In honor of the new year, NBC has decided to cause trouble by shifting most of their weeknight prime-time shows a minute or two one way or the other. You may think (to pick one example) their Monday night schedule is three one-hour shows: Fear Factor at 8:00, Las Vegas at 9:00, Average Joe at 10:00. Nope. Fear Factor starts at 8 but it's a 59 minute show. Las Vegas starts at 8:59 and runs for an hour. Then Average Joe starts at 9:59 and runs for 61 minutes. On Tuesday, we have The Tracy Morgan Show at 8:00, Whoopi at 8:30 and then Frasier at 9:00…but Frasier is now a 31 minute show so the following program, Happy Family, starts at 9:31 and runs for 28 minutes. This enables Law & Order: Special Victims Unit, which is a 61 minute show, to start at 9:59. On Wednesday, Ed and West Wing start at 8:00 and 9:00 but West Wing is a 59 minute show so Law & Order starts at 9:59. It's just as screwy on Thursday and Friday.
The first problem with this, of course, is that if you try switching channels during the evening, you'll wind up missing the beginning or end of some show. You have even more problems if you want to record a show for later viewing. Most TV listings seem to be ignoring these subtle adjustments but TiVo has the accurate times. This is great if you're not changing channels but if you do, it can get messy. If you tell TiVo to record Frasier, and then to switch over to ABC to record Less Than Perfect, it will not accept the second show because it will tell you they overlap…which they do.
So let's say you decide you want to get the entirety of Frasier even at the expense of the first minute of Less Than Perfect. You could accomplish that with the time-padding options of TiVo. It takes some effort to program but it can be done. Pad the recording time of Frasier by one minute at the end. Set Less Than Perfect as a manual recording beginning at 9:35 and then set "Start Recording" to 4 minutes early. Then Frasier would end at 9:31 and Less Than Perfect would start recording one minute into the show…which is, of course, less than perfect.
But there are some combinations that don't work. On Monday night, CBS airs Still Standing from 8:30 to 9:00 while NBC has Las Vegas from 8:59 to 9:59. What if you wanted to record both shows and chop off the last minute of Still Standing? Well, you can't. TiVo can pad the end of a recording 1 minute or 2 minutes but the next increment is five. You can't set a manual recording to end at 8:59. The best you could do is 8:57.
Obviously, this problem is even worse for folks who are trying to record with VCRs that program in five-minute increments. And there are other problems for everyone, like remembering that a favorite show starts at 9:59, not 10:00. There are no upsides for us. I'm skeptical that there's any great advantage for the network but I know there are none for us. Someone needs a serious beating. (Thanks to Earl Kress for calling this to my attention.)