...fans of "King of the Hill", who share the pain that all good ATFers felt from 1999 through 2002 - it seems that one straggler NFL game on Fox ran until about 7:45 PM Eastern, so Fox decided to show its usual post-game show, and then air just the last three minutes(!) of the KOTH Christmas episode (at least out east - the west got the full 30 minutes).
-- Don
I thought this might happen the minute I saw the new lineup. Why do those games have to take all afternoon? They never seem to be over in time, but sometimes they schedule extra "buffers" like a post-game show and KOTH rerun, so it's not always disaster. I wonder what would happen if they ended the coverage early to start 8ABE__ on time...
Don Del Grande wrote:
Consider yourselves lucky, on TV in england if something runs late they don't show part of a show, they just don't bother with it and put something else on that will fit into the time left, and it's usually not worth watching.
~Cameron
Howard Wilson II wrote:
I see...I don't like this "must broadcast in entirety" clause since they can really run too far with it (my brother surmises that _televised_ games take over 3 hours now because they keep pausing the game for all the commercials; if they have to show it all, why not pack more in?)...can't KOTH (which I have to guess has more sway than Futurama did) get a similar thing?
"Howard Wilson II" wrote in message news:[email]...
those
but
up.
Wanna go see the ratings for NFL on Fox, how much Fox pays for football?
Getting the NFL made FOX...
You really think Futurama at 6 could pull a 12 share consistently?
On Mon, 15 Dec 2003 05:21:09 GMT, Don Del Grande wrote:
Amen. Maybe some kind west-coast soul capped it and will post it (alt.binaries.multimedia.comedy) .
On Mon, 15 Dec 2003 13:47:19 -0500, Matt Garvey wrote (in a message further down the thread):
Your brother surmises correctly. You can watch a college game in person in about 2-and-a-quarter hours. NFL games clock in at 3:15, _minimum_.
I love love love football, and will watch just about any game that is on, but the NFL, and especially Fox, are damn near killing me.
Kickoff . . . 3 minutes of commercials . . . first 3 plays . . . 3 minutes of commercials . . . punt . . . 3 minutes of commercials . . . replay of punt . . . 3 minutes of commercials . . . 3 plays . . . 3 minutes of commercials . . . 3 plays . . . 3 minutes of commercials . . . field-goal attempt . . . 3 minutes of commercials . . . field-goal replay . . . 3 minutes of commercials . . . kickoff . . . 3 minutes of commercials . . . They've been on the air 45 minutes, and the first quarter is only half over.
The NFL is the 800-pound gorilla of sports programming, and the networks attempt to justify the adverts by claiming they have to recoup their investment. But I want to see Fox's Sunday night line up just as much as I want to see football. The cartoons are dessert, and I'm willing to stay up a little later to see them _all_, so show them all.
While we're at it, the NFL should take away time-outs. Who the hell needs a time-out when the TV is gonna cut away every 30 seconds of game-time anyway?
</soapbox>
Humble Will Teach wrote:
They allow 3:15 for NFL games - the "late" games start at 4:15 Eastern on the network that has a doubleheader that day. This allows for two things: one, most of the 1:00 games will be over by then; two, most of the time, all of the games will be over by 7:30, allowing for the "normal TV schedule" to start at that point.
And what college games end in 2 1/4 hours? (Basketball, maybe...) Even back when I went to college, in the early 1980s, non-televised games almost always took longer than 3 1/4 hours (thanks mainly to the "stop the clock on a first down while we move the chains" rule).
(Also, it's not just football that has the problem; sometime in the 1980s, as I recall, CBS was showing a golf tournament that was in sudden death, and when it got to 7:00 Eastern, they announced that they were cutting away so "60 Minutes" would start; the next day, it was "Heidi Bowl II" on West 57th Street, and CBS made it quite clear that they would never cut away from a sporting event again (which nearly backfired as Dan Rather walked off the news set once when he heard that the news might be delayed by a U.S. Open tennis match in progress).
They're needed to stop the clock. At least some of the time outs are only 30 seconds long.
-- Don
On Tue, 16 Dec 2003 03:26:45 GMT, Don Del Grande wrote:
Remember when CBS had the NFC games? They showed their entire Sunday night line-up, no matter how long the games took. I just wish Fox would do the same. I could put up with Terry Bradshaw and Howie Long rattling their pie-holes for 15 minutes after the game if it meant I didn't lose 15 minutes of KOTH.
Any that aren't on TV, which is actually most of them. Kickoff at noon, teams take turns punting or scoring, they take a total of 12 time-outs, you're out of the parking lot and in the bar by 3.
Without the "kickoff, TV timeout, 3 plays, TV timeout, punt, TV timeout, 3 plays, TV timeout, 3 plays, TV timeout, field-goal, TV timeout, field-goal replay, TV timeout, kickoff, TV timeout" sequence, they go surprisingly quickly. They have no reason to drag the first quarter to an hour.
If you haven't seen live (non-televised) game lately, you should. You'd be flabbergasted at how quickly they get it over with. And your local college could use the bread from your admission fee.
Fine. Let the teams decide when Fox goes to commercial, and not vice-versa.
Humble Will Teach wrote:
Not true. If a game ran past 7:30 Eastern, CBS pulled one of its hour-long programs (usually the 8:00 one, although when they had three shows after "60 Minutes" instead of one show and a movie (I remember "Trapper John, M.D." was on Sunday nights at 10 in the late 1970s), they could pull any of the three). In the west, this really screwed things up, as if there was a movie scheduled for 9:00, CBS almost always started it at 8:00 instead (and the local affiliates aired local programming at 10:00).
*High School* games are lucky to end in 2 1/4 hours, and they only play 12-minute quarters.
There used to be a TV rule (which I thought was still in effect) that said if the local team's game is on, it's shown in its entirety, even if it means pulling away from another game in progress (the San Francisco Fox and CBS stations have this happen to them pretty much every time a 49ers game is the second game of a doubleheader). If they did get rid of the rule, I'm surprised.
-- Don
On or about Thu, 18 Dec 2003 02:40:17 GMT, Don Del Grande made the sensational claim that:
And they usually don't have commercials, so they save a lot of those timeouts.
In alt.tv.futurama, on the "Re: At this time of year, please spare a thought for..." thread, Humble Will Teach wrote:
The networks, including Fox, used to do this, but then stopped. I think they were worried that someone would tune in for an 8:00PM show, find it wouldn't air for another 45 minutes, and switch to another network, never to return. I don't think the affiliates liked to run their evening news late, either, since people could switch to channels where the news was on time.
On Mon, 22 Dec 2003 19:16:37 GMT, [email] (Benjamin Robinson) wrote:
Exactly. Local news is a big moneymaker for the local stations, so they don't like it being preempted by a sitcom.
Don Del Grande wrote:
All two of them?:P
On or about Mon, 15 Dec 2003 22:40:19 -0500, Petrazickis made the sensational claim that:
You're confusing brain count with body count.
On Mon, 15 Dec 2003 05:21:09 GMT, Don Del Grande spewed forth these words of wisdom:
ESPN broadcast the finish of a regular season basketball game on Saturday, rather than cutaway to the Div. II National Football Championship game! I missed the first 30 minutes of the game. My alma matter was playing in it. (North Dakota).
On Tue, 16 Dec 2003 09:30:56 GMT, Galley wrote:
Not sure about the rest of the country, but Dallas viewers were treated to the last few minutes of Green Bay-Atlanta (or whoever the hell was playing, I don't even care), instead of the first 4 minutes of the Cowboys. Personally, I'd give up the last 4 minutes of a tied playoff game to see the first 4 minutes of a Cowboy game. Fox should have switched us, since this market's team was playing, and then done one of those annoying "game breaks" they are so fond of, if and when something happened in the early game.