Tonight's Trivial Complaint

I haven't bitched about this kind of thing in a while…

A couple of folks on the East Coast have e-mailed me or phoned to suggest I watch/TiVo Saturday Night Live in a few hours. They say it's a pretty good episode and that I will be especially interested in a Weekend Update bit about the WGA strike. Okay, so I go to set my TiVo accordingly and I happen to be in the "Browse by Time" section so I look for 11:30 PM, which is when I thought SNL started.

But it isn't in there. No Saturday Night Live at 11:30. Why? Because it doesn't start at 11:30 and run until 1 AM, like you'd expect. It starts at 11:29 PM and runs until 1:01 AM! That's just silly…and of course, it screws up the show I wanted to record that starts at 1 AM unless I go in and manually tell TiVo to not record the last minute of SNL.

Attention, Writers Guild Negotiating Committee: I have a new demand. Let's forget this nonsense about being compensated when our work is exhibited. Let's just insist that the networks stop trying to make a profit off squeezing minutes in and out of the schedule.