Much of the programming that was axed was not directly replaced. The Prime Time Access Rule had forced the networks to surrender the 7:30 p.m. Eastern Time time slot back to its affiliates, which was another part of the impetus for the rural purge. "Lassie" and "Hee Haw" almost immediately went into first-run syndication, where stations (many of them CBS affiliates) usually aired the shows in the fringe time slot that the networks had been forced to surrender. (Several other network cast-offs that had been axed for similar reasons, such as ABC's "The Lawrence Welk Show" and NBC's "Wild Kingdom", earned similar extensions of their runs through syndication at the same time.)