Wheel series

A wheel series is a term applied in the broadcast television industry to a television program in which two or more regular series are rotated with the same time slot. Sometimes the wheel series is given its own umbrella title and promoted as a single unit instead of promoting its separate components.

The most successful example of a wheel series on American television was the NBC Mystery Movie, which debuted in 1971 on NBC and ran for seven seasons. The three shows in the original rotation, Columbo, McCloud, and McMillan and Wife, all were among the most successful shows on American television in the 1970s. Other examples from that era (all airing on NBC) include The Name of the Game, Four in One and The Bold Ones.

The wheel series is not used today on American prime time network television, and the term has become somewhat archaic. However, some cable channels have developed their own wheel series structures (sometimes called an umbrella rotation) to group together short-run series or documentaries into a package that runs in a standard timeslot each week or each weeknight; examples of umbrella rotations include the Animal Planet Heroes grouping on Animal Planet, the three different productions grouped together as The Critical Hour on Discovery Health Channel, and the "Sci-Fi Series" collections on the Sci-Fi Channel.