Another heads-up for fans of shorts on TCM

Unfortunately, it looks as though there's another glitch with the TCM on-line schedule in that the shorts aren't showing up. I was looking through today's schedule, and noticed that there weren't any shorts scheduled. I was slightly surprised since following Monkey Business there was about a 12-minute gap before the next feature, the first of the Dick Tracy movie started. And then I noticed that there was about 12 or 13 minutes between the end of Dick Tracy and the Bowery Boys movie that was following. I also saw that the Bowery Boys film was just under 70 minutes and put in a 90-minute time slot, which obviously leaves 20 minutes for TCM to film. Surely during at least one of those slots there would be a short scheduled?

My first thought was that there was just a problem with the schedule for today. So I switched to the weekly schedule, and lo and behold, there wasn't one short on the schedule for the entire week! That has to be a misprint, I thought. I know the shorts are scheduled fairly shortly before they air, maybe a week or so, and that often times if you look at the weekly schedule only the first four or five days will have shorts on it because TCM hasn't necessarily decided what short to put in what slot in the last couple of days. But this time, there was nothing at all for any of the seven days.

Anyhow, I decided to stick around for the end of Monkey Business to see if TCM would run a one-reeler. No; we got an interesting piece on George Cukor. Wait an hour and change for the end of Dick Tracy. (Well, I actually watched something off the DVR.) This time there was the promo for the TCM wine club, and a trailer for something. Certainly there was going to be something in that 20-minute slot between the end of the Bowery Boys movie and the start of The Poseidon Adventure at noon. Well, first up was the piece Nancy Sinatra did on her father Frank the last time he was Star of the Month back in 2008 on the 10th anniversary of his death. He's going to be Star of the Month in December since that will be the 100th anniversary of his birth, but this one wasn't branded as a Star of the Month piece. Interestingly, there was what looked like a newly-made Star of the Month piece for Sinatra that came up after either Monkey Business or Dick Tracy, I can't remember which. But then finally, around 11:45 AM, there was the Traveltalks short on Bavaria.

But when I went back online, it still wasn't in either the daily or weekly schedule. So for the time being it looks as though either somebody's forgotten to update the schedule to include the shorts, or we'll no longer be getting them. A shame either way.