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:
“Men seem more bound to the wheel of success than women do. That women are trained to get satisfaction from affiliation rather than achievement has tended to keep them from great achievement. But it has also freed them from unreasonable expectations about the satisfactions that professional achievement brings.”
—Phyllis Rose (b. 1942)
“There is in every either-or a certain naivete which may well befit the evaluator, but ill- becomes the thinker, for whom opposites dissolve in series of transitions.”
—Robert Musil (1880–1942)