anyone know why television prime time is 7-10pm in the central and mountain zones and 8-11pm in the eastern and pacific time zones?
See if this helps: What’s the rationale for prime-time TV scheduling?
interesting to know.
be damned, I was just wondering this. I recently moved to the west coast and miss a lot of TV now because I just don’t care enough to stay out of bed for it.
I think the best answer is money. Canada, with five time zones, is able to start Prime Time the same time around the country. That’s because they have a center in Calgary devoted to airing feeds every hour. But American networks don’t want to spend the money for that (horrors!), so they air their feeds from New York and LA–where of course almost all their facilities are based. Having Central prime time an hour early spares them from airing a CTZ-only feed. And the Mountain time? None of the networks had a MTZ feed until 1986, and CBS still doesn’t. Before then Mountain zone stations were on their own. Airing live feeds for prime time starting at 5:30 or 8:30 wasn’t going to work, so they just taped the New York feed and aired it an hour later. I guess tape delaying two hours would have been too much trouble.
Crap. I am so old that I remember when Central TZ prime time started at 6:30 instead of 7:00.
National news was 5:30 to 6:00, and local news after that.
I seems to me when Jonny Quest first aired, it was on prime time 6:30 to 7:00.
Prime time used to start at 7:00 pm (6:00 Central and Mountain). The three big networks used to program four hours a night of prime time shows, but in 1971 the FCC began enforcing its Prime Time Access Rule. That limited the networks to providing 3 hours of prime time programming a night. The rule was supposed to usher in an era of diverse community-centric local programming. In reality, all it did was create an hour for syndicated game shows (Jeopardy! and Wheel of Fortune) and syndicated entertainment-gossip shows. Some stations extended their local news programs, basically repeating the same stories that were just shown every half hour on their two to three hour block of afternoon local news.
The rule was later scaled back to cover only the top 50 markets, but networks had no interest in producing shows exclusively for tiny markets. Sunday night restrictions were also lifted. The entire rule was repealed in 1996.
In Minneapolis, Combat! came on Channel 9 KMSP every Tuesday night at 6:30, right after Dobie Gillis reruns. I can still hear the announcer talking over DG’s closing theme: “Tonight on Combat!, Sgt Saunders and the squad…” One of my best childhood memories! :o