This is just to confuse us: The New York Daily News is reporting — and several other news sources have picked up — the following:
ABC's Ted Koppel has made getting private personalities to open up on "Up Close" look easy. His latest conquest comes next week when he gets notoriously shy "Doonesbury" cartoonist Garry Trudeau to speak in a two-part interview airing on "Up Close," Dec. 3-4 at 12:05 a.m. In a candid chat, Trudeau — husband of NBC's "Dateline" anchor Jane Pauley — discusses such topics as last year's terrorist attacks and his portrayal of President Bush as an empty cowboy hat.
Meanwhile, the Yahoo online TV listing (tv.yahoo.com) says that the first part of the Up Close interview of Mr. Trudeau airs Wednesday morning, December 4 with part two following 24 hours later — in other words, the thing runs Dec. 4-5 instead of 3-4.
What we seem to have here is the old TV Guide convention of treating shows that air within a few hours of Midnight as being part of the preceding day. The Leno and Letterman shows tonight start at 11:35 PM. The O'Brien and Kilborn shows that start an hour later are actually tomorrow morning and if you set your VCR or TiVo to record Conan or Craig, you have to program tomorrow's date. But in TV Guide and similar listings, those shows are part of today's listings. Tomorrow starts around 4:00 AM.
This corruption of the clock probably made sense years ago, when everyone watched TV shows only when they were broadcast, and when most stations went off the air in the wee small hours of the morning. To most viewers, 1 AM felt like part of the preceding day so why not list it as such? But most TV channels are now 24/7 and a lot of us are setting recorders that insist on treating a Tuesday morning show as if it airs on Tuesday morning. Maybe it's time for all the listings to recognize this.