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Last minute guides keep viewers guessing

At the last minute, online guides note Bones is in and Prison Break is out of schedule tonight. But why did it take so long?

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It took long enough but we finally got there.

Tonight according to a Seven amendment issued late last Friday, Bones is airing at 9:30pm, Heroes at 10:30pm and Prison Break is out of schedule.

But up until late yesterday, online guides were still listing Heroes at 9:30pm Scrubs at 10:30pm and Prison Break at 11:00pm.

Seven’s own online guide even had Heroes as a Hot Pick at 9:30pm yesterday. Now it chooses Bones instead. Either it prefers the Bones episode over Heroes, or it just prefers the timeslot to get a nudge along.

But why on earth did it take so long to amend the guides? Weekends notwithstanding, this should have been fixed on Monday.

Many guides take their info from either Pagemasters, based in Melbourne, or HWW in Sydney. In Melbourne on Monday lots of workers took the day off to create a “4 day Cup weekend.”

With print guides already so far behind such late amendments, the last thing we need is for online guides to start dropping the ball too.

As indicated by TV Tonight on Friday, Prison Break is out tonight, set to return in the week of November 23rd.

23 Responses

  1. Sadly people these are the days of modern tv. I live in adelaide and my weekly messenger is so far better then the tv guide that cant even be bothered to take e mails anymore because they know they get the guide wrong. My example is scrubs. I was glad when they had put it on their dont miss section then terribly peeved when i read that it was the last season. I knew five months beforehand that there is an eighth season coming out in the us in january. If tv jounalists get things like that wrong little wonder why we dont respect the media as a whole. Its if they want us to buy dvds and be expected to watch cop shows,fatty fatty loses weight then crys and people who can’t sing. All the best people.

  2. @Arwen

    looks like you got a good deal there and you should be thanking Ch7 🙂
    IMO Heroes is gone down hill fast, it just become so confusing with time travel and people not staying dead. Just stopped watching it.

    Bones on the hands is one of my favorites.

  3. I just sat down to watch Heroes, been looking forward to it since we recorded it on Thursday night, and what do I find… Bones! So, so angry about this programming arrogance the networks are showing their viewers!

  4. channel 7’s claim that they flaunt to us on every second ad is their fast tracking of programmes from the US. what really annoys me about what they’ve done to prison break is that they screwed around with the 3rd season and played the last few episodes a few months behind the US – and then took ages to start the 4th season even though the US were about 5 episodes in. Now i can’t imagine why they would take it off for three weeks because it can’t possibly be that the US are having a break too – they’re up to episode 10 while we’ve only seen 4! i don’t really care what time it’s on as long as it is on. if channel 7 actually paid attention to what the show was about they would realise you can’t just stop it half way through a season – jesus christ it’s not like BONES or Criminal Minds!!!!!

  5. Back to the internet for Prison Break. Too hard to hunt for next episode date and or time slot. Thought I would give channel 7 a chance this year. Once I get ahead on direct downloads from the U.S., I do not come back.

  6. Prime could keep their schedule up to date; it wasn’t on WIN’s thing on the Y!7 TV Guide, or in Austar’s Onscreen TV Guide. In the end, I set up a manual record after seeing a promo on the telly.

  7. The TV stations think they are clever by changing time slots, over running shows and the like – but in the end the viewer will give up and vote with their feet.

    At least I have a PVR that just keeps recordng all day long to protect against these crimes of the tv stations….

  8. The Bones episode certainly contain a shocker.

    Incidentally it was the final of season 3. There were only 15 episodes due to the writers strike.

    7 goes straight to season 4 next week.

  10. I still think Seven should put it up against The Strip. I could see it smashing it in the ratings. It was pulling 1.1-1.3 million on Thursdays before Seven moved it to Mondays

  11. So .. What does this all mean for Tivo boxes and the Tivo program guide service feed? The helter skelter nature of TV station programmers doesnt work . Or is this just another trick marketing device ?

    “Oh no sorry we had to change the programming, but good thing you had your Tivo set to record that show and it auto updated the time eh ? eh ?! ”

    “Your internet connection went down and it didnt update …err umm ”

    They wonder why people are leaving FTA and Pay TV in droves. Those that are tech savvy bittorent, those that aren’t seem to be happy to wait for the boxset to come out 1-2 months after the series finish.

    And whats with bones screening 2 nights a week now ?

  12. Prison Break is “out for tonight” but returns over two weeks later? Why two weeks? I have a feeling it won’t be back so soon.

    I’m surprised to hear that Heroes is still on. When I heard Bones was on at 9:30pm after seeing the ad, I thought Prison Break was still going to be on.

    From the way they advertised it, they made it look like Bones will permanently be on at 9:30pm. I love Bones but it’s already on Monday. I love two episodes a week of the same show but not if it means another show is sacrificed.

  13. It is like Russian Roulette, turn on TV and hope your show is on.

    Can’t imagine walking into asupermarket and hoping they have groceries or a bread shop and hoping there is bread there,

    TV networks, when will you get the hint. We are your consumers, look after us before it is too late.

    P.S. Would not surprise if we can watch American,Canadian or Indian TV network shows in next few years – streamed direct and free

  14. this is just another example of australian networks moving people around and stuffing up our schedules…Seven should have fasttracked heroes earlier as many people download it to keep up with the latest american gossip….i feel sorry for people who have recorded heroes/prison break and will miss their shows

  15. Yep it is frustrating and slack I don’t know anything about online TV guides but I would think that it would only take a few minutes to change them

    I think the most reliable guide is foxtels they almost always change it with in hours of the program changing but it even took them to yesterday to change it

  17. Ianblair23 – I’m not that old but I use a highlighter LOL

    Jane – ITA a lot will miss the final, tune in next Monday and wonder what happened and on top of that the season 4 opener is a 2 part ep and IMO should be shown on Monday together, drop the rerun of City Homicide.

    I bet the ratings for Bones tonight will be lower by a large margin than the Monday average. But I hope I’m wrong.

  18. What a shame this ch7 scheduling mess is, no doubt a lot of people will miss the season3 finale of Bones tonight, even the ch7 Bones homepage has the episode slated for next Thursday the 13th.
    And the finale is a real shocker, the long awaited Gormogon serial killer is finally revealed!!!!!

  19. As indicated in the story, these changes refer to tonight November 6. This was all published here last Friday. If in doubt you can also click on the tag to bring up recent stories on Bones, Prison Break, Heroes, Scrubs.

  20. David could you please add some dates, are you saying Bones will be on this Thursday night (tonight) 9:30pm?

    Bones is a great show and having it on twice a week is fabulous now ch7 just need to advertise it more so everyone is aware when it is on.

  21. Alot of people (and I mean alot of people) still rely on the weekly printed TV guides they get as part of the Sunday newspapers. My parents are one such example. They, as I assume alot of older viewers do, sit down on Sunday and circle in red pen the shows which they intend on watching that week. So when the networks issue a late amendment my parents wont find this out until they sit down and intend watch the program that has been rescheduled or axed. They then get very frustrated because it differs from the guide and say “well this never use to happen back in my day”.

    Now that they get the paper delivered daily, I tell them to always check the TV guide printed in the paper as it should capture any changes that were made after weekly guides went to print. But when the networks issues changes to their schedule only hours before it is due to go to air how is anybody who doesn’t have internet access meant to receive this information?

    And now that the online guides aren’t even keeping up with the amendments what hope do we have?

    All I can say is thank God for the stable schedules of the ABC, SBS and especially Foxtel.

  23. yeah it is pretty slack that they can’t get their own online guide right when it is their own change, and especially since it is supposed to be powering tivo, they were making an effort to provide a quality service to promote tivo but it looks like that has come off the rails. it was listing the correct shows on 7HD only too which got people worried that they wouldn’t be able to see bones without HD.

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