Although deficits weren't an issue for "Next Generation," they have claimed other victims. In early 1992, 20th Television canceled its own show "Anything but Love," starring Jamie Lee Curtis and Richard Lewis, after almost three years on the air. The outlook for rerun sales on a show of such modest appeal -- it ranked 73d for the season -- weren't promising enough for the studio's tastes.

The best chance for the studios to recoup prime-time losses are through foreign markets and, for a hit show, the sale of rerun rights to local stations. This is the famous "back end" that virtually everyone in Hollywood always seems to be angling for a piece of.

"Next Generation" was a different kind of series. Studios normally sell their series to the broadcast networks; indeed, Paramount initially developed "Next Generation" for the Fox network. But this time, Paramount decided to keep control.

The studio cut out the network middleman and sold the show directly to local stations, one city at a time. "Next Generation" looked just like a prime-time network series: it was produced with the same lofty budget, watched by the same vast audiences and sold to the same advertisers. It quickly became a mammoth hit.

But the dynamics of the television business led Paramount to kill its cash cow. The real payoff for a hit series arrives when stations buy it to run it five or seven nights a week. In agreeing to broadcast "Next Generation," stations also committed to buy all rerun rights and to broadcast each episode six or seven times, no matter how many were produced.

Paramount made 182 "Next Generation" episodes, enough for a station to show one every week night for more than eight months before the cycle started over. The more Paramount produced, the longer the stations' obligation to buy and run the series. "Originally, the feeling was that after about seven years," Mr. McCluggage says, "stations might start to choke on the back end."