Law & Order gone from c5?

[radan]

Does anybody know why UK Channel 5 seems to have dropped both “Law & Order Special Victims Unit” and “Law & Order Criminal Intent” after just a few episodes into the latest series? These are two of my favourite programmes.

[Buenchico]

"Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" was hardly a few episodes into the series. Channel 5 showed 16 out of the 19 available episodes:
http://www.channel5.c...victims-unit/episodes

However you're right in saying that only 4 (of 16) episodes of “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” were shown.

The reason is almost certainly financial. Most commercial TV channels are finding it hard to balance their books at the present time. The global economic climate means that advertisers are less willing to spend money on TV advertising, especially when many people use devices which filter out adverts anyway. (Advertising revenues are being switched away from television, to online media and social networking sites). ITV1 has come extremely close to going bust several times over the past few years, with other broadcasters facing similar difficulties.

The company which owns Channel 5 (Northern & Shell) is likely to be struggling with low advertising revenues, both for Channel 5 and for their newspapers (Daily Express, Sunday Express, Daily Star, Daily Star Sunday). They will have purchased the rights to show the 'Law & Order' programmes with an option to allow them to back out of the deal, part way through the series, if the advertising revenue received didn't match the costs of showing those programmes.

So, with insufficient advertising, they had no option other than to 'pull the plug' on those shows.

Chris

[radan]

Thanks for your reply. Unfortunately that's what I thought the reason might be.

[Dodger666]

I assumed they'd been dropped to accommodate that rubbish, Big Brother.