Daylight Savings Time schedule fun

Tonight's the night when most people in the United States and Canada set their clocks back one hour. Now, in theory, people in Arizona don't have to worry about it. Except that things that are on a schedule are going to be one hour different for them, as the rerun of Noir Alley that comes on at 10AM ET will still be 10AM ET, but move from 7AM to 8AM for the Arizonians.

But of course the bigger reason for mentioning it is that a lot of cable channels technically start their broadcast day at 6:00 AM, or maybe later if they run infomercials overnight into the morning. The end of Daylight Savings time means that cable channels all have 25 hours in their broadcast day for today (Saturday). And listings services always seem to have a problem with this.

In the case of TCM, there's been a tendency to program the 1949 MGM 25th anniversary featurette Some of the Best. However, the schedule on the website for quite some time has only been showing the shorts that are already there when the monthly schedule is planned out, which mostly means the Saturday matinee block, although sometimes a few others such as when a block of shorts make up Silent Sunday Nights. The shorts that get put in the last several minutes of a feature's programming block don't show up.

This year, that means that Noir Alley shows up at midnight tonight as usual, with City of Fear, a movie from after the traditional end of the noir cycle, but one with a lot of noir elements other than its having much brighter outdoor photography. TCM says the movie runs 81 minutes, and with Eddie Muller's intro and outro, it would probably run very close to 90 minutes. (Indeed, the TCM schedule has the repeat showing in a 90-minute block.) However, TCM has the midnight showing in a two-hour block, so I'd expect some sort of short to fill up that time.

Then, at what ought to be the second 1:00 AM ET, but what TCM has listed as 2:00 AM, is Stand By Me. It's been ages since I've seen it, but every source I could find gives it a runtime a few minutes shy of 90. I don't think there's a TCM host for the post-Noir Alley selections, but they have the movie in 105-minute block.

At 3:45 AM is the 73-minute film The Window, followed at 5:15 AM by the 1937 short Hollywood Party, not to be confused with the programmer starring Jimmy Durante as Schnarzan. The Sunday morning lineup begins at the more or less normal 6:00 AM with the 1931 version of The Front Page.

So what's filling up the extra hour, and between which two movies will it be? It's been a while since I've made a point of recording or being up to see what gets put there, but my recollection has always been that Some of the Best, or whatever else fills that hour, gets put at the end of the night. I could be wrong, of course, but that's something to think about with the scheduling.