CBS is bowing to reality and making it official: on Sundays, when it carries late-afternoon National Football League games, the schedule of programs that follows will start at 7:30 p.m. and not 7.
That is, it will be the starting time on paper for the Eastern time zone. (In Central time, the new start time will be 6:30 p.m.) CBS acknowledges that for many weeks the lineup will be pushed back still further by long N.F.L. games. But this ought to help viewers who record CBS's Sunday shows.
The disconnect between the scheduled times for Sunday shows and the time those shows actually appeared has been a concern for fans of programs like “The Good Wife.†With football games running long, viewers who regularly DVR that drama found themselves missing the ends of episodes if they did not also set up their machines to record the following show. Even with CBS issuing regular updates last year, fans of the series were especiall y irritated if episodes got cut off.
“We're just trying to be proactive and viewer friendly,†said Kelly Kahl, the chief scheduler for CBS.
Even with “60 Minutes†scheduled to start at 7:30 - and the rest of the lineup sliding to start times on the half hour - CBS executives will still be advising DVR users to record the following shows this season, Mr. Kahl said. DVRs record by the official program schedule, so when shows start late and run past their scheduled time, much of the content goes unrecorded.
There are a host of reasons why N.F.L. games should be expected to run long this season. Among the ones Mr. Kahl cited were later kickoff times that the N.F.L. announced this season (4:25 p.m.); the increasing number of official video reviews (after every turnover, for example); and the use of replacement referees, who may not keep the game moving as fast.
Not that CBS was especially unhappy to have more minutes o f football included in its Sunday prime-time numbers. “It may be a pain but we'll take a 17 rating for football every week,†Mr. Kahl said.
The N.F.L. shows no signs of fading as television's biggest attraction. The first edition of “Sunday Night Football†on NBC this week was the second-most-watched in that show's history, with 27.57 million viewers.
CBS didn't have a football run-over Sunday, but it did have a tennis run-over. That didn't hurt “60 Minutes,†which was the most-watched nonfootball offering on television last week: 12.6 million viewers watched the account from a former Navy SEAL of the raid that killed Osama Bin Laden.
Bill Carter writes about the television industry. Follow @wjcarter on Twitter.
