20 million dollars is how much each Friend’s cast member makes yearly off residuals.
10 million is how much the Big Bang Theory cast make.
Jerry Seinfeld & Larry David make 40-60 million a year in residuals.

Residuals for syndication of TV shows and movies has made a handful of celebrities centi millionaires or billionaires, but are still a relatively new thing.

• The Brady Bunch
• I Love Lucy
• Cheers
• The Jefferson’s
• Different Strokes

Some of the most iconic shows of the 60s, 70s and 80s had few if any of the cast members get any residuals off the series.

The only notable one was MASH, where Alan Alda negotiated a fee for reruns of the series in his contract, which today make him about a million a year.

The reason for this was how few cable channels existed in the past.

• 28 cable channels existed in the US in 1980.
• 79 by 1990
• 280 was the number by 2000.

The reason residuals became a thing were a few factors.

The additional channels.

Networks popping up would license shows from other studios or be an extension of existing studios.

They’d put on older/popular shows to build steam for their channel and that licensing was the biggest factor in the boom of reruns.

Infomercials

The 1990s was a rise of late night infomercials between 1-5 am on a lot of random channels, which previously would in some cases just keep the channel black with a sign in the corner saying “programming resumes at…”.

That stopped with infomercial companies paying for that space and eventually networks realized a small audience existed for late night programming, where syndicating old shows worked.

General quality of shows

Due to changes in cameras and editing tools, early TV went out of date very quickly.

A few shows like Twilight Zone exist, which aged well, but most were barely watchable 5-10 years later. That changed, where today, shows such as Seinfeld or Friends, despite ending decades ago were filmed at a camera quality people can enjoy years later.

Those things set the rerun boom, where Seinfeld was arguably the first big win off of it.

They used residuals so much, even with guest cast that baseball player Keith Hernandez said that due to his two episode stint in the show, he still receives a check for $5,000-10,000 a year from it.

The only issue?

That market is dying fast and residuals might not exist in the next 5-10 years.

Very few series ever factored in streaming royalties, because it was a concept that didn’t exist until the early 2010s.

Netflix also set an industry standard, where no actors in a Netflix show/movie have ever gotten a residual deal and they just pay actors money upfront, with no plan for anything down the line.

Where this becomes a problem.

In 2019, before Friends and the Office were taken off Netflix, they were despite not being Netflix originals and being older shows, made up 18% of all streating on Netflix.

Netflix made 20.1 billion dollars in revenue in 2019 and had over 1,000 shows/movies.

Two shows which weren’t even made by them made up almost one in five hours of all content views and doubled all original content views.

Despite this, neither the cast of Friends or the Office actually made any money.

Jerry Seinfeld was the only exception, where him and his partner Larry David were paid for the Netflix deal, but that was due to them working on streaming rights years prior, to get a stake in that.

This isn’t exactly a problem, where most actors are paid pretty well, but if a hit like Stranger Things, Game of Thrones or Ozark is made for streaming, which they’ll all likely still be popular in 10-20 years, it’s upsetting the cast won’t get $1 from that down the road.

But is there a solution?

Calling this as a prediction, but right now, there’s a heavy streaming war for content, where it’s common for actors, directors and authors to have Netflix, Disney, Apple, Amazon and many more hunting for content in bidding wars.

Eventually a big name will request some way to get a form of a residual and my guess is the companies agree to give new projects a bonus fund, where they delegate 1% of revenue to new projects coming in and it’s split based on views, similar to how TikTok or YouTube shorts is paying people.

This feels pretty fair and a likely industry change that’ll happen as cable falls and more actors, writers, directors and producers want long term money.