Sunday TV Note

Do you watch football games on Sundays? Do you watch or record shows that come on CBS on Sunday nights after football games? Then you know the frustration that frequently arises from this situation. If a game goes into overtime, then all the shows that follow air late, sometimes up to 30 minutes late, occasionally longer than that.

Fox solved this problem several years back by basically giving up on showing any regular programming in the 7 o'clock hour. They created The OT, a postgame wrap-up show that can run for any length of time until 8 pm, when The Simpsons comes on.

The problem with this solution, at least from CBS's point of view, is that they air 60 Minutes at 7 pm, and have been doing so for decades. I'd been thinking for at least the past year that CBS ought to try something like what Fox does: during the fall football months, make the length of 60 Minutes variable, and give it another half-hour (or even an hour) somewhere else during the week—Saturday night, maybe? not much going on then besides reruns—to air additional segments that didn't fit in the Sunday show.

It's very unlikely that CBS would ever do that, though. Then, to make things just a little worse, the NFL announced that this year, the late games would start ten minutes later, to allow the early games time to finish without having to cut away in certain markets for contractual reasons. So on a good day, even without any overtime, 60 Minutes isn't going to start until 7:30, pushing back The Amazing Race, The Good Wife, and whatever now airs after that (I have no clue, at the moment).

CBS has decided to acknowledge the annoyance by formally pushing back the official start time of 60 Minutes to 7:30 on Sundays when they are airing two games (this article has the specific dates for this season). This way, if you watch The Good Wife (I came to the show late, but I'm a fan now) you can set your DVR accordingly, and it will know that the show won't be starting until at least 9:30. You will still need to add some padding at the end for the possibility of an overrun, depending on what happens with the late games that day, but you'll at least have a better chance of getting it right.