RERUNS CREATE A SENSE OF DEJA VIEW : NETWORKS PAD TIME WITH REPEATS SO THEY CAN SAVE NEW EPISODES FOR THE IMPORTANT MAY SWEEPS.

Byline: Bill Carter The New York Times

As you watch television these days, you may feel more and more as though you're seeing double. Don't adjust your set. The fact is that in the middle of the regular television season you are seeing double, or even triple.

Repeats, once mainly relegated to summer, are now sprinkled heavily in prime time from December through April. These days, when you tune in your favorite show, you may well find yourself saying: ``Oh, no! This is the one about the cross-dresser!''

The reason: Given the available product, the television season is too long. It lasts as long as 38 weeks, from September through May, even though most producers can create only 22 to 24 new episodes for that period.

To ensure that there will be four original episodes remaining for May - the last of the three crucial ``sweeps'' months (after November and February), when ratings are used to set advertising fees - the networks are forced to play a gambler's game.

They use repeats relatively early in the season, hoping that viewers will stay tuned no matter what.

In the past, only a couple of new episodes of a show were saved for May, but in the last two years, from the network affiliates' point of view, the month's importance has grown.

Making this situation more confusing, for viewers and nervous programmers alike, is the fact that all repeats are not created equal. Some series, mainly comedies like ``Cybill'' and ``Home Improvement,'' attract almost as many viewers when they are rerun as when they were new.

But most hourlong dramas, especially in the category of continuing drama, have trouble keeping viewers interested in episodes they've already seen, so the gamble is dicey.

``As a general rule, the more background you need to keep up with the story, the less well the show is going to repeat,'' said Preston Beckman, the NBC senior vice president for scheduling.

Continuing drama includes nighttime soap operas and so-called ensemble dramas. The soaps, like Fox's ``Melrose Place'' and ``Beverly Hills, 90210,'' are so driven by story continuity that the gamble is not worth it; they are not repeated at all.

But because they are relatively inexpensive to produce, it is cost-effective to make almost enough episodes to cover the season (32 for ``Melrose Place,'' for example).

With the more expensive and higher-profile ensemble shows, such as ``ER,'' ``Chicago Hope'' and ``NYPD Blue,'' the decisions are much trickier.

These shows weave linear season-long stories and include what producers call story arcs, dramatic situations that are developed over several episodes. This makes repeating an episode here or there extremely difficult.

NBC's ``ER,'' the titan of television drama, is so potent that even though a repeat doesn't come close to the rating of a new episode, it still draws a bigger audience than an original episode of any other drama.

CBS' ``Chicago Hope'' fares less well, and ``NYPD Blue,'' on which the story arc is central, has become such a ratings risk when it is repeated that ABC has shown only one repeat this season.

The dramas that tend to fare best in repeats are action shows like CBS' ``Walker, Texas Ranger'' or those whose stories are resolved in a single hour, like NBC's ``Law and Order.''

Perhaps best off this season is Fox's ``X-Files,'' with its detective investigations of the supernatural. As has long been the case with science fiction (witness ``Star Trek''), such stories have cultlike appeal, and many viewers want to watch them over and over again.

Fox is willing to fill out this ``X-Files'' season with reruns and has already used nine repeats, a very high total.

With ``ER,'' NBC has also used nine repeats, but for some increasingly impatient fans of the hospital drama, that number may be too high.

This month, only one new episode of ``ER'' ran, and only a single new one is scheduled for April, because NBC needs the last four new episodes for May.

Despite the passion for ``ER,'' the gaps between new installments are a potential problem, Beckman said, because after just two consecutive weeks of repeats, ``the rating for a new episode will be down because people just don't come back right away.''

A better idea, he said, would be to follow a standard network strategy for shows that don't repeat well: preempt them with specials.

``Even John Wells, the executive producer of `ER,' would like us to preempt more so that the audience doesn't get ticked off,'' Beckman said. But ``ER,'' even in repeats, simply makes too much money. ``Our sales department hates it when `ER' isn't on,'' Beckman added.

A third Fox drama, ``Party of Five,'' is soapy enough that like ``Melrose Place'' and ``Beverly Hills, 90210,'' it can't be repeated.

Instead of resorting to preemption, Fox decided to end that show's season in March and put in a replacement drama, ``Kindred: The Embraced,'' which has its premiere on Tuesday. But only marginal shows are replaced temporarily; the hits need to stay on the air.

Repeating a comedy is a lot easier. Most viewers are willing to laugh at a good joke a second or even a third time. NBC has plenty of comedy, and for that reason it does better with repeats than any other network.

``Seinfeld,'' television's most popular comedy, has had repeats nine times this season, but this hasn't stirred much complaint. It would be even easier for NBC if it could dig back into the ``Seinfeld'' library and put on episodes from earlier seasons. But those shows, now in syndication, are off limits to the network.

Syndication creates a special problem for network schedulers, who prefer that a rerun be as distant as possible from the current episodes. (Nine ``ER'' reruns have been used so far this season, but because the show is not yet in syndication, all have been from last season, defusing a bit of viewer dissatisfaction.)

Some networks are trying to rework deals so that two or three episodes a season can be withheld from syndication, to be repeated in the future.

While vintage episodes may help make springtime repeats less intrusive, viewers still won't like them as much as fresh stories.

The only real way to cut down on repeats is to order more episodes, though that would be expensive (an episode of a drama costs about $1 million). But Fox's approach with ``Melrose Place'' and ``Beverly Hills, 90210'' is not going to set a trend.

``Those soaps are in a unique situation,'' said Doug Binzak, Fox's senior vice president for scheduling. ``They have enormous casts, so two episodes can be shot at the same time.'' And the soaps include little action, which keeps costs low, he said.

But expense is only one reason networks can't order eight more episodes of a show.

``Some of it is economics; some of it is physics,'' Binzak said. ``There is only a certain amount of time in a day. It takes an enormous amount of creative output to put together an entire television season. Dramas take more than a week to shoot and up to two weeks to score and edit. That doesn't even count the writing. Producers can't produce a show a week, even if we pay them to do it.''

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos

Photo: (1) Loyal fans of ``The X-Files,'' featuring Gill ian Anderson and a weekly changing cast of creepies, are willing to watch episodes again. So Fox can get by with the nine repeats it has tallied so far this season.

(2) Comedies such as Tim Allen's ``Home Improvement'' can get by with repeats, since viewers are willing to laugh again at a good joke.