One of the goofier reasons I like living on the West Coast is that sporting events start earlier in the day. Sunday football starts at 10am here, so I don’t have to twiddle my thumbs until the games start. It also means postseason baseball wraps up around 8 or 9pm. I do remember hating as a kid hating that Saturday college football would start at 9am, robbing me of the late cartoons. So what do you like and hate about your time zone when it comes to TV?
Non-sporting events like award shows, American Idol, etc. are often shown live on the east coast, while shown taped in the west coast even though filmed in L.A., which is on the west coast!
I can’t imagine getting up and having to wait until 1PM to watch the first NFL games on Sundays. 1PM is when the late games are supposed to start.
Early? Man, as a Californian my entire life, I look forward to moving to Hawaii, where the NBA games start at 1pm and a Giants game would be done by 7 pm, just in time for dinner.
Getting up at 7 am is guaranteed with two children under 3 anyway, so I might as well watch some NFL while I’m at it.
I’m not much of a night owl, so I enjoy being able to watch prime time programs and still go to bed at 10 (central time).
I hate how regular programming shows are staggered back an hour starting from the east coast; 8 PM Eastern, 7 PM Central, 6 PM Mountain… UNTIL the west coast they change it back to the eastern time ha haaaa!! The system worked well when I lived in Utah, it threw me for a loop when I moved to Oregon.
Living in Central, the Eastern prime-time slots seem bizarre to me. Putter around until 8pm and then you’re up until 11pm if you’re going to watch it all? Then the news at 11 o’clock at night? Yeesh…
East coast for nearly all my life. Well, Michigan, but we’re in the Eastern Timezone.
I never understood(and still can’t get) what it is like to live where “live” TV doesn’t mean “live”.
American Idol? Live. Do you really not know who the winner is in advance? Assuming you care, that is.
The Super Bowl starts around 6-7 PM. It’s a night game! It doesn’t end until past 11 PM. I can not imagine it ending around 8 PM. It’s just…weird.
The Academy Awards start…at 5:30 in the early evening? That’s prime time TV viewing, folks. 8:30-nearly midnight. I can’t imagine it any other way.
What about Survivor? Do they really not show the “live” reveal of who the winner is? I mean, don’t you hear about it before it airs, then? It seems like spoilers would be everywhere in the three hours between airings.
Heck, I don’t even know how you don’t find out who got kicked on Survivor before it airs. It’s not a live show, but it has secret results.
I’ve never lived where TV does not air “first”, so to speak.
I’ve lived most of my life in the central time zone, but spent a few years on the east coast. I don’t think I could adapt again to how late everything come on if I moved to the east coast.
My wife and I do this:
Eat at 5 PM
Watch some DVD’s while our daughter plays(and we play with her) from about 5:45-6:30 or so. She’s 2, by the way(my daughter, not my wife). 
6:30-7:00: Daughter brushes teeth, gets PJ’s on, and goes to bed
7:00-8:00: We play a video game and hang out.
8:00-Whenever: Watch TV
And like you, I can’t imagine it any other way. TV starts at 8:00, not earlier.
I grew up in the West and I love having early sports but waiting until 8 for prime time to start always pissed me off since I could rarely make it until the end of the 9:30 shows. Now I live in Mountain and it’s the best of both worlds. I get the early sports, a 7:00 prime time, and my tape delayed shows are only 1 hour behind.
I hated living in Texas since I was on central and I had so much time to kill in the morning before football started and it seemed that the games were more likely to run into the early prime time slots.
Eastern time zone and postseason baseball are a match made in hell. I can just see the baseball execs huddling at their conference table: “Hmmm, how can we get school-age kids to be lifelong baseball fans?” “I’ve got it! We’ll start all the World Series games at 8:30, have extra long breaks between innings to sell more ads, have an uber-patriotic seventh inning stretch, and make sure it never ends before 12:30 in the morning!” “Brilliant!”
We live in the west but we’ve got east and west coast feeds for network t.v.
We DVR everything and if we didn’t have the eastern channels I think we’d watch everything one day later. I’m not going to stay up late just for t.v.
I’m in CST having moved here from EST two years ago.
My wife and I truly enjoy the fact that shows start an hour earlier, her especially as it means that she has a better chance staying awake during them.
I live in the eastern time zone and I hate it when my baseball team is in another time zone. Especially when we’re playing the Oakland A’s. Do I really want to stay up until 1 AM to hear an A’s/Indians game? (Not really but I do) When we play Texas I have to think about just what time zone is that anyway? Three teams in our division are in the central time zone so there’s a good bit of off-an-hour games.
A lot of times when we’re in a different time zone they put the games on in the afternoon. Which is nice because I get to listen during work but then my evening is kind of boring.
One time I went to San Francisco and happened to be back in my hotel every night around 9-ish. I thought “great, I can watch TV!” except my hotel had east coast feed cable and everything was shifted 3 hours…post-midnight television which kind of sucks.