Burning off

Burning off is the low-profile airing of otherwise-abandoned unaired television programs, usually by scheduling in far less important time slots or on less important sister networks. Abandoned programs may be burned off for a number of reasons:

Methods

Up through the 1990s, this often meant the airing of pilots for shows that were not going to be picked up, such as The Art of Being Nick, Seinfeld and Barney Miller, usually during the summer months to provide some form of "new" programming in the technical sense. In the latter two cases, the pilot proved popular enough that a series was eventually commissioned. The anthology series Love, American Style was devoted to many such failed pilots.

Since the late 1990s, episodes of long-running shows that are no longer hits and have been taken off the schedule have been burned off. The Drew Carey Show is an example of a series whose entire final season was burned off (the series' ninth season aired on ABC in the summer of 2004). In many cases, instead of airing the episodes during the regular television season, the episodes are held back and presented during the summer months to fulfill the network's obligation to air them and to produce at least some return on their investment. Recent examples of summer burn-offs include Fox's Sons of Tucson (2010) and the NBC medical/fantasy drama Do No Harm (2013).