As we all know there are many more commercials today than in the 60s/70s. How many minutes of ads did the typical show have then? How many breaks in the show?
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Commercial breaks in the 60s/70s
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Network half-hours were 22 minutes long, and were usually structured with three acts and an epilogue and/or credits, so four commercial breaks.
Double that for hour-long shows.
In prime time, up until the early eighties, the standard for prime-time half-hour network shows was three breaks during the program, plus additional commercials after the closing credits as part of the station break. Each break commonly included one minute of advertising, and there were also typically two twenty second network promos plus a station ID. Add it all up, and that came to a little bit under five minutes of non-program material. So a network half-hour program typically ran a bit over 25 minutes. That's consistent with the running times of most of these old programs on Blu-Ray and DVD releases.
As Michael Hagerty said, you can double that for hour-long shows.
But there were a few exceptions to the above. When the networks started running news breaks in prime time, that minute came out of whatever program aired right before the news break. Hour-long programs also would often include a preview of next week's program, and some also included a teaser at the beginning that was a preview of that night's episode. Subtract all that out, and you could see an hour program that might run as short as 49 minutes.
The shows i watched when i was younger- American Gladiators, the Wheel/Jeopardy combo- it depended on the show. Because the shows i mentioned were syndicated, there might have been an extra minute or 2, but not much. And the station break that came after the Transworld/4 Point/Goldwyn or Griffin/KingWorld logos were usually a minute or 2 too. Another show that might fit this was The Kidsongs TV Show maybe one less minute since there were rules on how many ads a kids show could have, not to mention the station break after the Together Again Productions logo. Hour-long programs also would often include a preview of next week's program (AG did this for a while, previewing the contenders for next week). The syndie shows weren't preceded by news breaks like on the network shows. In fact, i have a complete series set of AG, and the runtime is consistent with a syndie show-43-to 44 minutes, and i have a few episodes of The Kidsongs TV Show that run 21/22 minutes. These were shows that aired on our ABC station in Asheville then, so this can apply to ABC shows too save for the news breaks.
Great answer TexasTom! So did hour long shows have six breaks in action? I always assumed from reruns of old Quinn Martin shows (and their infamous "acts") they had fewer.
Four acts plus an epilogue.
Show Tease/Open
BREAK ONE
Act One
BREAK TWO
Act two
BREAK THREE
Act three
BREAK FOUR
Act four
BREAK FIVE
Epilogue
BREAK SIX
Ending credits
Michael Hagerty's breakdown of the breaks in an hour-long show certainly does seem like it fits for the old Quinn Martin shows, but I do think it varied by network and maybe by year for other hour-long programs.
As an example, when "Baa Baa Black Sheep" ("Black Sheep Squadron" in its second season) aired on NBC in the seventies, it followed this pattern:
Show preview/Open
BREAK ONE (1.0 minutes long)
Act One
BREAK TWO (1.5 minutes long)
Act two
BREAK THREE/STATION BREAK (1.0 minutes of network advertising, plus an additional minute for affiliates)
Act three
BREAK FOUR (1.5 minutes long)
Act four
BREAK FIVE (1.0 minutes long)
Preview of next week's episode
Ending credits
STATION BREAK (1.0 minutes for affiliates)
The commercials that would have gone into the sixth break are instead split between the second and fourth breaks. In addition, four network promos would be scattered through that hour.
On the other hand, CBS did it slightly differently -- at least in some cases. I remember noticing during repeats of at least one CBS program that the program had five acts instead of four. That was "Lost In Space", and while I saw it in reruns, it wouldn't have been an additional commercial break added by a local station, because I saw the show commercial free on AFRTS in West Germany in the seventies. (Also memorable was the fact that they ran the episodes in reverse order, so at the end of each episode we got the cliffhanger that led into the episode that they'd run the previous week.)
Either way, it still added up to the same six minutes per hour of national commercials. The one exception: at some point in the seventies, the cost of buying TV rights for recent theatrical features got high enough that all three broadcast networks started adding a seventh minute in each hour during feature film broadcasts. That meant that a movie broadcast in a two-hour time slot in prime time would hold 14 minutes of national commercials instead of 12 minutes.
Note that runtimes for syndicated shows was a tricky thing in the past. Stations had their own film editors and many stations would chop out portions of syndicated programs to make room for extra commercials. As an example, "Space: 1999" switched stations in Seattle between the first and second seasons. The station that aired it in the first season edited the program to make room for 14 minutes of commercials, but when it switched stations, the new station didn't do that and it only held 9 minutes of commercials. For syndicated reruns, that practice was extremely common -- when I was in college, we got "MASH" reruns on three different stations (via cable) from three different markets. The commercial load was different on each station. I found out years later that those "MASH" syndication prints were edited to make room for 6 minutes of commercials, but many stations apparently decided that wasn't enough and cut out some more of the program to make room for an extra minute or two of ads.
Eventually the edited syndication prints became common, and at some point (I'm guessing 25 or 30 years ago) the film editor position at local stations became redundant and went away.
The bottom line is that older syndicated programs that you may have recorded off-air yourself could possibly have faced additional editing by your local station. If you have a DVD (or Blu-Ray) set, in most cases you're probably looking at the full-length program, but there have been a few exceptions to that.
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