Saturday, May 12, 2018

Keeping an Eye out for Things

While I’m not sure that I can promise that I’ll never share a drinking game again, what I should do is work harder on coming up with some other type of post to share instead. It will have to have some sort of theme to it that relates to any and every unusual thing that happens on TV. Here are some examples of what to look out for.

Delays: Any time a show winds up airing later than at one point it was supposed to, the show is more or less going to end that season. It applies to one season shows too. The only season that I can think of that was delayed and wasn’t the last season was the fourth season of Community. Look at Taken when it aired this season. It was supposed to start during the fall, but didn’t start airing until the new season had begun. Now the show is officially cancelled.

No announced timeslot: This is a variant of the whole delay thing. The longer a show goes without a set time that it will air, the more likely it will end. What you’d think wouldn’t be concerning is if it suddenly shows back up in place of a cancelled show or show otherwise pulled from the schedule. That can make it dead at the end of the season as well. The longer that Shades of Blue went without a timeslot this season, the more I correctly thought that it would be cancelled later.

Hiatus: Sometimes these make sense and sometimes they don’t. Often, they will be so that another show will air in its place before it returns. Other times are more concerning. When Brooklyn Nine-Nine went on hiatus in the middle of the season, we had no idea for a while when it was coming back. It then took over the timeslot for Ghosted. With Ghosted on hiatus, you’d think that it would make sense that it doesn’t have a time to air. But the 6 to 6:30 FOX timeslot on Sundays keeps airing reruns of shows. This is a very bad sign for Ghosted, which you’d hope air the rest of its episodes in the future. I’d hope that it would, but I have no idea for sure if it will.

Late airtime: Yet another bad sign for a show is the when of a season starting. If a show ends before May starts, that can be bad. But what is normally a death sentence is when the season of a show starts in April or a bit later. You can guess that the show probably won’t last. If a show is suddenly a summer show when it never used to be, that’s a very bad sign. If a show is midseason when it used to be on during the fall all the time, that is a bad sign as well. Now there could be other reasons why there could be a change and later airtime. But more often than not, it is a bad sign.

Lack of reruns: This isn’t always a bad thing because there are some networks that normally don’t show reruns of any shows that often, if ever. But other networks, like CBS or the CW, do air reruns of shows a lot, except when they don’t. This doesn’t always mean that a show will be cancelled that season or the next season. But if they don’t show reruns of it and put something else in its place instead, then you know that they care less about it. On the flip side, any shows getting reruns outside of its timeslot in addition to what it normally gets is a show cared more about and more likely to stay around.

Bad time for new episodes: Here’s one that isn’t typically thought of that much. But there are a lot of times when new episodes of shows happen at dumb times like on Thanksgiving or New Year’s Day. Now this doesn’t mean that the show is in any danger. It could just be a lack of time for showing all of the new episodes that they want to. It may be an annoyance more than anything else. But I do think that often shows that air on bad dates are often cared about less.

Unusualness with breaking news: This one is so rare that it is hard to know how to justify explaining it. I don’t even know for sure one way or another what means what and this could be based more on what the networks do than what shows networks care more about than others. But there are different ways of handling show airing when breaking news happens. Sometimes, they will air everything and put the other shows on delay. Sometimes, they will cut out what they should have aired. If there is a special rerun of the new show, that’s not too bad. It isn’t that bad either if they put the whole thing online. But if they air it all, even with the interruptions, then you know that they care about it, even if those who put it on DVR won’t get it right.


And that’s about it for this post. I think that maybe when it works every now and then, I’ll do a randomly titled post that explains things to those who may not know as much as I do about some of the whole various nuances of scheduling and other things. What does x mean? Why is y happening? Does any of this make sense in any way? I guess that you’ll have to see in the future what I could mean.

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