Someone at NBC is being awfully stubborn about admitting there's a Writers Guild strike on. I'm on a list that brings me press releases from the network and, for example, I just got this one with a "schedule update" for Late Night With Conan O'Brien. The asterisks denote a change from the previous release…
DAILY UPDATED LISTINGS FOR NBC'S LATE NIGHT WITH CONAN O'BRIEN
UPDATED NOVEMBER 13
(Mondays – Fridays, 12:35 a.m. ET – 1:35 a.m. ET)
**(REPEAT) Tuesday, November 13 – Actress Glenn Close, actor Michael Cera, musical guest Modest Mouse
Wednesday, November 14 – Actor Jason Bateman, actor Brian Posehn, musical guest Plain White T's
Thursday, November 15 – Actor Benjamin Bratt, tennis player Venus Williams
Friday, November 16 – Actor Jonah Hill, actor Timothy Olyphant, and entertainer Fonzworth Bentley
In other words, now that it's Tuesday morning, we're grudgingly announcing that tonight's show will be a rerun but we're still pretending that tomorrow night's may actually be a new episode with guests Jason Bateman, Brian Posehn and Plain White T's. No writers are working on that episode and Conan may not even be in town. There are no talks going on at the moment that could conceivably settle the WGA strike before the day is out and I kinda doubt Jason, Brian and the T's are keeping the time open to tape Conan tomorrow. Still, we're not ruling out the possibility that everything could still come together and the show could go on.
By the way: I may be the only person in the world who gets annoyed by this but the press release is wrong in another way. Late Night With Conan O'Brien is not on Mondays through Fridays. It's on Tuesdays through Saturdays. I know that a show that starts shortly after Midnight feels like it's part of the preceding day but it isn't and in a world where people set VCRs or TiVos, this matters a little, perhaps only to me.