In the beginning, before there were Tivo and DVD players and VCRs, there was the rerun and it was good. There's Lucy at the chocolate factory - what a treat! Look there's Mr. Spock and his logical ways. There's Gilligan trying to get off the island again - maybe this time he'll make it.

But now with more and more entire series available in convenient small packages (a boxed DVD season is smaller than the average hardcover book), we can pull out Lucy and Ethel, Kirk and Spock, Gilligan and the Skipper, Mulder and Scully and every other favorite character or storyline at whim. And without commercials or edits to the original episodes that make time for commercials.

We're less and less likely to pause our compulsive channel-surfing to watch Buffy slay another vampire. It's no longer an event to watch Tony Soprano once again take out a fellow Mafioso. It's just as close as our fingertips to reach for that remote. The history of television can now fit onto our bookshelves. So how can a random rerun compare to what we can have any time we choose?

And because drama and comedy reruns have filled so many spare hours that consumers will have less and less inclination to watch as they fill their DVD libraries with one classic TV series after another, that time is likely to be filled with whatever programming costs less to the stations to run than reruns of old shows, namely, more reality, talk and game shows. If the rerun viewership drops below a certain level, TV stations would not want to pay high amounts of money to air them. And if they can't make as much money for them in rerun syndication deals, the studios may be less inclined to spend the money on series upfront, thus denying potential future hits from existence due to the business (bottom-line) realities.

Also, many actors, writers and other creatives count on the money made from the residuals earned from syndicated reruns. There is little monetary compensation from DVD sales to anyone but the studios. If the average working actors, writers, directors, etc. can't make a living from their work, this again could affect future productions.

On the other hand, perhaps some will realize that reruns are actually advertisements for buying DVDs and can still be valuable to studios in that capacity. If the studios recognize that keeping reruns of shows on television keeps them in the minds of consumers to the point that even Mr. Belvedere or Harry & the Hendersons will be worth releasing on DVD someday, maybe they could see the wisdom in lowering the price of the syndication packages they sell to networks and stations.

I don't think in the near future we'll see Andy and Aunt Bea, Rod Serling, the Cartwright boys and all the rest of our old TV friends ride off into the rerun sunset, but in the long term, they're endangered, which I think will turn out to be a sad thing for our culture. Many of us were exposed to these TV and pop culture icons by accident, just because they were out there in random rerun.