When was the episode of Dr. Phil that I’ll be watching today filmed?
Ditto for The Price is Right.
It depends a on the show, I think. I was in the audience for a Canadian game show recently that taped the entire season of the show in two weeks over the summer, and it’ll run weekly throughout the year.
On the other hand, Jeopardy seems to tape weekly or bi-weekly throughout the year, but even there, the episodes are taped a couple of months before they air.
Right, because there was a thread that we had here talked about Merv Griffin mentioning the start of something amazing just as Ken Jennings run was about to be shown.
Your standard couch & desk talk shows usually film earlier in the day (Letterman, Leno, Conan, etc). I was at a Conan taping and I believe it was taped at 4:00 pm.
It happens frequently these days that multiple talk shows are filmed on one day with one audience to free to host for a weekend gig or just give some extra time off. I’ve seen this on Letterman, Craig Ferguson, and Conan. You’ll often get the hint when at the start of the monologue for, say, a Friday show, the host says “that Wednesday audience was awful” [nudge, nudge, wink, wink].
Carson used guest hosts to acheive this, but none of the moderns do.
Otherwise, yes, the nighttime talk shows are taped earlier in the day.
A week’s worth of daily game shows are usually taped over one or two days, and then parceled out to syndication.
Syndicated talk shows are also taped ahead of time, on varying schedules.
As jacquilynne correctly said, there’s a lot of “it depends” in this question.
I believe Jon Stewart tapes his show at 5:00 pm for an 11:00 pm broadcast (eastern time.)
I just read Ken Jennings’ book, and I believe he said that they taped once a week (he had to fly out to LA every Friday), and all 5 weekly episodes were taped in that one day. This was done several months ahead of time. If I remember correctly, they had to double up for a while, to cover the summer hiatus, as well. He ended up having to keep the whole thing a secret for months, and come up with all kinds of excuses for missing work, etc.
Leno seems to finish taping around 530ish pacific time. My bus ride home goes past the studio every night and we determine how good a show it is by how many people are milling about. (and of course complain at those damn tourists wandering around)
Complain ABOUT those damn tourists, not at them.
Letterman typically tapes the Monday and Friday show on Monday and the others in the afternoon of the day they air.
I thought the Friday show was taped on Thursday?