My pal Ken Levine complained about situation comedies — and this probably applies to other kinds of shows, though it's done most often with sitcoms — being sped up in syndication. He references this article over on Slate that shows you examples and lets you test to see if you can tell the difference.
I agree with everything Ken says…though I have to admit I didn't do so well on Slate's test. I'm also wondering if the speed-ups aren't the lesser of two bad choices, the other being to merely hack a minute or three out of the shows. No, I don't want to watch shows sped-up. I also don't want to watch them incomplete. If I absolutely have to pick between those two options, I think some speed-ups might be preferable to most editing.
Of course, picking from two bad choices always leaves you with a bad choice. There are a few other options which remain largely untried…
One is to run the shows uncut and unsped and just forget about this concept of half-hours. That would mean that after you roll in the requisite number of commercials, a show might start at 9:00 and end at 9:36 and the next one would start at 9:37. The entire schedule would be full of shows that began at 5:22 and 7:53 and rarely on the hour or half-hour. I'm not sure how viewers would take to this. Since I watch almost everything TiVoed, I'd be fine with it assuming the info on start/stop times made available to DVRs was precise. Given how often the times on ordinary broadcast television are off a minute or two, I'm skeptical this could be accomplished.
Another possibility is to let shows run their full, unsped length but to pad things out to round numbers. Years ago, someone announced they were going to do one of those classic sitcom channels and run everything uncut, including the credits. What they were going to do was to pad every 30-minute show to 45 with little interstitial segments. Like, they'd run a Dick Van Dyke Show at 10:00 and then a M*A*S*H at 10:45 and in-between, they'd have little spots where they'd interview people who worked on the shows and/or run clips of particularly golden moments.
They were confident viewers could cope with show starting fifteen and forty-five minutes after the hour. Well, maybe. But that idea never happened, I think because they found it too expensive to produce the filler material. I wonder though if viewers would have waited through those time-wasting segments or if they'd have started changing channels, looking for a real show that was starting now instead of in fifteen minutes.
Cartoon Network and its sister station Boomerang seem to do an amalgam of these two methods…but they, of course, have two advantages. One is that their library includes zillions of short cartoons of all different lengths. A sitcom network doesn't have loads of five-minute and seven-minute situation comedies. Also of course, a lot of their viewership is kids who've been parked in front of the set to watch whatever's on. It does not seem to affect their audience that the start times on so many of their shows are off a few minutes, either early or late.
Lastly, there's one other method which I don't think anyone has really tried: Fewer commercials. Run the shows with the number of ads they were originally intended to have.
This may sound akin to heresy but as streaming services become more plentiful and popular, regular ol' broadcast television is going to have to consider that as a way to compete. I wonder if anyone has tested something. Would viewers today pay more attention (or if they're watching on DVRs, not skip ahead) if commercial breaks were one minute as opposed to three or four? I sure don't watch many of the commercials in the shows I watch on MeTV or Antenna TV or other channels that run old shows.
I wonder what would happen if a station adopted a policy: Commercial breaks would be no longer than one minute during shows and two minutes between programs. It might take a while for viewers to get accustomed to that but once they did, might there be data to suggest that a commercial in a one-minute break on that station was two or three times more valuable than one buried in a three-minute break? I'll reach for my remote to jump through three minutes of ads. I might not bother to avoid one minute.
I dunno. I'm just throwing this out there. Maybe not enough folks watch on DVRs and know how to skip ahead…now. But that will probably change. If I were buying ad time during TV shows to sell my product, I might think it was worth paying a little more for an ad that fewer viewers were fast-forwarding through. Then again, I watch most of my favorite old TV shows via boxed sets of DVDs or Blu-Rays. That's really the answer to this whole problem.