As others have noted, The Hallmark Channel is now running episodes of M*A*S*H uncut. Each night starting at 10 PM (7 PM for those of us on the West Coast with satellite dishes), four shows are run and in order to accommodate the usual cable channel number of commercials, the shows run longer than a half hour. The first starts at 10:00, the second at 10:36, the third at 11:12 and the fourth at 11:48.
Interestingly, though TiVo and most of the online guides seem to know about this, the Hallmark Channel's website seems utterly unaware. It presently has the shows starting at 10:00, 10:30, 11:00 and 11:30…and then the show after starts at 12:30, which is also wrong. Actually, the show following starts at 12:25 and runs for two hours and four minutes, ending so that the show after that (usually a Rifleman rerun) which is listed as starting at 2:30 starts at 2:29.
To further confuse people, the same four M*A*S*H episodes are run twice a day and in the earlier airing, they are cut. Tomorrow at Noon, you can tune in and see "Baby, It's Cold Outside" (that's the one about a cold snap making everyone in camp miserable) in a half-hour slot, which means that they'll cut four and a half minutes to accommodate more commercials. Then later that evening, you can tune in and see "Baby, It's Cold Outside" in a 36-minute slot with nothing cut.
You wonder where all this is heading. Is this a test to see if uncut episodes will draw a larger audience? If the response shows that people really like the shows without the trims, will Hallmark or some cable channel experiment with reducing the number of commercials (and charging more for the ones they do run) and putting the shows in half-hour slots? Or might we be heading towards a day when they'll run everything uncut and let shows start and end whenever they start and end?
In the meantime, Game Show Network is going the other way with this. They used to run three old black-and-white game shows early in the A.M., uncut but each in a 40 minute slot. Starting next week, those two hours will be filled with four shows, so there will presumably be some cutting. I don't know what the thinking is behind this but if it's because the ratings on those shows have been going down, I think I know the reason. Both the I've Got A Secret and What's My Line? shows have gotten a bit stale from being rerun over and over, and the few commercials, which repeat ad nauseam during the two-hour block, have long since passed the saturation level. During them, I'm now tempted to grab up the phone, call the 800 number and offer to buy a dozen of those damn dog grooming brushes if they will just limit the commercial to two runs per night. And I don't even have a dog.