This kind of thing bothers me more than it probably should. Every evening, Monday through Thursday, I have my TiVo set to record The Daily Show, The Nightly Show and @Midnight on Comedy Central. Looking at tomorrow night, the TiVo schedule is as follows…
- The Daily Show starts at 11 PM and runs 34 minutes
- The Nightly Show starts at 11:31 PM and runs 32 minutes
- @Midnight starts at 12:01 AM and runs 30 minutes
Obviously, there's some strange overlaps going on there. But then an hour later, they rerun all three episodes. This time…
- The Daily Show starts at 1:33 AM and runs 32 minutes
- The Nightly Show starts at 2:05 AM and runs 30 minutes
- @Midnight starts at 2:35 and runs 30 minutes
I'll do a more careful measure tomorrow night but it sounds to me like they're sticking 2 minutes of extra commercials into the first runs of The Daily Show and The Nightly Show…but then the next day, they rerun both shows a few more times and both of them are 32 minutes. I guess they put two extra minutes of ads into Mr. Wilmore's program then.
But that still doesn't explain how between 11 PM and 12:01 AM, they manage to run 66 minutes of programming.
I'm going to conduct a thorough investigation and get back to you on this. If anyone's already done this, drop me a note and save me the time and effort.