Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Shaun of the De

Thanks, Comedy Central.  Thanks for telling TV listings companies that you'd take a full two-hours to show an edited version of a movie with a theatrical running time of 99.  Thanks for then failing to actually show the entire movie in 120 minutes because you kept cutting for commercials every three minutes to show two minutes of commercials.  (Don't do the math.)  We've been working our way through the movie (wearing out the batteries with all that fast-forwarding) the last few nights and were dismayed when the two hours were up and we still didn't have resolution.  Thankfully, there's one more airing (and we've told Comcast to record 3 hours this time, just in case).  We looked on movie spoiler and guess there's actually 10-15 more minutes of movie left. But bad form for just not fitting the movie into the time alloted.   I mean, I get it when NBC does that with irrelevant bits of dramas no one's watching anymore, but you don't do that with a movie.  You have to assume people are recording it.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

I hear this complaint from the DVR users on the TV message board I occassionally post to. As for me, my VCR and I are still chugging along. I've always padded the start and end times of any program I record by as much as 10 minutes because networks have always been unpredictable. In the old days, before the master control system was computerized, programs were timed by some schmuck running a router/switcher. Then things got computerized, but as computers are prone to error it made things worse. Now the networks are intentionally screwing up start and end times to hook viewers. All this begs the questions... why spend the multi-million dollars for an automated router/switcher when some drunken union engineer can screw up a show's run time for a basic hourly wage?

James said...

But this wasn't some engineer screwing with things, this was Comedy Central deciding to fill it so full of commercials that 99 minutes of movie took at least 150 minutes to run despite publishing a running time of 120. Your 10 minutes of padding would not have helped.

James said...

But this wasn't some engineer screwing with things, this was Comedy Central deciding to fill it so full of commercials that 99 minutes of movie took at least 150 minutes to run despite publishing a running time of 120. Your 10 minutes of padding would not have helped.