Daytime Pre-emptions in your area

[chris12]

I was wondering how bad some of your stations were with daytime pre-emptions back in the day. What were some of the shows they used to pre-empt and what did they pre-empt it with. Also, what do you think some of the reasoning behind the decisions were? Was it more money oportunity, not caring for a certain network show.

 

[bhayes1016]

- At one point in the late 70s, KHOU-Houston pre-empted The Price Is Right and ran Hour Magazine in its place.
- KXAS in DFW didn't carry David Letterman's NBC morning show.

 

[bpatrick]

Atlanta might have been the worst. For example,
in the summer of 1973, WSB/2 (NBC) pre-empted
Jeopardy!, Who, What Or Where, and Three On
A Match in favor of news at noon and Merv Griffin
at 12:30. WAGA/5 (CBS) pre-empted The Young
And The Restless and the early weeks of Match Game
'73, replacing them with noon news and the syndicated
game show It's Your Bet; Secret Storm aired at 1 PM
instead of 4. WXIA/11 (ABC and then WQXI) aired
Password, One Life To Live, and Love, American Style
in the mornings because of news at noon and the "Prize
Movie" from 3:30 to 5.

A few years later, WSB ran Hollywood Squares and Password
Plus on delay and pre-empted Card Sharks and High Rollers.
It preferred to air Dinah Shore's syndicated show at 10 AM.
Around the same time (1979) it didn't clear 12-1 either.
WAGA pre-empted CBS's 10 AM, 3:30 PM, and 4 PM programming
(meaning Love Of Life aired on Channel 36, since CBS had it at
4 at the time). WXIA had $20,000 Pyramid and Edge Of Night
on delay but otherwise was carrying the entire ABC daytime
schedule in pattern.

In the summer of 1980, WSB elected to carry Mike Douglas
instead of Letterman at 10 AM; WXIA, which was about to
get the NBC affiliation anyway, dropped ABC's Love Boat
reruns and picked up Letterman from 10-11:30. That was
the summer that 2 and 11 swapped some of their daytime
shows in anticipation of the network switch that fall.
2 picked up Love Boat, Family Feud, General Hospital, One
Life To Live, and Edge Of Night; 11 began airing (besides
Letterman) Another World, The Doctors, and Texas.
2 kept only one NBC show until the Sept. 1 switch: Days
Of Our Lives; 11 hung on to All My Children and Ryan's Hope
(ABC) to the bitter end. Password Plus and Wheel Of Fortune
were dead in the market until they moved to 11 on Sept. 1.

In some other markets where I've lived, WLOS/13 Greenville/
Spartanburg/Asheville didn't start airing One Life To Live until
1973. WGHP/8 Greensboro/Winston-Salem/High Point, when
it was an ABC affiliate, never carried Dark Shadows or Edge
Of Night (WLOS didn't carry Edge either). WTVT/13 Tampa/
St. Petersburg, when it was a CBS affiliate, didn't carry Bold
And The Beautiful; it had an hour-long noon newscast, followed
by Young And The Restless at 1, As The World Turns at 2, and
Guiding Light at 3.

 

[Apollo7979]

In Dayton when WDTN-2 was an ABC affiliate, they didn't carry "General Hospital" for years. I think they ran it for a very short period in the early 80s (WDTN flipped from NBC to ABC in 1980), but chose to run cartoons, Hour Magazine, Geraldo, Maury Polvich (his first talk show), and Montel in it's place. This continued until the early 2000s when they put the show back on at it's regular slot.

There also was a short period when WDTN didn't run either "General Hospital" or "One Life to Live." This lasted from the mid 90s up until GH got put back on the schedule. OLTL returned to the schedule about a year before WDTN went back to NBC.

 

[easttxtv]

>> - KXAS in DFW didn't carry David Letterman's NBC morning show.

From what I've been able to tell, KXAS/5 seems to have been the worst of the original big 3 (WFAA/8 and KDFW/4 not as much) about pre-emptions. From the 70s through the 90s there were several instances, part of which came during times while KXAS had the local airing rights to Texas Rangers games, others (70s into the mid-80s) when it seemed Ch.5 just wanted to go their own way separate from the network. Texas wasn't aired in it's last several months up to it's finale (the whole time of it's 10am timeslot IIRR). Donahue and Charlie Rose were on in the morning (this was before Rose would go national on PBS) knocking out whatever NBC showed from 9am through 10am. The Doctors was on for some time at 10:30am instead of 11 (I guess to try giving it a chance away from Young and the Restless). If the Rangers had an early afternoon start, you could kiss Another World (and probably Santa Barbara too IIRR) off for the day--this was long before they started throwing us a bone and airing pre-empted shows overnight after Leno-Conan. I know there were several game shows I missed in part or in full because of all the pre-emptions. Also, for a while in about 1997, during when Ch.5 had an LMA with KXTX/39 (when it was still an indie), it aired Another World over on Ch.39 and moved Jenny Jones up an hour after Days on Ch.5; this brilliant experiment lasted less than a year and Another World was moved back to the original slot afterward.

WFAA/8 delayed showing Port Charles (and A Daytime to Remember before that) till about 2:30am. It has also shown All My Children at 11am for many years in order to have their hour-long noon news. I think there were other isolated cases there but sometimes you get dust bunnies in the brain 8)

KDFW/4 may have done some pre-empting in the past, but the instance I remember most was in the year or so prior to their part of the big Fox affil switch in the mid-1990s. They were wanting to pre-empt Price is Right for local airings of Donahue and the same for Bold and the Beautiful in order to show (IIRR) a court show. KTVT/11 stepped up and agreed to take on the airings of both shows; this would lead to KTVT's getting CBS' affiliation as part of the big switch later on. Ch.4 didn't seem to cry in their beer too much when they lost the rest of CBS' schedule (and about 1/2 their ratings points) in July 1995.

 

[Corky Marlowe]

I know the Bob Braun show ran around noontime for many years in Cincinnati...Any Cincy people out there know what channel, and what, if anything, it pre-empted?

 

[Ultimajock]

From what I've been able to tell, KXAS/5 seems to have been the worst of the original big 3 (WFAA/8 and KDFW/4 not as much) about pre-emptions. From the 70s through the 90s there were several instances, part of which came during times while KXAS had the local airing rights to Texas Rangers games, others (70s into the mid-80s) when it seemed Ch.5 just wanted to go their own way separate from the network. Texas wasn't aired in it's last several months up to it's finale (the whole time of it's 10am timeslot IIRR). Donahue and Charlie Rose were on in the morning (this was before Rose would go national on PBS)

...erm...the Charlie Rose show on KXAS was syndicated by Donahue's distributor, Multimedia (WITI/6 Milwaukee ran it in place of "As the World Turns" for a stretch in the early '80s, which is where I first saw it). Thus, Rose had already gone national (he also did a stretch on "CBS News Nightwatch" before the PBS show cranked up)...

 

[BoscoGoldBear]

Now for Boston's original big three, courtesy of my memory (and from reading Peter Wiggins' classic TV schedules):

WBZ/4 (then NBC): always ran Eyewitness News at 12 and Mike Douglas at 12:30 (all 90 minutes), preempting Jeopardy! (12 Noon), Eye Guess (12:30), The Who, What Or Where Game (also 12:30) and Let's Make A Deal (1:30), among other shows. Once 4 moved Mike Douglas from 12:30 to 4:30 (eventually 4 pm), they had WBZ reporter Sharon King's Woman '7x (i.e. '72, '73, '74), which became People Are Talking, which was eventually hosted by Tom Bergeron (yes, THAT Tom Bergeron). As time went on, WBZ's preemptions shrank from 2 pm to 1:30 (when Days Of Our Lives started as an hour long soap) to eventually 1 pm (Days' starting time).

WHDH/5 (then CBS) only preempted the 12 Noon soap (Where The Heart Is) and maybe the 4 pm show as well. When WCVB/5 became ABC, it preempted the 11 am ABC show and even had The View on well past midnight at first. Also, it preempted anything ABC had at 4 pm, most notably The Edge Of Night.

WNAC/7 (then ABC) was notorious for putting movies on at 2 pm and bumping various ABC shows to early morning after Major Mudd (even Magilla Gorilla was on during weekdays). Once it became CBS, the preemptions were mostly limited to 4 pm (and 3:30 at one point) to make room for Merv Griffin (once on WBZ/4 as Mike Douglas' late-afternoon counterpart), The Streets Of San Francisco and Welcome Back, Kotter (which went to WLVI/56 less than a year later - now they are co-owned!).

Of course, my memory has been fogged in because of age! ;D

 

[jal41]

Atlanta might have been the worst.

And it stayed worse until recently. WSB delayed "The View" until 3:05 AM for the first couple of seasons. In the 90's WXIA pawned off NBC's showing of reruns of ABC's "Full House" to WTLK/14 (now WPXA).

As mentioned somewhere else, WAGA pawned "CBS This Morning" off onto WTLK until the New World fiasco.

I believe they have to get permission from the networks before they can time-shift a show (or move it to another channel). I am surprised the networks haven't clamped down more than they did. (But if they want/need habitiual preempters like WSB, they have to give a little.)

 

[bpatrick]

I know the Bob Braun show ran around noontime for many years in Cincinnati...Any Cincy people out there know what channel, and what, if anything, it pre-empted?

Braun aired on WLWT/5 from noon to 1:30 for most of the run;
I know Jeopardy! and Who, What Or Where would have been
affected; I also seem to recall Jackpot!, which aired on NBC at
noon in 1974, being delayed to 5:30 as a lead-in to the news.
Days Of Our Lives came on at 1:30 instead of 1:00 starting
in 1979. His show also aired at noon on WCMH/4 Columbus (also NBC);
not sure if WDTN did this after going to ABC.

His show also ran in other cities throughout the region. WHAS/11
Louisville used to join him in progress at 12:30; I remember that
when The Young And The Restless went to an hour and aired at
1 PM on CBS (which WHAS was then), the station ran Braun at
12:30, Search For Tomorrow on a one-hour delay at 1:30, and
Y&R the following day at 9 AM. WLEX/18 Lexington (NBC) used
to take the second feed of Days Of Our Lives (1:30 instead of
1:00) because it, too, carried Braun from 12:30-1:30.

 

[gr8oldies]

As I recall there was a time when WLWD, WLWT, WLWC and probably WLWI ran Paul Dixon, 9-10:30, Phil Donahue (originating at Dayton's WLWD) 10:30-11:30, wenty back to NBC for Hollywood Squares, the it was Bob Braun's 50-50 club 9simulcast on WLW radio) from 12-1:30. After the untimely death of Paul Dixon, and Donahue's move to Chicago, Donahue ran 9-10am (Columbus,. I think, ran him at 3:30).

 

[anotherguyTN]

WMC NBC 5 in Memphis was notorious for dropping almost all of NBC's game shows and replacing them with syndicated talk shows from the late 70's until the early 90's. I can remember reading in the newspaper that their excuse was the low ratings for NBC's shows, but NBC would claim low ratings were due to stations like WMC that didn't carry the shows. During this time they were owned by Scripps Howard, which I've heard did the same type of thing in other areas as well. When the station was sold in the early 90's to what would become Raycom, they started carrying more of NBC's daytime programming, but by that time they were starting to cut back to where they are now with extending the Today show and soon to be only Day of Our Lives.

I've thought that if the networks would have put more pressure on local stations to carry their daytime lineup or face some sort of penalty that daytime TV, expecially on NBC stations, wouldn't be in the sorry state it is now. Instead NBC caved in and gave most of their daytime back to local stations.

 

[briancraig]

In Memphis, WHBQ didn't carry All My Children until the end of 1975. They also didn't show Ryan's Hope for most of its run.

WMC as anotherguy pointed out didn't carry a lot of NBC's shows in the 80s and 90s. They were pretty good in the 70s although for awhile they carried Dinah in the mid morning instead of NBC. They also never cleared the NBC 9 am hour after they started showing Donahue in 1977.

WREG didn't show whatever CBS carried at 3 pm after about 1971, but otherwise cleared the whole schedule.

All 3 Memphis stations by 1972 had noon newscasts. That seems pretty unique.

 

[bpatrick]

All three Atlanta affiliates had noon newscasts
beginning in the fall of 1972; previously, Channel
11 (then-ABC) had done theirs at 12:30, and in
the 1975-76 season did theirs at 11:30 AM, carrying
ABC's noon show in pattern.

What was really unique was that 11 had noon
newscasts on Saturday and Sunday from 1972-74.
But when 2 (NBC) and 5 (CBS) jumped on that
bandwagon, 11 went back to ABC's kids' shows on
Saturdays and carried "Issues And Answers" at noon
on Sundays.

 

[fredflintstone]

I've thought that if the networks would have put more pressure on local stations to carry their daytime lineup or face some sort of penalty that daytime TV, expecially on NBC stations, wouldn't be in the sorry state it is now. Instead NBC caved in and gave most of their daytime back to local stations.

I find this thread sort of amusing. First of all, network shows were not pre-empted. A station did not carry them. Pre-emption is when a show is replaced by a news event, ballgame or special.

Some of you think stations should clear programs. That's not how it works. An independent affiliated station does what's best for itself, not what's best for the network.

Pressure? The stations held all the cards back then. Three major networks. Three VHF stations (or less) in markets without network owned stations. The stations that selectively cleared network programs tended to be the strongest stations locally - best local news ratings, most profitable. Stations refused network programs to make their schedules stronger (and more profitable). If a network applied pressure, they'd likely get a weaker affiliate.

In Detroit, WJBK at various times did not clear the morning news, the evening news, late show, whatever ran at 10 am or noon ... and did not clear prime time shows which either did not look promising or which started to flounder. Eventually Fox owned the station and dropped CBS entirely - CBS ended up on a weak UHF with no local news at all.

 

[easttxtv]

From what I've been able to tell, KXAS/5 seems to have been the worst of the original big 3 (WFAA/8 and KDFW/4 not as much) about pre-emptions. From the 70s through the 90s there were several instances, part of which came during times while KXAS had the local airing rights to Texas Rangers games, others (70s into the mid-80s) when it seemed Ch.5 just wanted to go their own way separate from the network. Texas wasn't aired in it's last several months up to it's finale (the whole time of it's 10am timeslot IIRR). Donahue and Charlie Rose were on in the morning (this was before Rose would go national on PBS)

...erm...the Charlie Rose show on KXAS was syndicated by Donahue's distributor, Multimedia (WITI/6 Milwaukee ran it in place of "As the World Turns" for a stretch in the early '80s, which is where I first saw it). Thus, Rose had already gone national (he also did a stretch on "CBS News Nightwatch" before the PBS show cranked up)...

Oh, well, misinformed again...thanx for the update. Has been a **while** ago....

 

[ShawnHill1]

I've thought that if the networks would have put more pressure on local stations to carry their daytime lineup or face some sort of penalty that daytime TV, expecially on NBC stations, wouldn't be in the sorry state it is now. Instead NBC caved in and gave most of their daytime back to local stations.

I find this thread sort of amusing. First of all, network shows were not pre-empted. A station did not carry them. Pre-emption is when a show is replaced by a news event, ballgame or special.

Some of you think stations should clear programs. That's not how it works. An independent affiliated station does what's best for itself, not what's best for the network.

Pressure? The stations held all the cards back then. Three major networks. Three VHF stations (or less) in markets without network owned stations. The stations that selectively cleared network programs tended to be the strongest stations locally - best local news ratings, most profitable. Stations refused network programs to make their schedules stronger (and more profitable). If a network applied pressure, they'd likely get a weaker affiliate.

In Detroit, WJBK at various times did not clear the morning news, the evening news, late show, whatever ran at 10 am or noon ... and did not clear prime time shows which either did not look promising or which started to flounder. Eventually Fox owned the station and dropped CBS entirely - CBS ended up on a weak UHF with no local news at all.

I more or less made sort of the same points you did in another thread, in regards to why certain stations (whether individually or in a group) swapped networks. Each station, especially the ones not owned by the networks, have to make the best programming and financial decision for them. If you were lucky enough to live in a network O & O-dominated market (New York City, Chicago, Los Angeles, and now Philadelphia and San Francisco/Oakland/San Jose), consider yourself blessed. Otherwise, unless you live(d) in a market where you're close enough to pick up a neighboring market's set of stations and they carried a certain network's show dropped in your own area, you were out of luck.

But back to the topic...from my experience, in the mid to late 80s, when I lived in Rockford, Illinois, the two biggest offenders of dropping network programs in the daytime were WREX Channel 13 (then ABC, now NBC) and WTVO Channel 17 (then NBC, now ABC). WREX carried its own noon newscast, which meant All My Children wasn't cleared (until 1987, where it aired at 9am). In sense of irony, WISN in Milwaukee also carried noon news, but always carried AMC at 11am. WTVO didn't show any NBC shows from the 9am and 11am hours (which, from 1987-88 as an example, meant no Sale of the Century, Classic Concentration, Super Password and Scrabble in Rockford). WTVO had Hour Magazine at 9, and Sally Jesse Raphael at 11. WTVO also carried some Chicago Cubs games (from WGN) back then as well (mostly weekend games), but they moved to WIFR (CBS) in 1988.

WIFR was the only CBS station in the Northern Illinois-Southern Wisconsin region (Chicago, Rockford, Madison, and Milwaukee) that cleared the entire network daytime schedule in pattern. WBBM in Chicago, of course being a CBS-owned station, carried the network shows, but some shows didn't air in pattern. WITI in Milwaukee and WISC in Madison dropped the 9am CT CBS hour (Pyramid and Press Your Luck/Card Sharks/Family Feud), and WITI didn't clear CBS Late Night (but did air Newswatch), while WIFR and WISC normally delayed CBS Late Night to an hour (WIFR on Friday nights, two hours, because of some syndicated product).

As far as weekends...WTVO didn't air the NBC Saturday Nightly News, while it aired in Milwaukee (WTMJ), Chicago (WMAQ), and Madison (WMTV). WKOW in Madison didn't clear ABC World News Sunday nor American Bandstand either (but of course, both aired in Chicago, Rockford, and Milwaukee). In place of AB, WKOW aired a country-music program instead. Outside of Chicago, the Saturday morning kid's shows weren't always cleared in full...WTVO and WISC dropped the 11am hour of their networks' programming, WITI didn't clear CBS from 9:30 to 10:30am (Small Wonder and some real estate show aired instead), WTMJ mostly went local between 9:30 to sometimes 11 or 11:30. Everybody else cleared all the shows in pattern.

 

[mleach]

I know the Bob Braun show ran around noontime for many years in Cincinnati...Any Cincy people out there know what channel, and what, if anything, it pre-empted?

Braun aired on WLWT/5 from noon to 1:30 for most of the run;
I know Jeopardy! and Who, What Or Where would have been
affected; I also seem to recall Jackpot!, which aired on NBC at
noon in 1974, being delayed to 5:30 as a lead-in to the news.
Days Of Our Lives came on at 1:30 instead of 1:00 starting
in 1979. His show also aired at noon on WCMH/4 Columbus (also NBC);
not sure if WDTN did this after going to ABC.

His show also ran in other cities throughout the region. WHAS/11
Louisville used to join him in progress at 12:30; I remember that
when The Young And The Restless went to an hour and aired at
1 PM on CBS (which WHAS was then), the station ran Braun at
12:30, Search For Tomorrow on a one-hour delay at 1:30, and
Y&R the following day at 9 AM. WLEX/18 Lexington (NBC) used
to take the second feed of Days Of Our Lives (1:30 instead of
1:00) because it, too, carried Braun from 12:30-1:30.

Bob Braun was also seen on a few West Virginia stations too. I am pretty sure Charleston-Huntington's WSAZ channel 3 aired it.

 

[bpatrick]

Bob Braun did air on WSAZ from 9 to 10 AM,
so no NBC programs were affected.

 

[bpatrick]

I've thought that if the networks would have put more pressure on local stations to carry their daytime lineup or face some sort of penalty that daytime TV, expecially on NBC stations, wouldn't be in the sorry state it is now. Instead NBC caved in and gave most of their daytime back to local stations.

I find this thread sort of amusing. First of all, network shows were not pre-empted. A station did not carry them. Pre-emption is when a show is replaced by a news event, ballgame or special.

Some of you think stations should clear programs. That's not how it works. An independent affiliated station does what's best for itself, not what's best for the network.

Pressure? The stations held all the cards back then. Three major networks. Three VHF stations (or less) in markets without network owned stations. The stations that selectively cleared network programs tended to be the strongest stations locally - best local news ratings, most profitable. Stations refused network programs to make their schedules stronger (and more profitable). If a network applied pressure, they'd likely get a weaker affiliate.

In Detroit, WJBK at various times did not clear the morning news, the evening news, late show, whatever ran at 10 am or noon ... and did not clear prime time shows which either did not look promising or which started to flounder. Eventually Fox owned the station and dropped CBS entirely - CBS ended up on a weak UHF with no local news at all.

Actually, it's not that unusual to see the term "pre-empts"
as a synonym for "the station doesn't carry the program."
For example, the June 11, 1980 issue of Variety, reporting
on WSB's switch to ABC, paraphrases an NBC spokesperson:
"He said that in the last 52 weeks WSB had pre-empted 450
hours of network broadcasting in all dayparts." For the record,
that includes such things as running Dinah Shore in place of
three game shows in the mornings, and Lawrence Welk and
movies instead of most NBC sports programming on Sunday
afternoons.

I think we're all aware that money is the motivating factor;
Bob Braun (and Ruth Lyons before him) had advertisers lining
up to be on the 50/50 Club; if WLWT had carried whatever
NBC was feeding at noon, it would have gotten no more than
its network comp. 'Way back in the '50s CBS had network
programming at 1 PM but abandoned it because Midwestern
stations preferred to carry news and farm news from noon
to 12:30 Central. CBS didn't resume 1 PM programming until
The Young And The Restless went to an hour, by which time
it was possible to feed it to the Midwest at 11 AM.

It just seems that, over the years, there have been more
variations in daytime schedules from market to market than
there have been in primetime schedules, and I think what
we're really doing here is comparing notes to see what some
of those variations were.