Here's a possible entry in the list of network time slots being juggled to annoy us. NBC has been advertising a two-hour special edition of Deal or No Deal for next Monday night at 8 PM. It includes "surprise" appearances (surprises to anyone who hasn't seen the promos) of Regis Philbin and Jay Leno. It's followed at 10 PM by a special, heavily-promoted episode of The Apprentice.
But now, George W. Bush has announced he will address the nation Monday evening at 8 PM Eastern time, which is 5 PM Pacific. Standard operating procedure would be for the network to just bump everything later on the schedule. Bush's remarks (plus whatever additional coverage is done) are expected to consume 25 minutes. Ordinarily, that would mean that Deal would start at 8:25, Apprentice at 10:25, the late local news at 11:25, Leno at Midnight instead of 11:35, etc. Somewhere in the wee, small hours of the AM, they'd make up the missing time.
That's how it would work on the east coast. On the west, they'd just cover the speech as part of the 5 PM News and then all the prime-time shows would run as scheduled.
NBC is now announcing on its website and elsewhere that Bush will speak at 8 PM, Deal will start at 8:25 and Apprentice will still start at 10 sharp. The person at NBC who told me this (someone not in the programming department, I should emphasize) says they're editing Deal or No Deal down to 95 minutes…but only for the East Coast.
I'm not sure I believe this. It's not unprecedented for breaking news to cause one time zone to miss a hunk of a show but it usually isn't planned this way. I can't recall any network actually cutting a different version of a program to air on one side of the country. Let's see if that's actually what they're doing…and if so, if TiVo finds out about it in time to update.