The Creeping Hour

It began innocently enough, about a year or so ago, when I started noticing that local afternoon news broadcasts were not starting on time, but rather a minute or two before the hour. At first I questioned my own time pieces, though all the chronometers scattered through my abode could not be equally askew. I asked a friend who worked at one of the local new shows about the phenomenon and he agreed with me it was likely a ploy to capture or retain viewers who might otherwise gravitate to another station, perhaps during a commerical break. This barely made sense, since the news material is always the same, and it's brand loyalty--or successful lead-in programming--that dictates viewership for local newscasts. Furthermore, local news comes in consecutive hourly shifts, with new sets of anchors appearing at 4:47 and 5:56. As competing outlets continued to push back the clock, all hourly broadcasts are commencing now by the 55-minute mark, and threaten to start as early as yesterday by the time this trend subsides.

This development is fairly innocuous, but lately it's been the networks who've begun to ignore the hourly demarcations by which we've been trained from birth to order our lives and our TV scheduling. They employ the opposite strategy of running popular programs a minute or two beyond the hour, eating up the first minute or two of some popular show on another network, hopefully discouraging the viewer from switching. So successful programs like "Lost" and "Desperate Housewives" now run to 9:02 and 10:02 respectively, trying to keep their audience glued to "Alias" and "Boston Legal" rather than catch an NBC show like "West Wing" "already in progress." Even factoring in that the last minute of each show is usually a preview and the first minute usually a recap, this strategy does seem to be effective.

Time-shifting for audience retention during Sweeps has been a common practice in recent years, most apparent in the airing of "extended" sitcom episodes like NBC's 40-minute "Friends" and "Will and Grace," initiated partly to maintain audiences and partly not to have to expose them to hammocked crap like "Good Morning, Miami!" At least more minutes of good comedies provide a few extra laughs for the evening; it's not the same with ABC's lame TGIF family "comedies," which are also being stretched out to keep you and me from the competition.

But beyond the battle for Nielsen points is the more subtle war being waged, and that's against TIVO and the VCRs and DVRs with which we've armed ourselves to battle Network tyranny. Those who rely on TIVO's automatic sequencing--especially when moving from one station to another at the top of an hour-- are chafing when they find that they are missing the last reveal on "Lost" or "Housewives." This undermines the value of TIVO, which sits just fine with the TV industry, because TIVO, with its commercial-skipping capabilities, threatens the advertising stream upon which networks survive.

I've been burned a few times when absentee-taping Wednesday night's quality programming and missing portions of either "Lost" or "West Wing." Like a good lab rat I've learned to adjust, and either program consecutive shows on the same network, or run around to my other recording devices and set-up multiple tapings to cover all possibilities. If I need to tape only one show, I automatically start two minutes early and end two minutes late. This strategy should cover me for a year or two until the TV honchos develop another nefarious scheme. Meanwhile I've noticed the on-screen listings from my digital cable company have begun to reflect the off-hour conclusions of some programs, perhaps so it can adjust its own DVR system to the irregularities (and wean viewers from their generic TIVOs).

The losers in this ongoing war do not really include me, because I insist on some personal control of my devices, and can react accordingly. But what of the 80% of the population whose brains short-circuit when confronted with the VCR timers, not to mention those hopeless compulsives out there who'd like to think that 10 P.M. will always mean 10 P.M. in an otherwise chaotic landscape? The public be damned. Note to the four major nets: HBO programs always begin on time!