List of Cable Syndication Deals

I'm sick of reading articles about shows getting sold into cable syndication and not really knowing whether I should be impressed with the money being dished out. I'm all about the context here, and I've never been able to find a big list like this, so I did some searching and found quite a few per-episode dollar figures for your perusal. "Year" is the year the deal was made. (I thought about including the year the show premiered in first-run, also. I might add that in later, as it's interesting how some of these shows were sold at very different points in their first-run life cycles.) I'll save the inevitable disclaimer for the bottom.

Hour-longs:

Show	Cable Net	$ per episode	Year
The Sopranos	A&E	2,500,000	2007
Hawaii Five-0	TNT	2,500,000	2011
NCIS: Los Angeles	USA	2,200,000	2009
The Mentalist	TNT	2,200,000	2009
Law & Order: CI	USA Network/Bravo	1,900,000	2004
CSI: NY	Spike	1,900,000	2004
CSI	Spike	1,600,000	2001
Castle	TNT	1,500,000	2011
Cold Case	TNT	1,400,000	2005
Without a Trace	TNT	1,400,000	2003
House	USA	1,400,000	2005
Medium	Lifetime	1,350,000	2005
Law & Order: SVU	USA	1,300,000	2001
Grey's Anatomy	Lifetime	1,200,000	2006
The West Wing	Bravo	1,200,000	2001
CSI: Miami	A&E	1,000,000	2003
Law & Order	TNT	800,000	2002
NCIS	USA	750,000	2006
Criminal Minds	A&E	650,000	2008
Glee	Oxygen	500,000	2010
Desperate Housewives	Lifetime	500,000	2006
Bones	TNT	450,000	2008
Smallville	ABC Family	400,000	2004
Heroes	G4	300,000	2007
Lost	Sci-Fi/G4	200,000	2008
Ugly Betty	TV Guide	200,000	2009

Half-hours:
 

Show	Cable Net	$ per episode	Year
2 Broke Girls	TBS	1,700,000	2012
The Big Bang Theory	TBS	1,500,000	2010
Modern Family	USA	1,400,000	2010
Two and a Half Men	FX	850,000	2006
30 Rock	Comedy Central	800,000	2009
Mike and Molly	FX	750,000	2012
How I Met Your Mother	Lifetime	750,000	2008
Sex and the City	TBS	750,000	2003
It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia	Comedy Central	700,000	2009
The Office	TBS	650,000	2007
My Name is Earl	TBS	600,000	2007
Entourage	Spike	600,000	2009
Curb Your Enthusiasm	TV Guide/TV Land	600,000	2009
The Cleveland Show	TBS/Adult Swim	500,000	2010
Old Christine	Lifetime	350,000	2009
According to Jim	TBS	300,000	2005

DISCLAIMER: These are just cable deals and don't (or at least shouldn't) include broadcast syndication money. They're all estimates, and at times they are even estimates of estimates, as not even all these figures are totally agreed upon. These figures might occasionally include money from a secondary network that isn't listed, like WGN or ION, and I should also note that there are other aspects of the deals (like minimum/maximum episode #s) that vary and that we're generally not privy to in Internet-land. Generally, though, they should be pretty good ballpark figures.

Since I mostly talk primetime first-run ratings around here, I'm not making this post for any reason other than to illuminate just one part of the balance sheet for many shows still around today or in recent history. I don't have access to the information that would allow me to make judgments on how solid these deals were for the cable nets, though the losses taken on many of these pacts (I'm thinking of Without a Trace, Entourage, pretty much all the Lifetime deals, and especially the ridiculous Sopranos deal) have been well documented elsewhere in the media.

Hoping to update this in the future as information for other shows comes out. There are a few shows whose cable bucks I'm quite interested in but couldn't find anything, namely Family Guy and American Dad! on TBS/Adult Swim, Scrubs on Comedy Central, and Supernatural on TNT. So if anybody knows of those or other figures or wants to contest some of the above, have at it.