My Own Personal March Madness

CBS is on my list. And it’s not a list you generally want to be on.

After a long session last night of recording Wicked Good Podcast #50 (hooray!), Maureen and I decided to watch the newest episode of The Amazing Race before turning in for the night. Now, I know darned well that the NCAA tournament is going on; I’ve filled out my bracket based on which mascot/logo I like better, because I know zero about college sports in general, and college basketball in particular. I’m a big sports fan, sure, but if they stopped playing college basketball tomorrow, I’d never know the difference.

What does March Madness have to do with The Amazing Race, you may ask? Well, CBS broadcasts the games, and the games apparently ran late. Since CBS has zero slack built into their Sunday schedule, The Amazing Race came on 45 minutes late. Which means, since TiVo wasn’t informed, we got to see 45 minutes of 60 Minutes and the first 15 minutes of The Amazing Race. I think Maureen was able to back up and catch the ending to at least see who won; I had completely given up on watching the episode at this point.

Honestly, I know CBS probably doesn’t care much about DVR viewers because we don’t watch all of their commercials, but isn’t there some way to change the schedule around so that this doesn’t happen? Like, don’t show one of your shows that night and then have a post game show scheduled to run until 8; that’s what Fox does when it has the late football game or NASCAR or whatever. Then, at the most, it runs maybe five minutes late.

And yeah, I know I can tell TiVo to run late, but I really shouldn’t have to waste an extra hour on my TiVo because CBS can’t get their schedule right. I’m sure this has to annoy non-Tivo viewers too, doesn’t it? I mean, there’s got to be someone who unexpectedly has to choose between the second half of Amazing Race and Family Guy or Desperate Housewives, isn’t there? You’d figure that CBS would lose at least a percentage of those viewers.

I just figure there’s got to be a solution to this problem that CBS could come up with. I tolerated this during football season because I follow all the games and know when CBS is likely to run late. But I shouldn’t have to have my Tivo account for every random sporting event that CBS may decide to run, even if it’s something major like March Madness. They’re the ones who want me to watch their programming (especially now that Nielsen’s working on including DVR numbers in their ratings); they shouldn’t make it harder for me to see what I want to see.