I seem to vaguely recall a brief period in the early 90’s, where one or more of the tv networks (NBC comes to mind) tried an experiment that tanked…
IIRC they would show a program in its entirety, and save all the commercials for the end of the show. So, let’s say for example, you were watching Seinfeld…the shows runs 20 some minutes, ends, then 10-15 minutes of commercials air until the next show begins.
Did this really happen or have I lost marbles?
I never heard of this in any of my college classes (I was a radio/tv/film major)…and it sounds outrageously stupid.
If something like this did occur, it might have been ~ 1990, when things got a little screwy when they started timeshifting schedules…
Back in ye olde days, a show would start at 9:00:00 PM and end at 9:30:00 PM. Then NBC decided to run the end of one show right into the front of the next one, without a commercial. Then they outdid themselves by starting the next show at 9:29:30 PM so that viewers were hooked on the next show and didn’t go surfing. This policy resulting in shuffling of ad islands, which might have been long until they got the kinks out of the system.
There have been a very few special features during which a single commercial or no commercials were shown. This was always promoted as intending to show reverence to the high quality and serious demeanor of the show in question. I do not remember anything like this happening for a series (even for Movie of the Week stuff).
Whether they were actually designed as ploys to garner viewers (as opposed to something marketing came up with when it looked as though they might have too few advertisers) I have never heard.
All the kiddie shows on PBS are shown that way.
Even on stations like Nickleodeon, kiddie shows only have commercial breaks between shows and smack dab in the middle of 1/2 hour shows.
I also seem to remember a Mad About You episode where they did a continuous, one camera shot for however long a normal episode is (22 min.?) then did a bunch of commercials. They then used the 30 second slot at the end to make a comment about another show that did the same thing…thereby calling attention to the fact that they did it too.