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Of course, not every drama works in reruns. Serials, as a rule, don't repeat well: E! took a bath with Melrose Place and Models Inc. And Lois & Clark: The New Adventures of Superman--bought by TNT from Warner Bros. at $275,000 per episode--is getting off to a sluggish start. The challenge, says USA's Perth, is determining "the durability or vulnerability of a show five years down the road."

And that's just one concern. Many fear the fees are getting out of control, especially when the usual rerun deal requires cable networks to pick up a show's first four seasons. "The prices are out of whack," says Perth, who paid $750,000 for Walker, Texas Ranger. And while USA's Walker reruns draw an average of 2.3 million viewers--outstanding by cable standards--Perth says the show will need ''an enormous number of airings to have any sort of profitability." But nothing will stop price acceleration, believes FX entertainment exec VP Mark Sonnenberg, as long as the market remains highly competitive: "USA didn't get X-Files or NYPD Blue, so it had to get Walker."

At this point, says Sonnenberg, Angel shouldn't see any additional competition for its potential million-dollar payday--although that could change, he adds, if Millennium or The Pretender suddenly takes off. In the mid-to-high-six-figure category, however, there are two good candidates for cable syndication: Nash Bridges and JAG. Neither is a huge hit, but action usually does well on cable, and self-contained episodes are considered a plus.

If there's a moral to this story, it's more Grimm's fairy tale than Disney: The young grow up to eat their parents. The reward of any show doing well on cable comes at the expense of the broadcast nets, which are already losing millions of viewers every year to their wired competitor. "They are breeders of success,'' says Perth of the Big Four, ''and in the end, that success often is their competition."

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DRAMATIC RETURNS: Rerun Prices at a Glance

Year Sold Show Studio Cable Network Price*

1986 Falcon Crest Warner Bros. Turner Broadcasting $10,000

1986 Knots Landing Warner Bros. Turner Broadcasting $12,000 1988 Murder, She Wrote Universal USA $525,000

1991 Unsolved Mysteries Buena Vista Lifetime $180,000

1993 The Commish ABC Productions Lifetime $195,000

1994 Law & Order Universal A&E $155,000

1995 Melrose Place Spelling E! $200,000

1995 Picket Fences Twentieth Century Fox FX $190,000 1995 Lois & Clark Warner Bros. TNT $275,000

1995 Dr. Quinn, MTM Family $250,000 Medicine Woman Channel


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