The Timing Is Off

For the past couple of months I've notice a strange trend which keeps occurring on my television guide. It appears the long-standing television practice of ending shows at either the top or bottom of the hour no longer exists because lately every show lists their ending time as either :31 or :01. Normally I wouldn't make a big fuss about this because it is only one minute, except it causes a larger annoyance. My particular cable system does not compensate for this discrepancy and if a show goes even one minute into the next block of time it apparently thinks the show will last for the entire half-hour. So, if you scan ahead to see what is coming on at 8:30 it continues to show you what was on at 8, simply because that show won't technically end until 8:31. As a man who is addicted to know what is coming on later this tends to drive me a little crazy. I'll be using the guide to check if the evening's episode of whichever show I enjoy is a repeat or brand-new and what happens instead is I think the show isn't airing at all, simply because the show before it has infringed on its time for one whole minute. Ironically, it usually takes me a minute to figure out what is going on.

I would love to know why this is happening. One of the theories I have come up with is to think this was done to help the legions of people who record everything onto their DVRs for later use. If you have ever set your DVR to record anything (especially a suspenseful show) you know the dangers of sitting down to watch the show a couple days later, anxiously getting to the end and being very excited to see the previews for the next week's show... only to find out the DVR stopped recording right before that part was shown. Ok, I will grant you that is annoying. Also, that it is so much easier to tell the DVR to record the program rather than asking it to record specific times on a specific channels. However, in this day and age of commercials on top of promos on top of more commercials, it is not like the people who are so attached to their DVRs won't see that same preview half a dozen times in the next couple of days. Believe me, while they might not see it at the exact moment they want to, eventually it will be on and they won't have missed anything just because their DVR cut off right when the clock hit either :30 or :00. There really was no need to move everything back a couple minutes. So, basically, in trying to stop one annoying thing from happening, an entire new slate of annoying things popped up. 

I'm well aware that shows which come on after live events, especially things like basketball or baseball games, are at the whims of forces beyond their control. When that happens I am completely willing to deal with shows that have funky starting times. But this off-time scheduling of weekly sitcoms is being done on purpose and it just feels unnecessary. Apparently these shows just can't fit their scripts into the same amount of time every other show has had since the beginning of television. And what is extra annoying is that it's not like they're doing anything with this additional minute. Most shows wrap up their mystery or tell their last joke with more than enough time to spare. Usually what you get after that final scene is four minutes of commercials and while occasionally there will be either one last joke which is never usually that funny or a preview for next week's show, most of the time what you come back to is just the credits rolling by. Hardly seems worth recording, let alone causing all these other frustrations just to appease a few people who are worried about seeing what will happen on the next episode of a show they think so little about they can't be bothered to watch it in real time to begin with.

Admittedly, I am a little set in my ways and this is just the product of the new on-Demand world we live in. People can watch TV on their phones and tablets whenever they want, so why bother to stick with the way things used to be? If you don't make it easy for people to watch your show at their convenience they will simply move on to another show that will. After all it is not as though there is a law which says shows must start and end at the top or bottom of the hour just because that is the way it has always been done. In this respect TV has become like any other business with a product to sell. Perhaps the new evolution of television shows won't even have start times, just times when you can start downloading them to watch on your own time. However, if it wasn't such a big deal to keep this practice going than you wouldn't see things like the local news being cut to 10 minutes because the Red Sox game ran long and the network wants to make sure the next program starts at its regularly scheduled time. Additionally, it does seem to me that fixing the guide so that it will show the show that takes up the bulk of the half hour block would not be some time-consuming undertaking and few things in life bother me more than annoyances which continue to hang around even though they have a simple and easily-accomplished solution. It may take the programmers more than a minute, but the good news is that if they go over their allotted time they can charge for the entire half-hour.