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We now accept as commonplace the notion that actors in popular television shows are set for life financially, as we read about how cast members in hit shows such as Friends, Seinfeld, and The Big Bang Theory not only were paid upwards of $1 million per episode during those series' initial runs, but then earned millions of dollars more in residuals and royalties from syndication deals, DVD sales, and video streaming. That wasn't always the case, however. The actors from television shows of decades past — shows whose episodes have been continuously rerun countless thousands of times all over the world and are touchstones of popular culture — did not reap any such bounty. Those cast members were typically paid salaries that ranged from modest to pretty good, and they may have received additional payments for the first few airings of episodes in which they appeared, but that was it — they collected little or no residuals when their shows were sold into syndication, and no royalties from a home video market that didn't yet exist. As Eve Plumb, who portrayed Jan Brady on the 1970s sitcom The Brady Bunch, revealed in 2011: The biggest misconception is that we’re all rich from it, but we are not. We have not been paid for reruns of the show for many, many years. We are not making money off of it at all. The one notable exception to this circumstance, according to legend, is actress Dawn Wells, who played the character of Mary Ann Summers in the 1960s sitcom Gilligan's Island. Numerous websites such as Mental Floss have offered versions of the following tale about how Wells supposedly parlayed her three seasons on the show into a lifetime of paychecks: This narrative seems quite improbable on its face. Actors are generally represented by a bevy of various unions, guilds, agents, and lawyers, and the idea that only one person in the whole television industry possessed the savvy to recognize that a contractual entitlement to residuals was a potentially lucrative reward worth pursuing strains credulity. Moreover, the goal of most television producers in that era was to keep their shows going long enough (generally three years) to amass a sufficient number of episodes for syndication deals after those series ended their original network runs, as the syndication market provided the bulk of potential profits. While producers may not have expected their shows to still be airing 40 years later, they certainly hoped their series would enjoy long TV afterlives, and they would not be keen on sharing those revenues with actors who had little bargaining power (nor would they want to set a precedent for other actors to follow). A minor actor in a secondary role who dared to press for a contractual guarantee to perpetual royalties likely would have been curtly informed how quickly and easily she could be replaced. We don't need to speculate on the state of 1960s television to know the answer here, though, because Wells herself has repeatedly stated that this legend is false. In 2014, for example, Wells said during an interview that she was paid a salary roughly equivalent to $50,000 in today's dollars and never received any residuals: And in a 2016 interview, she answered the question, What’s one big myth about [Gilligan's Island]? by asserting that the actors didn't really get a dime in residuals: A 2014 Washington Post obituary of Wells' cast mate Russell Johnson, who played the Professor, also observed that Johnson resented ... that he and other cast members were left out of the bulk of the syndication profits. For what it's worth, the daughter of Gilligan's Island creator Sherwood Schwartz disputed the oft-repeated claim that her father realized as much as $90 million from the series:
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