Saturday, November 5, 2011

Check your local box guide

Tonight is the end of Daylight Savings Time. Outside of Arizona, Hawaii, and parts of Saskatchewan, we all have to set our clocks back an hour at 2:00 AM local time, meaning that the 1:00 AM-2:00 AM hour repeats twice, for a 25-hour broadcast day. This always seems to present a problem for broadcasters, who don't seem to program the proper amount of material. TCM is a case in point. Their printed schedule for the last half of the night reads as follows:

Member of the Wedding at 12:15 AM ET;
Requiem for a Heavyweight at 2:00 AM; and
The Haunting at 4:00 AM.

Now, we know this is wrong because Member of the Wedding is only a 90 minute film. Assuming Donald Bogle does an intro, and combined with the opening sequence and the what's on next stuff, you'll definitely need a 105-minute time slot for this. If there were no clock change, then the times above would be accurate. Of course, they're not.

My DirecTV box guide has Member of the Wedding starting at 12:15 AM ET, but lists the next movie as beginning at the second 1:00 AM; that movie being Requiem for a Heavyweight. So far, so good; the box guide lists two 1:00 AM hours (and if you had used the "jump ahead 12 hours" button, you'd have gone from 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM to 6:00 AM). The box guide lists Requiem for a Heavyweight in a two-hour time slot, which again matches up with TCM's original printed schedule. However, it has The Haunting, a 112-minute movie, in a three-hour time slot. Something's obviously wrong there too.

Needless to say, I'm not certain exactly what's going to air and when. Requiem for a Heavyweight is a movie that should fit in a 90-minute time slot. TCM's online schedule lists two shorts to fill the last half hour of the two-hour time slot it's been given. If I had to guess, those shorts are going to get deleted and some 90-minute movie is going to get aired, but I have no idea if that would be before or after The Haunting. The upshot is that if you'd like to see any of theses movies, either drink lots of coffee, set your DVR to record the whole night, or just buy the DVDs.

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