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ANSI Standard Broadcast TV Schedule: Difference between revisions

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ANSI Standard Broadcast TV Schedule (view source)

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* 10 PM - 11 PM: The third and last hour of Prime Time. Seldom comedy; almost always drama or (for a later decade) a news magazine.
* 11 PM - 11:30 PM: Local news.
* 11:30 PM - 1 AM: Late night. Dominated in the 1960s and 1970s by [[NBC]]'s ''[[The Tonight Show]]''; the [[ABC]] news program ''[[Nightline]]'', launched in 1980, was the first serious competitor. [[CBS]] subsisted on action drama repeats and shows rejected for prime time and made-for-TV movies in this slot (notwithstanding the one season Pat Sajak hosted a talk show for them) until they poached [[David Letterman]] for ''The Late Show'' in the early 1990s. Stations that did not have a network show running in this slot would play an old cheap movie (the kind that ''[[Mystery Science Theater 3000]]'' liked to riff on) after the local news, and then go dark and show the test pattern until the 5 AM farm report. In [[The Eighties]], [[Infomercial|infomercials]] changed that because they were willing to temporarily pay the cost of running the station to hawk their products.
** Sometime in [[The Nineties]] and almost simultaneously, the networks moved the start of late night back 5 minutes to give affiliates more commercial time on the late local news without having to cut [[High School]] sports coverage or the [[Yet Another Baby Panda]] story.
*** This occured during the First [[Gulf War]].
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On Sundays, the mornings would have political shows (''[[Meet the Press]]'', ''[[Face The Nation]]'', ''[[Issues And Answers]]'' etc.) and religious programming. The afternoon would have sports in season. [[Prime Time]] started an hour earlier, at 7 PM. The extra network programming was either an extra family hour or, in the case of CBS, ''[[60 Minutes]]''.
 
Things started changing in [[The Eighties]] and continued mutating through [[The Nineties]]. The [[FoxFOX]] network booted with much less network programming than the older networks -- only two hours of [[Prime Time]] ([[wikipedia:1992-93 American network television schedule|four]], [[wikipedia:1993-94 United States network television schedule|then three]], on Sunday.) and the occasional talk show. The original excuse was that it was a start-up network; but things never changed (although for a couple years the network experimented with 10pm Sunday programming, low ratings and affiliate pressure forced them to dump it). Fox would eventually score sports programming and become a serious competitor to the original three networks, but they would never have over-the-air national news, daytime soaps, or the 10 PM hour of [[Prime Time]].
 
The earliest years of Fox were uninspiring, since both hours of [[Prime Time]] were family hours and Fox was unsure how to do that kind of program. But then, the requirement that there be a family hour was removed. This allowed Fox to be the model for its own version of the standard schedule, one that other new networks would follow. Here is the short version:
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