So I'm in Denver on business, and I'm lying in my hotel apartment watching NBC, and lo and behold, up pops a trailer for Friends. 'Excellent!', I think. 'I don't care about the spoilers, or the fact that I've missed the first (?) episodes of the series. I'll get to see Friends S8 before everyone else in the UK.'
And the trailer says that it's on at 8/7pm. 'Hmmm.', I think. 'OK, I'm an intelligent lad, surely I can work this out. It must be 8pm ET, and 7pm CT. I'm on MT, which two hours behind ET, so I need to be back at 6pm.'
So I leg it out of the office at 5:58pm MT, and make it to the hotel just in time for...9 News. And then Entertainment Tonight. And at 7pm MT, on comes Friends.
Where did I go wrong? Have I missed something totally obvious? Indeed, am I a moron?
The continental-48 of the US spans 4 time zones, though the networks are a little weird about it.
Take "Friends" with a national broadcast of Thursday at 8pm. If you are in the Eastern time zone, it runs at 8pm. If you are in the Central time zone, the program is running there at the same moment, which locally is 7pm.
[At that moment it is 6pm in the Mountain zone and 5pm in the Pacific zone]
Now there's no point in airing prime programming at 5pm in the Pacific, so the channels in that zone air "Friends" at 8pm Pacific.
So what to do with the Mountain folks? When "Friends" airs for Eastern/Central, it is 6pm- a bit early for prime programming. When it airs for Pacific, it is 9pm- too late to start your 3-hour prime programming block. So the only choice is to choose a starting time in between. In the case of Denver, it is 7pm.
Now I don't program TV or anything like that, so I don't know exactly how Mountain TV stations work. I don't know if they all have to choose 7pm as "prime time" or if it's up to each market.
You can see the Eastern vs. Pacific part of this in action if you have satellite or digital cable. Most of the movie channels [HBO, Cinemax, etc] and certain others like Disney channel operate two separate feeds- standard and "west". If you are looking at the standard feed, the west feed is the exact same channel, but 3 hours in the past. If you are looking at the west feed, the standard feed is the exact same channel, but 3 hours in the future.
Part of the problems in the Mountain Time Zone stem from the early days. Getting a good signal often depended on which side of which mountain your receiver was built. I'm guessing Denver, being on the East side of the mountains tended to go with the Central time zone since CT is just east of them. (That's just my guess btw.)
I pretty much pulled my explanation out of my, er, 'pocket'. While I work in small-time video, I have no knowledge of how the networks run other than a short visit to a local TV station.
Mountain time is the most difficult to figure. Each station picks its own standard. Most choose the 8-11 PM prime time slot, but not all. Having assumed this, however, you would have missed the show. Denver's KUSA (channel 9) is one that likes it early I guess. I don't know why. Maybe the owner of Multimedia Holdings Corporation comes from the Central time zone.
Rule of thumb: outside the Central time zone, most markets choose the 8-11 PM slot for prime time, but obviously not all. Caveat Emptor.