Originally Posted by BurgundyRanger
Wait. I was totally wrong. I missed on a bunch of things:
* Each football game results in THREE weeks of pre-empts on the West Coast.
* The Breeders' Cup horse races on Nov. 7 adds two more weeks of West Coast pre-empts.
* The Skins Game golf match pre-empts the West Coast on Nov. 28.
So, we're going to hit a stretch of TEN STRAIGHT WEEKS of no PR on the West Coast (Oct. 10, 17, 24, 31; all of November, and then Dec. 5 and 12), with could result in NO NEW RPM episodes for those same 10 weeks and push the finale back to January 23, 2010!
I think there are three approaches they can take, each of which has its own set of drawbacks:
* Maintain the pattern established on May 30, which is showing one new episode only in weeks that are unaffected in any time zone .... which means 10 weeks with no new RPM and a 1/23/10 finale.
* Follow the pattern used in 2008 for PRJF, which was to go back into the 'new' episodes in November, even though the slots are pre-empted on the West Coast. But how can you do that with an exclusive property? That would be five episodes (eps 27-31) that would be unavailable in the Pacific time zone before getting an all-clear finale on 12/19/09.
* Double-up on new episodes in the five-week all-clear stretch of Sept. 5 to Oct. 3 to minimize the effect of those 10 weeks of trouble. But, if they do that, they'll be all the way to ep #31 (one from the end) on Oct. 3, with no clear-cut place to show the finale until they get to that same all-clear 12/19/09 date, again resulting in a 10-week gap of no new episodes.
You wanna choose one of those three scenarios? It's a giant mess, that's all I know.