If you’re a Fringe fan, eager for Friday night’s all new episode, you’d better be pulling for the Texas Rangers tonight.
A rain delay in St. Louis last night pushed back game six of the World Series until tonight. If the Cardinals win, the series is tied and that means a pivotal game seven tomorrow night.
The game would air on Fox during prime time and that would mean no Fringe this week. Fox didn’t air a new episode last week either.
Go Rangers!
AndyMac says
I hate it when sports (which I don’t watch or care about) keeps me from getting my new shows.
There are 3000 channels on cable. Why can’t they air the World Series on one of those? At least the Superbowl has the decency to be only 1 day.
Bruce says
Because the other 99% of the country wants to see the game on a major television network. By the way, I love FRINGE and will miss it too.
MacD says
I love sports and Fringe, and the fact of the matter is, if you look at ratings, all live sports absolutely dominate every single TV show (for the most part), and especially fringe. Higher advertising dollars, so that is why.
Summer Brooks says
Hey, that’s my sport you’re messing with! 🙂
Fox can charge more money for ads if the games run on the affiliate stations than they can for them running on the Fox Sports channels.
Here’s the real travesty: Fox wants DirecTV to pay 40% more in carrier fees for the same channels. Channels I don’t watch. So if they haven’t concluded their pissing match come November 1st, DirecTV will suspend FX, Fox Movie Channel, the related regional and national sports channels, but NOT the local Fox affiliates or Fox News.
Ya know, I wish they would yank the Fox affiliates and Fox News, and leave FX the hell alone. At least I could watch Bones and Fringe online… but they’re messing with me seeing Justified, and that’s not right!
What’s funny is that DirecTV is in a unique position to alleviate some of the backlash if they were to drop the affiliates… because they have NFL Sunday Ticket, and can still let subscribers see their local games that they’d otherwise miss if the Fox affiliates were dropped. Wonder if they thought of that.
I also wish the sat TV and cable companies grew a set, and let viewers pick their channels a la carte, all tiers, including premium channels like HBO, Showtime and Starz.
That one small change would really reflect who’s watching what channels. I also wonder why advertisers haven’t pushed for something like that in the past. It’s almost like they don’t care that they might be getting overcharged for running ads on a channel that isn’t watched as much as they’re being told.
Just because that channel is in my subscription package doesn’t mean I watch it, but it’s being forced on the carrier and on me as part of a package deal. I would pay a couple bucks more to get HBO if it meant I didn’t also have to get Cinemax or Encore, or whatever’s in that HBO bundle. I’d pay a couple extra bucks to keep FX, or NatGeo Wild, if I could drop Fox News and MSNBC and NatGeo (NatGeo lost me when they became the prison channel). Hell, if I could get Bravo just when Top Chef’s on, and drop it the rest of the year when they air nothing but Real Housewives Who Should Get Real Lives, I’d do that in a freaking heartbeat.
The consumers and advertisers may well be getting ripped off by these channel package deals, and the sooner we can all push the a la carte programming choices, maybe the sooner we’ll get better programming, and the sooner the advertisers will get the ROI they should have been getting these past 20 years.
I want to take back control of what I watch by telling them what channels are useless, because just changing the channel and not watching isn’t working anymore. Maybe then the folks making these stupid TV shows would care a little more about what they put on the air because my eyeballs and my dollars would mean just a bit more.
AndyMac says
So sorry Summer! I guess I’m one of the 1% (though I suspect the 99% figure stated by Bruce is a bit high).
Thank goodness for a huge collection of movies in my BluRay jukebox and Netflix streaming. They have gotten us through this past week quite nicely.
I noted that Netflix streaming has been a little slow this week. I have a feeling that quite a few people are looking for alternate entertainment during this time of baseball madness.
As for the rest of your rant, I agree completely.
John says
I can’t say I’ve been a fan of Baseball since I was a kid and they seemed to keep going on strike nearly every season back in the late 70, early 80’s. Haven’t even been interested until my son(7) started playing. Even now though, I still find no entertainment in professional Baseball. At least teh Superbowl sometimes has decent commercials to watch.
Samuel Sloan says
I love Fringe but have no problem waiting one more week or however long it takes. The happiness I received over the news of my St. Louis Cardinals winning the World Series was worth several episodes of Fringe.
startrekmom says
I think they should air games on the weekends only, and during the day so they can be finished by prime-time. Or if they insist on airing the current way, at least air past season reruns as backups instead of new programming when they don’t have a game to run. That way, those of us who use our dvrs to program our shows, won’t miss a new episode when the dvr thinks there should be a game on.