals don't meet the certain viewpoints they espouse.
    • Related: Insight, a syndicated anthology drama series by Paulist Productions, which ran from 1960-1985. Notable for airing during late night, early mornings, and other strange times. Essentially The Twilight Zone with a religious twist. However, unlike most typical religious programming, its non secular nature was seldom evident at first glance due to the lack of heavy handed preachiness. It guest starred many established actors of the time as well as up and coming actors who would later become stars. Out of the twenty-five years of the show's run (250 episodes), only ten episodes are avaiable from Paulist Press (VHS only as of 2011). Good luck in finding most of the rest of it. Many rumors exist as to why it's not headed for DVD anytime soon. One posible reason is that the show represented Catholic theology of its time and may no longer represent current Church doctrine on a lot of issues.
  • TV Burp, anyone? Old episodes are rarely shown outside of immediate broadcast, and there have been no full series boxsets because of rights issues on the multiple clips from different shows and their networks and/or companies that Avalon doesn't own. There have been multiple Best of DVDs as well as at least 20 Best of episodes on TV (but those still fall under old episodes).
  • The English television company TVS (Television South) some time ago bought out the U.S. company MTM (Mary Tyler Moore's production company). Then somebody else, wanting the rights to the MTM shows, bought out TVS. A number of TVS programs have ended up never being released on VHS or DVD. For example, a lot of folks would give their eyeteeth to see The Witches and the Grinnygog again, which at the moment is only available as an illegal bootleg.
    • A month after TVS ceased broadcasting it was bought by International Family Entertainment, who did use some TVS shows on the now defunct UK version of The Family Channel. IFE was bought by 20th Century Fox (who now have the MTM rights) and Saban, who in turn sold the rights to Disney as a very minor part of their takeover of Fox / ABC Family and the international Fox Kids / Jetix channels. Unfortunately at some point during this game of musical programme rights, all the paperwork relating to TVS's programmes was thrown out, meaning the entire library is basically in rights hell and unlikely to see the light of day. A few shows did escape this, in the months leading up to the end, TVS sold its current network shows like Art Attack and The Ruth Rendell Mysteries to independent producers (and How 2 to Scottish Television), complete with the back catalogues of those shows, and the local news and sport archive was sold to successor Meridian. However, the vast majority of TVS shows are buggered.
  • The English Dub of the Ultra Series show Ultra Seven, due to its Old Shame status for Tsuburaya Productions.
  • The 1993 produced-in-Canada TV version of The Untouchables with Tom Amandes, William Forsythe, and John Rhys-Davies.
  • The popular Swedish Vintergatan ("Milky Way") series, which were humorous science fiction adventures for children. The two seasons cannot be released on DVD because of music rights issues. On the other hand, Swedish Television is reairs it once a year, so you can tape it yourself with no legal problems.
  • Young Blades has not been released on DVD, which is unsurprising due to its lack of popularity and its being on PAX. There are a few unofficial DVD copies out there, however: after one fan lost all her taped episodes during Hurricane Katrina, she wrote to the production company and they sold her all the episodes on DVD, including missing scenes. Several other fans followed her example.
  1. ↑ (which knocks out the premiere and the next two episodes recorded, one of which was shelved due to an ineligible contestant {and whose existence is in question})
  2. ↑ (and good luck finding a decent copy these days)
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