Letterboxing/Widescreen on Network TV

Factual Questions
1

Slightly relevant background info:
I still have my old 4:3 CRT TV sets…I’m waiting for one of them to die so I can get a HD widescreen.

Most of the TV I watch is old stuff that I record on the DVR and watch at my leisure…I’m currently on the Law & Order episodes from '91-94 and season 5 of Homicide: Life on the Street. In other words, none of this stuff was shot in widescreen back then.

The newer shows I normally watch have been off due to the writer’s strike, so other than the new Law & Order episodes, I haven’t really seen any new TV in months.

More relevant to my question:
What I noticed is on the last couple of episodes of Law & Order that aired from the current season, two letters were visible coming off the left edge of the screen about 1/5 up from the bottom of the screen…“er”. I think they were there through the entire show, but disappeared during the commercials. I also noticed that there is no letterboxing.

I’m currently watching the latest Saturday Night Live (from 4/12) and during the opening part, there is text coming onto the left hand side of the screen and no letterboxing. At some points, the text is completely visible and at other times, you just see the end of it.

The question:
What are they networks doing? Some sort of Pan & Scan to avoid letterboxing for people with standard ratio TVs? Or are they just cropping out the edges? If so, how do they know I don’t have a widescreen TV?

I don’t know if I’m so accustomed to it that I don’t notice it anymore, but I’m sure that a year ago, when the new shows that I watch were on prime-time, they all had the thin black strip at the top and bottom of the screen for the wider ratio. Anyone have an explanation?

2

I’ve frequently seen networks broadcasting a widescreen signal with a 4:3 picture centered in it and black sidebars. You can tell it’s the broadcaster adding these, as opposed to the TV, because the broadcaster will often put their logo “bug” over there in the sidebar area, and it often overlaps the actual picture a little too, so if the path the video took to your eyeballs included a step where they restore the 4:3-ness of the show (e.g. with pan-n-scan as you mention), you’d see part of the bug.

Presumably they do this to make the picture look better to viewers that don’t know how to get the their own TV into the right mode to view it, but it really ends up making the problem worse. Once I was flipping around my DTV stations and I encountered one that was a super-wide-screen movie, letterboxed, then sent out on a 16:9 ATSC broadcast, which I then viewed on my 4:3 TV. The result was 3 sets of black bars (the outermost ones on the top and bottom, then two more on the sides inside of that, then two more on the top and bottom inside that). When they do something that dumb, even the savvy users can’t fix it.