Dick Cavett Show all the comercials

Cafe Society
1

I’ve watched a few of Dick Cavett SHows on Decades Catchy Comedy TV Schedule - What's On Catchy Comedy?

I’m struck by how often he breaks away for a commercial. It seems excessive even for this day and age; and seems completely odd considering its a show from the 60s and 70s.

The show doesn’t look edited, in that it doesn’t look like they’ve cut out a lot of talk and are just cutting to commercial, but maybe these are edited.

Can someone confirm what is going on here? Did they really break away for commercial that often, or is the original show somehow edited to allow them to go to commercial every 5 min?

THe only way I can think of is that they now come back from commercial and just air the last 5 min before the next commercial and the original 10 min are left out…
…or
…he really did have that many commercial breaks in the original broadcast

2

I haven’t seen the shows you’re referring to, but was each commercial break for just one commercial? If so, that might just be a different approach from today, where each break includes five or ten commercials.

3

I just checked out this episode, which was from his original ABC series. The firsr segment (the monologue) is about six minutes long, the second segment is 10 minutes, and the segments after that all seem to be 6-7 minutes. That’s pretty much the same breakup as today’s late night shows. Plus, the commercial breaks were 90 seconds or 2 minutes each, compared to today’s breaks, which are longer. All in all, I’d say Cavett probably got one additional segment in during the first hour.

Although Cavett’s shows had many different formats while he was on, so the ones the OP is seeing may be broken up differently.