Why You Can’t Stream Every Season of ‘Bonanza’—And When That Might Change

Dedicated Bonanza fans who’ve tried to settle in for a few hours of adventure at the Ponderosa may have noticed something incredibly frustrating — though the hit Western starring Michael Landon, Lorne Greene and Dan Blocker ran for 14 blockbuster seasons, streaming platforms like Amazon, Tubi and the Roku Channel only offer episodes from the show’s first two seasons. Why is the rest of the show absent from streaming — and where can viewers watch the other 12 seasons?

The short answer has to do with rights issues. Due to mistakes made by the studio when it came to renewing copyright, most of the first two seasons of Bonanza are now in the public domain, and can be streamed for free all over.

The rest of the series, however, is in complex copyright purgatory — CBS owns the right to the show overall, while NBC owns the rights to most individual episodes.

To catch the full series, your best bets are to tune into the INSP, MeTV, or TV Land channels: MeTV shows the series from Monday through Saturday at 2pm; TV Land airs episodes at 10:45 or 11am weekdays; and ISP shows reruns at 8am on weekdays, and 11am on Sundays. If you don’t have access to any of those networks through your cable package, you can access them with web-based livestreaming TV apps like Philo and Frndly TV.

And if you’re willing to spend some cash to get the Cartwrights on demand, a complete series DVD box set is available. A new set will set you back over $100 on Amazon, but when you consider that it contains 14 seasons plus extras on 112 (!) discs, the price is a bit less shocking. Individual season box sets are also available.

Over 50 years after its final episode aired, Bonanza remains wildly popular not just with old fans, but with new generations born after the series concluded. Whether NBC and CBS will ever untangle the rights knot enough to make the series available for streaming remains an open question, but when they do, demand for this classic will be there.