Idiosyncrasies of presentation in America

American-style presentation?.....hmmm. Not sure if thats quite correct any more. A Populist presentation is probably a better description. No matter where it started.

It started with the satellite and cable channels. Some of which were American like Discovery.

I think that the highly variable starting and finishing times and the lengths of programmes on the 'main' terrestrial channels was a result of them being multi-genre from the outset and the absence of advertising on the BBC.

If you say that American TV channels are obsessed with fitting their programmes to a 30 minute grid then is that purely cultural or does it have any roots from the depths of time?

Split screen credits started in the mid 90s with NBC, with a project called 'NBC 2000':
http://adage.com/article/news/nbc-entertains-viewer-hook-split-screen-show-credits-programming/90250/


There's your answer

Simply because it’s easier to remember for a viewer. My TiVo has been recording a block of ER on POP and despite it being originally broadcast in an hour format with roughly 43 minutes of content they added more ad time so the entire episode takes up about 70 minutes. The length of the episode causes odd start times like one was 6:17 PM. I know I certainly wouldn’t remember to tune in with that start time.

There’s the added benefit that you can change the channel at the end of a program without missing parts of the episode.

The great Oddity Archive channel on YouTube has some interesting bits of the minutiae of American TV dotted around its many videos. These in particular:

TV station sign-offs
https://youtu.be/2SfD6jqwpuo

Interstitials:
https://youtu.be/mJyj8uEJZw4

Technical difficulties (starts with some British examples but the rest American)
https://youtu.be/KxFJLXmRw7w

American cities are similarly "organised", cookie-cutter and all similar-looking too: their cities are full of grids, as their cul-de-sac suburbia is.. well, their TV schedules remind me a bit of that (actually, their TV in general)

I don't think it's something about mentality: more something about how things evolved, for some reasons

But "6:17" is an extreme example: most channels round the times in a 5 minutes basis, except children channels (as I showed before), as a loophole against EU legislation

ITV have been doing that for evening weekday programmes since the 60s. When Michael Grade became BBC 1's controller in 1985, he adopted the same scheme for BBC 1. Because of the '18:40 to 19:15 God Slot' on Sunday, BBC 1 and ITV's Sunday schedule always kicked off at 19:15 hrs, and because of that so did BBC 2.

Yeah, even when looking at the older UK TV schedules, one can notice a sort of grid does exist; some Channel 4 dramas do run 1hr and 5 mins or 35 mins, but still, for the most part there is an orderliness

UK TV schedule grids offers the perfect compromise between the too messy TV schedules of many European countries - where thanks to little padding a US drama does not reach a 60-minutes slot etc.- and the too strict grids of the US, where they cut to pieces older dramas in order to squeezes as many ads as they can and have 30-minutes based schedules

Yes the BBC1 schedules pretty 1985 look odd today.

Saturdays have never, and still don't get scheduled in half hours on BBC1 and ITV. Traditionally that was because of sport, particularly Grandstand which used to finish at 5:10 and was then followed by news

Are you sure? I remember watching a Golden Girls doc about how there completely overhauled their Credits etc to try and get somewhere. Or was that the test case for this?

Does it have anything to do with sales of programmes between producers and broadcasters? If programmes are produced in multiples of 30 minutes then it makes organising schedules easier for a broadcaster. It's a bit like shipping containers are manufactured in a few standard sizes in order that they can easily be handled and accommodated by transporters.



I am aware that ITV organised its weekday evening programmes around a 30 minute grid. Was this because most evenings were an amalgamation of programmes from different ITV companies and a grid would make it easier to organise and schedule networked programmes? The daytime schedule could accommodate more variable length programmes as it could make more use of fillers and local programmes to fit oddly sized timeslots than the evening schedule could.

Definitely, and there's nothing wrong with having shows in 30mins/60mins slots, it's just a problem when this becomes an obsession, and shows that are longer than your typical shows (especially older shows) are cut in order to squeeze more ads
Again, the likes of ITV3 -with older shows - and GOLD wouldn't do that

BTW some -particularly cable - channels in the US now have times such as 11:03, 10:01 etc. during nighttime, but this, rather than something to do with the length of the show being "irregular" - longer than your usual 20mins/40mins etc. - , I think has something to do with more ads being squeezed in and irregular times as a consequence, with exceptions, such as some episodes of US drama American Horror Story, being 45/50 mins