How I Met Your Mother debuted to a surprisingly large audience on Monday for its fourth season premiere..  It's hard to know why.  The press coming into the season 4 premiere wasn't noticeable.  Still, it ended up beating it's lead-in The Big Bang Theory in total viewers and improved by almost a million viewers against the show's average last year.  How I Met Your Mother is a hot commodity in more ways than one.  Lifetime Network has purchased the rights to air re-runs of How I Met Your Mother for a reported $725,000 an episode.  Lifetime acquired the cable rights for Mother by out-bidding TBS, ABC Family, FX, and Comedy Central.  The purchase is the second most expensive ever in terms of a cable network buying the rights to a sitcom in its first cycle.  How I Met Your Mother airs Mondays at 8:30pm on CBS.

The gist of the deal is this.  Lifetime has the rights to How I Met Your Mother for four years, and will be able to broadcast up to eight seasons of How I Met Your Mother (assuming it lives that long).  The deal only trails F/X's agreement with Two and a Half Men in terms of money per episode.  F/X has paid $750,000 per episode, to Mother's $725,000.  The Office sold last year to TBS for $600,000 an episode.

The reason the bidding was so fierce for a second-tier (in terms of popularity) series is, apparently, the lack of good half-hour comedies and sitcoms available for syndication.  The sitcom is a dying breed, yet cable networks get solid ratings for their replay.  Reality shows are great on their first run for ratings, but no one really wants to watch re-runs of random American Idol episodes.  A thirty minute comedy is much more palatable one-off cable-watching experience.  


-Oscar Dahl, BuddyTV Senior Writer
(Image Courtesy of CBS)
Source: Hollywood Reporter