The Formula That Shaped Cable TV ??

A forgotten TV show from the late ’80s played a massive influence on how cable television was made—so much so that the formula it spawned is better known than the show.

In the midst of the recent Writers Guild of America strike,?a lot has been said about the ways that writers are paid, particularly how the rules often end up being quite confusing.

But even when the rules work out, they can be weird as heck. My case in point: The weird case of what happened to the late-’80s show?Sanchez of Bel Air.

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This show, which aired during the fall of 1986, was a bit of a forgotten unicorn at the time of its release. Airing on the USA Network, the show had a lot in common with a later Bel Air-based television show,?Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, albeit focusing on an upwardly mobile Latino family rather than a Black one. It was a sitcom when cable television was not known for airing sitcoms.

The show aired on USA at a time when representation, especially positive representation, of Latinos on television was quite limited, and the show did receive criticism for not being particularly authentic. (One potential reason for this: While its cast—with the notable exception of Bobby Sherman, for some reason—was largely Latino, its creators, Dave Hackel and April Kelly, were white.)

The show was not a hit, and disappeared after just 13 episodes. But because it appeared so early in the history of cable television, it became a bit of an unexpected landmark for completely behind-the-scenes reasons.

See, as a part of the show’s creation as one of the first sitcoms explicitly produced for the medium, it led to the development of?a residual agreement?about how much writers received upon re-airings of the show. The current formula breaks down as such: For the second to fifth re-airings, writers get 50 percent residuals, then it shrinks down to 6 percent on the sixth re-airing and 4 for each of the 7th and 8th re-airings. Gradually, the scale slides down until the 13th re-airing, when every future replay gets 1.5 percent each.

This formula, crazy as it sounds, is better known than?Sanchez of Bel Air. It’s called the Sanchez Formula, and is generally used for scripted shows that air on cable television.

In many ways, emerging technologies shift the game for writer compensation—and?the current Writers Guild of America strike?highlights how, when these rates fall out of sync with the work being created, it can create serious problems. While the Sanchez formula wasn’t perfect, it worked well enough that it has stuck around for nearly 40 years.

? Wanna learn more??Check out my 2018 piece “TV’s Hidden Math,” which explains why so many shows have 13 or 65 episodes—especially if they’re syndicated.