Local stations may interrupt for baseball in the summer, as they do for basketball in the winter.

This the problem. You never know what station in a given market has the rights to local games and they pre-empt like crazy. Monday nights have the fewest regular season games so I chose Monday just to be safe.

And as for men writing fan fic, how come when ever this conversation comes up, the focus is immediately on sexual pairings. A few of us are male, married professionals who like to write episodic stories that don't focus on sex.

Ah, yes. As Dana says, the perpetual plaint of the gen writer.

Although there's a very grey area between episodic and het fic in a lot of fandoms. Lots and lots of classic XF casefiles also dealt with the Mulder/Scully relationship in one form or another (UST to NC-17). And Farscape went porny real fast, so even a lot of the adventure stories have sex in them. Just because you wouldn't see (all of) it on your screen doesn't mean it wasn't happening, if you know what I mean.

And well-written episodic stories get a lot of attention, so far as I can tell. If you get the voices right and you can plot, people will definitely read your stuff. They just won't post "guh!" afterwards. *g*

A condensed season over the summer could rock. Isn't that what the OC had season 1?

The O.C.'s first season was something like 27 episodes over approximately the normal 2003-2004 seasonal period, but it started in August rather than September/October because FOX wanted to air more than just one or two episodes before pre-empting it for the world series.

Is FOX still trying to do year-round programming? Cuz if they are, then I doubt that they'd hold this back until the fall. Of course, all their shows from last summer bombed, right? (North Shore, The Jury, Method & Red, Quintuplets, etc.) So they might have changed their minds on the whole "year-round programming" thing.

I hate sports! Can't we ban all sports-related preempting, ever? Why can't the networks just say, "Our schedule is such and such, baseball will run x dates, normal shows will run x dates" and be done with it? Are they TRYING to drive me insane?

ETA if the sports doesn't happen for whatever reason, they can just show a movie or some dumb reality rerun instead.

Can't we ban all sports-related preempting, ever?

No.

I'm not saying they can't show sports, just that they shouldn't preempt non-sports programming for it.

What would you say is a good reason to preempt? Other than that you like baseball.

Well, because sports are live, and if the game goes long, pre-empting the next show is preferable to not showing the end. Doing otherwise would mean millions lost in both viewers and revenue, and then Fox wouldn't have the money to invest in shows like The Inside.

pre-empting the next show is preferable to not showing the end.

This they know from experience. They didn't always used to pre-empt programming.

Yes, what Jess said. The networks were badly burned by the "Heidi" game, [link] so they'll never do it again.

Heh.

Televised-sports-history x-post.