I truly don’t believe this has anything to do with Bob, at least at this point — maybe it did in the past.
The Price is Right airs on a network. By and large, the shows Buzzr and Game Show Network have on their respective schedules — at least those that are still on the air with new episodes — are in syndication.
Sony isn’t going to have huge pushback from local affiliates just because GSN might air 30-year-old Jeopardy! reruns in the morning. There is no direct competition to first-run episodes, and let’s be real: no one is jumping out of their seat to watch old J! reruns because they find them better than the show now.
The Price is Right? That’s a bit different. It’s one of the highest-rated shows in all of network daytime, and reruns probably hold considerable value. It’s probably next to impossible to find solid ratings data for how well the show did when reruns were allowed to air on Game Show Network, but just taking a wild guess here, I’d say it did exceptionally well and was the highest-rated show on the channel.
Whenever it came time to renegotiate any sort of deal between CBS, (insert precursor production company to Fremantle here) and Game Show Network, they probably couldn’t arrive at a deal because CBS saw how well the show was doing on GSN and put their foot down. And maybe it was Bob and his wishes to not be seen with departed Barker’s Beauties, but I really don’t buy into that. That would have been an issue as soon as the first rerun aired on GSN, yet the show lasted, what, six years there? I don’t think that’s it.
CBS held a lot of the chips at the time. They owned the studio Price was taped at. Bob Barker probably had a great relationship with the network, too. It’s not tough to imagine them getting their way pretty easily without much fight, and that’s probably why to this day, no one here can seem to give a straight answer as to why reruns were pulled from GSN — it truly was a non-issue to everyone involved except Game Show Network itself.
Why reruns still aren’t airing today? That much baffles me. CBS doesn’t own the studio anymore, so at least in theory, Fremantle could keep the show there no matter what network it’s being aired on. They have no proof reruns would impact the value of first-run episodes — I mean, if GSN/Buzzr only aired Bob Barker-hosted shows, there is no direct competition. It’s two completely different eras and ways of doing things. The show would probably do incredibly well in reruns, but I highly doubt it would be to the detriment to the product currently airing on CBS.
I don’t buy into the music rights conundrum, either. I work in IT, and my department is subject to audits. For that reason, we keep everything. If at any point the show elected to use music outside of their own library, they would have (obviously) obtained the rights to it, and there should be a paper trail somewhere for audit purposes. Those things don’t just magically disappear, or at least they shouldn’t. It might take some extra digging to find everything, but it shouldn’t be too difficult to, at minimum, locate which episodes featured copyrighted music and either pull them or get the proper rights — all without having to re-watch every episode and know what you’re listening for to make a judgement call. And I could be totally wrong about that, but certainly anything from the past 20 years in the age of computers and the internet should be easily searchable.
Whatever the issue is, I’d have to think it’s probably based on whatever happened in the past with previous reruns, and it wouldn’t surprise me if reruns are finally allowed to air at some point in the future — hopefully this decade.