A wheel series is a term applied in the broadcast television industry to a television program in which two or more regular series are rotated with the same time slot. Sometimes the wheel series is given its own umbrella title and promoted as a single unit instead of promoting its separate components.
The most successful example of a wheel series on American television was the NBC Mystery Movie, which debuted in 1971 on NBC and ran for seven seasons. The three shows in the original rotation, Columbo, McCloud, and McMillan & Wife, all were among the most successful shows on American television in the 1970s. Other examples from that era (all airing on NBC) include The Name of the Game, Four in One and The Bold Ones.
The wheel series is not used today on American prime time network television, and the term has become somewhat archaic. Attempts at reviving the format were made in 1989 with the Mystery Wheel of Adventure (a series of made-for-syndication TV movies including six installments of a new version of The Saint), and in the 1990s with a format that rotated new editions of Columbo and Kojak, without lasting success.
Some cable channels have developed their own wheel series structures (sometimes called an umbrella rotation) to group together short-run series or documentaries into a package that runs in a standard timeslot each week or each weeknight; examples of umbrella rotations include the Animal Planet Heroes grouping on Animal Planet, the three different productions grouped together as The Critical Hour on Discovery Health Channel, and the "Sci-Fi Series" collections on the Sci Fi Channel (now Syfy).
Famous quotes containing the words wheel and/or series:
“To sum up:
1. The cosmos is a gigantic fly-wheel making 10,000 revolutions a minute.
2. Man is a sick fly taking a dizzy ride on it.
3. Religion is the theory that the wheel was designed and set spinning to give him the ride.”
—H.L. (Henry Lewis)
“Depression moods lead, almost invariably, to accidents. But, when they occur, our mood changes again, since the accident shows we can draw the world in our wake, and that we still retain some degree of power even when our spirits are low. A series of accidents creates a positively light-hearted state, out of consideration for this strange power.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)