A lost episode of a television series or radio series is one which is, or was at one point, not available for rerun or release on home video or DVD. In some cases, the term is something of a misnomer, used to describe an episode that for any number of reasons was not aired in its original chronological place and later publicly released. It can also refer to episodes that, after their original airing, could not be rerun for various reasons, or episodes that were not, strictly speaking, part of the series, or to episodes which were wiped and no longer exist in an archive.

The most famous lost episodes are those of The Honeymooners, specifically kinescopes of Honeymooners skits performed as part of Jackie Gleason's variety show Cavalcade of Stars on the DuMont Television Network, which had been sitting idle in Gleason's own archives for years.

Nearly the entire film archive of the DuMont Network, consisting of episodes from around 200 television series are missing, presumed destroyed. Although a few kinescope episodes of DuMont series survive at the UCLA Film and Television Archive or Chicago's Museum of Broadcast Communications, early television actress Edie Adams testified at a hearing in front of a panel of the Library of Congress on the preservation of American television and video, in 1996, that little value was given to the DuMont film archive by the 1970s, and that all the remaining kinescoped episodes of DuMont series were loaded into three trucks and dumped into Upper New York Bay.

Get Smart had lost episodes of a different sort: a dispute over copyright ownership of much of the final season of the series (after it was cancelled by NBC and picked up by CBS) was resolved by restricting the syndication licensing of most of the season, limiting them to no more than three airings per station, and imposing reporting requirements on those airings. With most stations either using up their allotment of airings early, or simply refusing to air the affected episodes, they went unseen for many years. In addition, the black-and-white pilot, which was of odd length, and differed significantly from the format of the actual series, was almost never aired.

Married with Children has one episode that was dubbed as "lost," because the Fox network refused to air it. The third season episode, titled "I'll See You in Court", went unaired by Fox due to reservations over its subject matter. It was aired by FX cable network in 2002 and included in the show's DVD collection.

The English adaptation of the anime, or Japanese cartoon (show), Dragon Ball GT, made by FUNimation Entertainment, ran on Cartoon Network between 2003 and 2005, but it had a major alteration: the first sixteen episodes of the series, making up the "Black Star Dragon Ball Saga," were cut and replaced by a single, US-only episode, which summarized the saga; this became the new series premiere. This edit was implemented by FUNimation to prevent viewers from possibly being put-off by these differently-toned early episodes, which were more in tone with the first series of the Dragon Ball franchise, Dragon Ball, which featured less fighting and more humor. The missing episodes have since been released on DVD as the "Lost Episodes."

Before the advent of home video, the videotape and film originals of many television programs were often wiped or destroyed when the owners believed they had no more commercial value. For example, in the 1960s and 1970s many episodes of the BBC science fiction television program Doctor Who were erased by the BBC and no longer exist in the BBC's archives.

One episode of the 1990s sketch-comedy series Mr. Show parodied the concept by working on the pretense that the episode would be aired and then intentionally lost in order to foster future nostalgia.

References

See also

• Lost BBC episodes