i have plenty of time to write this pit thread. i do not watch very much television to start with, but i do like the amazing race. it isn’t on here. instead we have the creighton university/kent state basketball game.
calling the station resulted in the information that the network show that is on now everywhere else will be run at 3:00 am.
i have seen basketball. incredibly boring. any given five minutes of play are virtually identical to any other five minutes. football is even worse. i do not see the attraction, but we do have half a dozen channels that are devoted to sports full time. it would seem reasonable for the games to be there, rather than pre-empting regular programming
many years ago i had a similar problem. there was a hallmark presentation of sir lawrence olivier playing shylock in the merchant of venice on network television. locally it was pre-empted by the iowa class d girls basketball semi finals and never replayed.
put the sports on espn where they belong and leave the regular programming alone!
They tend to show about 10 minutes of Malcolm in the Middle because the football game always runs long and then they have to do the stupid after game show.
My Tivo gets strange things when they do this crap.
Much as I agree with the OP, ain’t nothing you can do about it. Most people would rather watch sports than whatever is being pre-empted. That means more money for the network, and that means the show you love gets yanked for burly men in tights and shoulder pads, or whatever.
Used to really bother me, back when there were actually shows on network TV worth watching. Now? Not so much.
I find this irritating, too, the endless analysis of the damn games. There simply isn’t enough room in pro sport rules for anything really original or unexpected (what was the last big innovation? Knute Rockne’s forward pass?) so to hear them try to come up with some so-called insight into why catching the ball was a good thing just drives me nuts. Also, the vapid time-wasting player interviews about team efforts and 110%… geez, what do you expect them to say? If the post-game interview had tidbits like “Yeah, and on this play, if you look real close, you can see me deliberately putting my knee on Greenbaum’s wrist in the pileup. Man, I’m glad the refs are as dumb as my ex-girlfriend”, then at least they’d be entertaining.
Interestingly, Howard Cosell apparantly thought baseball was too slow to ever have major television appeal, and games are longer now than when was in the biz. Pick up the damn pace, already.
Personally, I find it hard to care if the NHL ever returns, because I remember having my favourite shows bumped for games.
This used to drive me insane about six years ago when Deep Space Nine was still being aired. In my market, it came on at 7:00pm on Saturday nights on FOX… a perfect time for me as a teenager with no life and I rejoiced from November to May while it aired but cursed the gods weekly during August, September, and October when baseball, the most dreadfully boring of all sports, pre-empted it EVERY SINGLE WEEK.
I was one annoyed little Trekkie. I’ve still not managed to see all the episodes from that timeframe that I’ve missed. A pox on FOX and Paramount both.
I have wanted to start this rant several times myself, but never got around to it. I absolutely hate the fact that sports so often pre-empt other programs. I feel the decision in the “Heidi incident” was correct, and if part of the game is not shown, tough.
I watch very little TV these days, so when one of the few shows I watch is shown late or starts in the middle, I find it very annoying. I also usually tape what I plan to watch and often miss what I wanted and am stuck with 30 minutes of some stupid waste of time sports event. This is just another reason I watch very little TV these days. I wish they would either start the games earlier, or just stick to the schedule they have.
So let me see if I understand this argument properly. Many of you are annoyed with the fact that your shows are delayed, so your solution to this problem is to remove part of other people’s shows? Does that sum it up about right?
How about instead of that, the Amazing Race gets broadcast at a fixed time, no matter what, but it gets cut before the ending? Would that be better, or is it only okay when it happens to programming you personally don’t like?
I’m just trying to gauge the amount of self-centeredness actually being espoused in this thread.
Don’t go dissing Futurama. It’s the most intelligent show of this decade, so far.
I think the reason many people on this thread are pissed off is that, for non-sports fans, sports are SO freakin’ repetitive and boring. It’s the same thing over and over: dude catches ball, dude takes ball somewhere else, people talk for twenty minutes, blah blah blah make it stop. And they’re always on. There’s no drama in sports for me, no passion, just the same boring crap over and over. Certainly you’re free to think differently, and obviously a lot of people do like televised sports, but I find a love of professional sports hard to comprehend. Millionaires playing a kid’s game does not interest me whatsoever. It also seems that televising sports adds nothing to the experience that you can’t get listening to the game on the radio, or reading a play-by-play feed about it on the Internet. But that’s just my perspective as a non-sports fan.
Also, I only watch four or five shows a week on average. Sunday night Fox is one of my few “must-watch” nights. It’s really frustrating that two of the four Fox programs (Malcolm and King of the Hill) are constantly pre-empted. Yeah, maybe it’s selfish of me to want these shows to be broadcast instead of sports, but I feel really cheated that the only shows I watch are always interrupted. Can’t they do it on another night? This is my night!
Basically I just hate the way the world stops when there’s a sports event going on. I feel like a Jew on Xmas.
Well, let them start the darn games early enough that they’ll be over by 7:00 pm! And when they’re over, go straight to regular programming. I especially hate this: often, there’s some afternoon game that has already run past the time it was supposed to end, delaying the start of the show I’ve tuned in to see. The game ends – and they don’t start my show. Instead they either gab endlessly about the game that’s over now, or they inflict on us the last 1/2 hour (or whatever) of some other game!
If our shows are supposed to a cirtain length (30 minutes, 60 minutes, whatever), that’s actually how long they are. They don’t take wildly differing amounts of time, resulting in their taking up the next show’s timeslot.
They start a game at 4:00 pm and claim (in the TV listings) that the 7:00 pm show will really be shown at 7:00 pm. It’s just plain dishonest. They know that the game will last longer than 3 hours. I repeat my question – why don’t they start the game earlier in the day?
Good post, Contiuity Eror! That’s how I feel about pro sports on TV.
Here’s an example of the problems caused by these sports things. On CBS, on Sundays, when a game runs past 7:00 pm, they start 60 minutes whenever the game ends. If 60 minutes starts 30 minutes late, all of their other shows for the rest of prime time also start 30 minutes late. There’s never any explainaton. Turn on the TV at 9:00, you find the 8:00 show still on. They don’t tell you a thing. Why can’t they run text across the bottom of the screen to tell us when the 9:00 show will actually start? Do they think everyone knows what happened earlier? Many don’t.
The other problem is that if one watches the late-starting 8:00 pm show, one misses the first 1/2 hour of any 9:00 show on another channel.
Presuming it’s an honest question, the answer is because there’s also a 1:00 game, and if they pushed that back, folks on the west coast would watching a game before 10:00 AM (like 9:00 or 9:30 AM). They could scratch the late games and have them all start at 2:00, and I would be OK with that, but they would lose money, so it won’t happen. In fact, expect Thursday night football in addition to Sunday and Monday night football to become the norm.