Continuous Cricket: What I thought was a game played in high school, only to discover it's Channel Nine's summer programming.
- The Coodabeen Champions Take a Good Hard Look at Australia
On network TV, when sporting events run longer than the scheduled time, the following program (usually syndicated) is pre-empted and the game remains on air until it is finished. In other instances, network programming will be delayed until the game ends, such as when
Fox began showing football on Sunday afternoons, delaying
The Simpsons by as much as 15 minutes and shredding the later seasons of
King of the Hill, which was usually joined in progress after the football games ended, usually at half past the hour.
This practice goes back to a 1968 AFL game between the New York Jets and Oakland Raiders that aired on
NBC, known as the
Heidi Game
. The last 65 seconds of the game were cut off when the scheduled three-hour timeslot ended and a
made-for-TV movie adaptation of
Heidi went to air. In the unaired minute, the Raiders took the lead and won the game. NBC was widely criticized for cutting away from the game, and made a public apology.
Now, since there is considerable blowback from non-sports fans (and sports fans who enjoy other shows) about joining "your regularly scheduled programming" already in progress, many times cutting important parts of a show (on a show such as
CSI or
NCIS, the majority of the plot (the murder) will be set up within five minutes) networks will often block out extra time for this, making the remainder a post-show of indeterminate length. That way, if a broadcast goes long, the game will only eat into the time allotted for the post-show, which will often only last to round out the hour, and THEN go into the rest of the TV schedule. This is Fox's current strategy, with a post-game show called
The OT filling out the hour, killing an hour that for fourteen years became Fox's own version of a
Death Slot. Because of this, it's very rare (like when the Rams and 49ers played to a tie in November 2012) that Fox has to delay their Sunday programming at all.
Because of the popularity of
60 Minutes, CBS will usually delay the start of that show until every NFL game it has the rights to is over, then air it in its entirety, delaying the network's entire primetime schedule accordingly. This infuriates fans of the network's Sunday shows (especially those that use
DV Rs) as they cannot predict when their favorite show will actually start. In September 2012, CBS decided to just bump up the lineup a half-hour on game nights, though the games still leach into the second half-hour and cause delays, to the point that CBS has to maintain a text/Twitter service that sends out delay alerts.