Absolute horseshit. You’re entitled to your opinion, of course. But if enough people wanted to watch that show, it would be scheduled later to ensre it was run in its entirety.
And I’ll second calling bullshit on Hazel. NYC is not the center of the universe. Trying to give the biggest state in the union a half-assed chance of seeing televised games without asking them to tune in at 8am instead of 9am will lose a shitload of money. Money spent airing your precious little sitcom.
Face it, the NFL is a HUGE moneymaker for the networks. Ever wonder why they pay the NFL such astronomical amounts of money for the contracts? If that doesn’t show it, maybe compare ad costs for playoff games as well as the granddaddy of them all, the Super Bowl, to what Fox gets even for a spot on The Simpsons.
Funny, that’s pretty much exactly how I feel about reality television. And Futurama.
Understandable in that it is all basically white noise to you. I could say the exact same words about Harry Potter, for instance.
Ah, so you definitely don’t like television shows or movies, where the same millionaire complaint could be leveled at the actors playing dressup and make believe. As an added bonus, scripted entertainment has no element of the unknown. Neither does reality television, for that matter. Do you watch the Olympics? Would you have the same complaints about Futurama being delayed for the Olympics? Millions and millions of viewers tune into each of the 16 NFL games every week and feel the same way as you presumably do about the Olympics. But hey, those Olympians are just playing kids’ games too, right? At least they aren’t millionaires, like those pesky actors.
How is that different than saying you can get the same effect by simply reading a transcript of the show you wanted to see?
Okay, now I get it. Seriously, I get it that that must be annoying as hell. The good news is that the NFL has actually done some things to help folks like you out. MLB I have no idea, but this info may help you in the next few weeks at least. The 1:00pm game is scheduled until 4:15pm. There is no 4:00pm game, despite what the guide says. It is a 4:15pm game. If the 1:00pm ends early, or on time, they cut to other games until 4:15pm, when the late game starts. A football game is almost guaranteed to be about 3 hours and 5 minutes long. That puts the end at around 7:20pm. They then pad with 10 minutes of wrap-up, and so you get back to real tv at 7:30pm. So even though it says 60 minutes starts at 7:00pm, it’s a sure bet 7:30pm will be the real start. Unless they have a big story, like Bob Dylan this past week, at which point CBS will refuse to schedule a late game, leaving a firm 7:00pm starting time to 60 minutes. Fox has no such issue, so they usually start at 7:30pm.
I could say the same for 90 minute episodes of The Biggest Loser bloating out and preempting Scrubs, or The Apprentice preempting ER. It is annoying, but I recognize that since millions of Americans are into it, them’s the breaks.
Figure all start times are 7:30pm is there is a late game. Easier to check the guide than run a crawl non-stop. Wouldn’t you find that annoying?
Okay, yeah, that is a pitworthy gripe. Unfortunately, due to the cutthroat nature of the networks, there’s no incentive to fix that.
So everyone in this thread hates the Olympics, huh? All those children’s games interrupting the nightly sitcoms and whatnot. In all seriousness, sports have intrinsic value. They are usually just fluff and fun, but occasionally real social change can be affected. Allow me three examples to illustrate:
The Miracle on Ice gave Americans back our sense of self respect. When the hostages were freed from Iran, the state department showed them a video catching them up on the year they missed. It ended with the Miracle on Ice. The hostages had tears in their eyes recounting how it had restored their faith in their country to see that, and they knew nothing about hockey. Name me any other form of entertainment that could have managed that.
A while back, racial riots erupted in Detroit, with much loss of life and property damage. The city was damn near anarchy, but then the Tigers won the World Series, which unified the city and united people of all colors throughout the city. End of riots. I’d like to see The Amazing Race do that.
What was one of the first major signs that life was resuming after the World Trade Center? When the NFL resumed play. The country was mourning, but a feeling of normalcy returned in much sharper focus then a few awkward jokes on SNL and the Letterman show could ever hope to achieve.
Like it or not, sports is the one and only unifying, emotional commonality we have in this country. Whether you are a Red Sox fan or not, who couldn’t appreciate 80+ years of futility being overcome in dramatic fashion? Just try to get Christians, Jews, and Muslims together in celebration of any other thing. Futurama? That’s the child’s game.
And don’t be too quick to dismiss the NFL as a bunch of millionaires. They get a 5 year career, followed by a life of pain, difficulty walking, and likely several surgeries. They are the lowest paid athletes – by far – of all the major sports, including the largely unwatched NHL. There’s a total of 90 million allowed to each team for payroll, and they have to split that between 53 players. Compare that to the tens of millions MLB and NHL players get. NFL players earn every cent of their money, far more so than any actor ever has.
Don’t blame the NFL or football in general. Fox programming executives were the ones who put Futurama in such a poor time slot. Heck, even when there wasn’t a game you couldn’t count on seeing Futurama.
FOX programmers had it in for Futurama from the beginning since Matt Groening wouldn’t give them full control over it. If lacrosse was as popular sport as football, you’d have seen lacrosse matches running over the 7pm time slot.
The thing I love about these threads is the implicit smug self-righteousness of non-sports watchers (not that some sport watchers are much better, mind you, but…).
I watch sports (football and especially hockey if it ever gets back) and if it makes me a drunken, inbred Neanderthal, then so be it.
Personally, I’m sick of moronic, carbon-copy reality shows taking out better programming (though I did agree with the rants about the Fox 7 PM hour), so anything that cuts them off, all the better.
Des not compute. Futurama and MitM are on network TV. They were discussing putting all sports on pay TV. How in the fuck is that fair to people who can’t afford cable?
Bah, local news pre-empted my MNF game this week. Another Chicago high-rise on fire. Contained to the building. No one dead. A whole lot of ‘we don’t know’ or ‘we haven’t learned anything new’. An update every 15-30 minutes would have done the trick. Thankfully thousands of people called up in protest and they showed the second half of a phenominal game with a split-screen update every 15-30 minutes. The poor folks who wanted to watch shows on the other networks were screwed and we lost something like $1 million in local ad revenue.
Actually, I have a better idea. Why don’t we move all this insipid reality TV to it’s own cable channel? That way, we sports watchers won’t have to worry about them cutting off a game with 10 minutes left because the special 300 minute season premiere of My Big Fat Obnoxious Boss is coming on shortly?
Actually, as I just posted, the ultimate decision was to air the game in its entirety – except that decision could not be communicated to the broadcast operations supervisor.
Holy christ, what a load of whiners. You all realize that all your favorite network TV shows are repeated, right? Either later that night, at which time you can set your VCRs or Tivos, or endlessly during the summer.
I can’t think of a single sporting event that has ever been replayed in its entirety.
Exactly. While you can see repeats of games on ESPN Classic, they don’t sit there and show you every single pitch of a baseball game, for example. They’ll show an inning, skip a couple when not much happened, show another couple innings, skip some more. Also, I don’t think I’ve ever seen pro football on ESPN Classic, just college.
