I never know when to update
this blog. I’ve always updated it at random times that probably only make sense
to me and nobody else (and I’m not entirely sure that it makes sense to me all
the time either). I’m trying to update this blog with tie-ins to my blog about
Survivor. There should come a time when I blog on either Sundays or Fridays for
quite a while. I believe that I will update this blog at a bare minimum of once
a month. If you see a post for the current month, that doesn’t mean that you
won’t see any other updates that month. But I will post reviews of shows on www.tv.com that have either started or ended since
my last blog post. I’ll make sure to write those reviews before this blog is
updated again. And I have a new blog to be updated with links to this one. But
I highly recommend that if you want me to post updates in this blog, that you
read it more. The midseason shows from last season was the first one without
any readers and it caused me to care even less about this blog. But I promise
to update this blog whenever I can.
You may know what certain
things in television means. Or, you may not. There are certain tricks that the
average person can catch. I’ll tell you what they are. If you hadn’t already
figured it out for yourself, here is different terminology used in the
television world. Some of this is pretty basic that most people would know, but
I’m telling you about anyways. Most of this will be fairly obvious to some
people and some is just ways of trying to trick people that no smart person
would fall for.
New hit show in
actuality means any new show. Every freaking new show is called a hit. Even if
they don’t wind up airing a third episode, the second one will always be
promoted as a new hit show. I don’t know who they think they are fooling with
this, but I, for one, am not fooled. Not every new show is a hit, but it will
always be promoted as such.
Season finale might not
always be a season finale. Even when a show is cancelled, sometimes the last
episode of the series is promoted as the last episode of the season, thus
misleading people into the false idea that there is going to be more seasons.
Now, sometimes they do promote a season finale and have other seasons planned.
So keep up with the ratings of different shows and you’ll know if season finale
actually means final episode. Sometimes, the network will promote an episode as
the finale, omitting the word season. That is typically a tip-off that the show
will be cancelled.
Backdoor pilot refers
to an episode of a regular TV show that is setting up for a potential spin-off.
You may see these episodes with no actual spin-off happening. It’s not a
guarantee. But you will find these on TV often enough, due to television’s
tendency to keep making spin-offs.
Syndication is what
typically means putting a show on primetime in reruns either before or after
primetime. There are also some shows that never leave syndication as they are
designed to be there all the time. Originally, 100 episodes of a show is what
helped get a show into syndication, but now it seems to be less than that.
What’s good for a show is for it to be under 100 episodes, still in production,
and in syndication. Typically, if it is under 100 episodes, then they won’t be
making any more new episodes. They use syndication as a way of keeping shows
profitable.
Primetime is what airs
from 7:00 to 10:00 Central on Weeknights. There is also an extra hour from 6-7
on Sundays only. It used to have an extra half hour, but then the FCC said that
they couldn’t do that anymore. In case you are wondering, that time was from
6:30 to 7:00 Central until it was given back to syndication. I forget what year
that happened. But it explains why the 6:30 to 7:00 timeslot is normally
syndicated shows. For the Eastern and Western time zones, primetime is from
8:00 to 11:00 at night. Primetime is also on Sundays and Saturdays, although
almost nothing new is on Saturdays except for 48 Hours on CBS, various shows
that are cancelled (whether it is official or not), and special episodes or
other various broadcasts.
Wiping is a little
known event that happened in the earlier days of television history. It is
worth mentioning due to how it has affected classic TV shows. You see,
television didn’t always have the option of having reruns all the time or
having ways to release itself for home viewing. Without the advent of DVDs,
which occurred very lately in the history of television, there is probably no
way that we could watch an entire season of a TV show. With little options of
what to do, since storing all the episodes of various shows would cost too
much, they didn’t have much else to do with them, so some early TV show
episodes were erased. Much like how an old VHS tape can record another program
and thus replace what was originally on the tape, many old shows were reused
into new shows, thus losing the copies of the old shows. This has been
considered one of the greatest mistakes in television history. It’s why Doctor
Who fans complain about lost episodes, as some of the early season episodes no
longer exist. There is a ton of great classic shows that no longer exist. Do
you ever see people showing footage of the Tonight Show with Jack Parr? It’s
not because of anything bad against him; it’s because nearly none of his
episodes still exist. For more information about it, I have included this link
that explains more: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiping
Late night programming
is typically anything that airs after the newscast that typically follows
primetime shows. Of course, late night is poorly labeled since midnight begins
the new day, thus making it morning. But people don’t really care if the
terminology is correct or not. Typically, more TV14 programming is shown in
syndication at this time. This is also when you see various late night talk
shows on various networks. There’s also a ton of paid programming at this time,
which is to be expected as most late night programming is literally (not
really) a graveyard slot. I do wonder what happens when late night programming
is on tape delay. There must be some sort of way they catch up, but I’ve never
stayed up late enough to know what happens for sure. Also, when you think about
it, if a station doesn’t air newscasts (and even if they do) that’s when the
start of late night programming is.
Tape delay typically
happens most on Sundays during football season, but can happen at any time for
various reasons. Besides sports games running long, the most common reason for
a tape delay relates to news events happening, whether they are preplanned or
not. Different networks handle tape delay in different ways. But if a show you
want to watch isn’t on at the right time, then it is probably affected at the
moment by tape delay.
Well, I’m not sure what else
to say on the subject, so I guess that this is all for now. I would address
what a show runner is, but I’m not entirely sure of what it is myself. It could
be the same thing as a head writer, but I might be wrong about that, so I won’t
address it. There’s tons of different television lingo and you probably already
knew most of the stuff I mentioned here in this post of mine. But that’s all I
can think of mentioning at the moment.
