I’ve always been disinterested in basketball. But, living in a NCAA city, all the pre-emptions of regular programming to air basketball and then the goddamn seemingly endless playoffs turned my disinterest into hatred.
Once we videotaped the Hitchcock movie “Frenzy”, and we made sure to record a few extra minutes after the listed time in case it ran long. We were watching it and it got to the very end where someone is lifting up a weapon to kill someone and…END OF RECORDING.
I only got around to watching the last two minutes of the movie years later.
Law and Order did a couple of crossover episodes with Homicide: Life on the Street. Half of the story would be set in NY on L&O and the other half would be set in Baltimore on H:LOTS. The other day, I watched a rerun of the L&O half of one of these crossovers, which, of course, ended in a cliffhanger. The network didn’t air the other half of the story. I checked Netflix, which also only has half of the story.
Pretty much every death on Game of Thrones.
The look on Jason Bateman’s face was priceless when he gets the call
that The Dregs got an offer to play Carnegie Hall.
The non-ending of Siberia. An abrupt, everyone-freeze, stop action fade to black.
We will never know what was going on, which characters were the good guys/bad guys, too many loose ends.
A waste of viewers’ time. Thanks “Yoice”!
(I’m assuming open spoilers?)
Babylon 5
I watched this show religiously in the '90s. Loved it, loved the story arcs, thought the graphics were amazing for its budget, was impressed that they would change the lead after the 1st season, etc. It was a difficult show to follow, too. It was on syndication, which meant it wasn’t on the same timeframe every week. Sometimes it would be on Saturday nights at 11 for 6 weeks, then Friday for a while… no respect for B5.
So we’re coming to the end of season 4. There’s a huge battle brewing between B5 and Earth. The second to last episode was to be the battle, the culmination of the previous four seasons. I was pumped. The episode was a midnight showing on Saturday night.
I sit in front of the TV, the music comes on… and I promptly fell asleep.
I did not wake up until the closing credits. You have absolutely no idea how pissed I was.
Since that day, I have never watched another episode of Babylon 5. I never even watched the episode that I slept through. Wouldn’t mean anything to me now - I don’t remember much of the story and am not going to invest the hours it would take to get me up to speed.
It also changed my entire attitude towards TV. Before then, it was “important” that I kept up with some shows. After that, I realized it was largely a time sink and vowed never to get into TV like that again. I broke this vow for Lost, but that was a shared experience with my wife so I was able to rationalize it away.
In terms of pre-emptions, I was furious at NBC for cutting away from the NBA Finals to show OJ Simpson’s low speed chase. Jeez, guys, you couldn’t just say “NBC News will break in with an update, if something actually happens.”
According to the show It’s Like You Know, LA shuts down to watch a highway chase. I assume Californians just think the rest of us want to watch them too.
WTF???
Which one are you looking for? I probably have the ep. on a file and can send it to you-- or make a disc for you. Is it the one about the dead baby beauty pageant contestant? Sad to say, there’s a lot of political droning (filler) on the LOTS end, and it would have been better as a one-hour L&O.
If you looked at my link, you’d see it wasn’t Carnegie Hall, it was The Palladium.
I had two like this.
I was on vacation the week the Penultimate episode of Seinfeld aired. I set my VCR to tape it but the tape got messed up i the middle. I said, “That’s fine, the’ll rerun it a 100 times”. The episode was “The Puerto Rican Day” which had a scene where Kramer burned the PR flag. It ended up being banned and never shown again for years.
I used to watch the show Degrassi High. The series ended with a TV movie which I only found out about after the fact a day or two after it aired. Again I was sure it would be rerun and this time, as best as i can remember it never was and I don’t think I ever saw it (it was many years ago and it’s possible I did eventually find it online or something and just forgot).
In the UK, the first seasons of the X-Files were shown on BBC2. BBC2 also showed the snooker. Snooker games often over-run. This meant that, quite frequently, when the game over-ran, the X-Files would be cancelled because of the bloody snooker. I think this neatly coincides with the time that I stopped liking snooker.
Before the 1990s continuity just wasn’t a priority on TV shows. For the 70s and older shows continuity just between episodes let alone seasons was sometimes ignored! Even a quality, canonical show like the original Star Trek would do this occasionally. When the character of Harry Mudd appeared again in the episode* I, Mudd* after having already been in an earlier episode (Mudd’s Women) Kirk and Scotty recognized him but nobody else seemed to (not even Spock!) Bugged the hell out of me!
Some cable channel has been showing The Avengers, and they’ve just gotten to the Tara era. The Mrs. Peel episodes weren’t exactly campy, but they weren’t completely serious, either. There’s one where a couple of enemy spies swap their minds with Steed and Mrs. Peel, and another where there’s a machine that shrinks things, including people.
Hah. We used to watch that in school. On a VCR hooked up to a little TV in a basement room.
During the very last episode of Seinfeld in the last few minutes…the cable tv crapped out. (Not just ours, the actual cable company’s cable.)
One of my favourite shows when I was little was the original “V” - the series ended on a cliffhanger about a bomb on the ship and never came back on 
Also, I am still angry about the cancellation of the show “Happy Endings” - everyone agreed it was good, but it didn’t matter.
Many and these brought up some.
I also saw Read All About It in school. I think it was supposed to be educational drama? I think I did see all of them but at times it was out of order so nothing stuck with me. I did like watching it, though.
Weather - Oh Bob the weather. I grew up in north Iowa, which would have thunderstorms and tornado warnings. That meant interrupting TV shows for the announcement or losing power! I remember being made at losing power when the Captain America show was on. And I think I missed a few Spider Mans as well. (Hmm. I can’t find a live action series from the late 70s, early 80s, so maybe it was the 1979 TV movie. And it was Amazing Spider Man with Nicholas Hammond.)
The weather actually still plagues us from time to time even now. When some of our shows are syndicated, we will eventually miss one. Enterprise is one but I think early UPN, so Buffy, also had problems.
Yes to Sports pre-emptings. I’m a geek and don’t follow sports, so that was really annoying. Same for any televangelist shows.
I stuck it out because I loved it so much but Bab5 for a while there was very difficult for me to find. I first saw it in college but when I moved back to my hometown after that, it wasn’t on in the area. Took me a while and repeats on TNT see it all. And as much as I love it and think seasons two through four are awesome, it is tough to rewatch one and five. I was also bummed at how they lost Claudia Christian.
I also think I started to hate FOX when they were on the cusp of making it big and trying to compete with the big three. What that meant was where they would take chances before with shows, now the shows had to get ratings, same as the other networks. (Hello? How long did X-Files take? Did you guys learn nothing?) But for a while there, they had some great shows but nothing long term. Strange Luck, Kindred, Brisco County. Their shows in the '93 - '98 time frame.
It’s a cultural thing but I get annoyed at how BBC handles series. A few episodes here and there and then maybe nine or more months between? WTF?
Having said that, I also hate spring season in America because of, again, sports cutting into March and how irregular the schedule is until season finales.
I think i watch too much TV . . .
What’s more irksome is they changed Ralph’s name from Hanley back to Hinkley, also without explanation. It’s as if the name change never occurred.
I hated they way they never showed Tanya Robert’s or Laura Prepon’s bare breasts in That 70s Show.
They were definitely nonconventional and often bordered on science fiction, but they were never over-the-top campy the way they were in the final season.