During the two political conventions, Bill Maher did four extra episodes of Real Time — on July 20, 21, 27 and 28. Like the usual episodes, they were done live but there was one problem with that: They kinda had to begin after the convention had ended each night and the conventions ran long every evening. So Maher didn't start when he was supposed to start.
Each of those four evenings, he appeared at his scheduled start time of 11 PM Eastern with a pre-taped announcement announcing the delay and this would lead into an "encore" (i.e., rerun) edition of Real Time. At some point during that hour, they'd bail on the rerun and start the new show. This is terrible scheduling for many reasons, one being that you're putting in filler as your lead-in. Presumably, most viewers turned back to the convention on some other channel, so Maher and his producers were counting on viewers turning back to HBO after the final gavel each night, then sitting through more of the filler until the new show started. A lot probably did not.
This probably also disrupted one or more shows following the new Real Time episode. Since a lot of the HBO schedule involves airing movies in full, it's not easy to suddenly cut twenty-three minutes from something on the fly. I don't know what they did but it was probably messy.
The other big problem of course is that those of us who set TiVos and DVRs to record Maher's show didn't get most or any of some of those new episodes. Even though I padded my TiVo recording times, I still missed a lot and wound up watching them all on YouTube. The two Republican Convention specials seem to have scrolled off but here are the two from the Democratic Convention…
Hurry because they'll probably disappear to subscriber-only status soon, too. I thought they were good discussions and I hope the messiness of getting to see them didn't cause the tune-in to be so low that this kind of thing won't be attempted again.