I was traveling over the weekend, but a few people asked me to write about this story.
ICYMI like I did: On Sunday night, fans tuned in to CBS to watch the broadcast of Billy Joel's 100th residency special at Madison Square Garden, only to be left disappointed when the performance was abruptly cut short during the iconic song "Piano Man" to make way for local news programming.
The event, titled Billy Joel: The 100th - Live at Madison Square Garden, was meant to celebrate Joel's remarkable achievement and historic run at the renowned New York City venue. This milestone concert also marked the first time one of Joel's performances was aired on a broadcast network, making the interruption even more unfortunate.
The broadcast faced initial setbacks, with some viewers experiencing a 30-minute delay due to the 2024 Masters Tournament. However, the real disappointment came when the screen suddenly went dark during the final verse of "Piano Man," leaving fans without the grand finale they had anticipated.
LOL.
One frustrated fan vented on social media, "The #BillyJoel #MSG #100 concert not only starts a half hour late, but then you cut off the last 3-4 minutes for local news to start at 11:30? Are you serious? This is an absolutely pathetic decision for an event that's been advertised for MONTHS, and you managed to completely botch it."
My favorite part of all this? THE MEETING.
Any time some ridiculous outlier like this happens, you can bet there will be a meeting. Some boss somewhere will ask “How did this happen?” (Likely answer - nobody thought to reprogram the automation/satellite feed/technobabble-soemthing from the scheduled 11:30 cutoff).
The follow-up question is “How do we make sure this never happens again?!!!!!”
You can be your bottom dollar that some poor Vice President Of Something is going to have to sit in their office when CBS gives this show another try on the 19th.
In a statement to Billboard on Monday (April 15), a spokesperson for CBS explained the snafu, writing, “A network programming timing error ended last night’s Billy Joel special approximately two minutes early in the Eastern and Central Time Zones. We apologize to Mr. Joel, his fans, our affiliated stations, and our audience whose viewing experience was interrupted during the last song. Due to the overwhelming demand from his legion of fans, BILLY JOEL: THE 100TH – LIVE AT MADISON SQUARE GARDEN will be rebroadcast in its entirety on CBS on April 19th at 9:00PM ET/PT.” (via Billboard)
I wonder how many rounds of approval THAT response took before it went out.
“A network programming timing error.” It’s not unheard of for the local news to start late on CBS. Have you heard of this National Football League? It’s pretty popular and the games end when they end, and the CBS lineup often gets backed up, with the news starting at 11-something. My guess is someone had done some math figuring “what’s the latest the Masters could possibly go” with a plan to have the hosts take it to the nearest round number, and the back time Billy Joel from there to 11:30.
When I was at Sirius(XM) there was nothing scarier than launching a new channel. God forbid there was a nano-second of dead-air when a channel launched. If so, there would be a meeting. Now once the channel was up, you could futz the thing up all day long and nobody cared. Just get the launch right. I feel ya CBS Executive.
ANYWAY, THE MEETING.
Question 1: What happened? Some close-to-retirement engineering type blames programming. Senior Programming Executive blames Junior Programming Executive. Senior Programming Executive goes back to Very Senior Executive who has actually moved on to something else by now and has lost interest. The meeting goes something like that. I wasn’t at the Billy Joel Meeting.
Question 2: How do we make sure this never happens again? Junior Programming Executive, with fresh bus tire track marks on their back, is ordered by Senior Programming Executive to sit at some desk IN THE OFFICE at 9:00PM ET/PT to make sure this never happens again.
The best part? Senior Programming Executive will ask the Junior Executive the next day “how did it go?” rather than monitor the situation live themself.
Because I am an anarchist, I kind of hope some sort of breaking news happens around 10:45 eastern, but also avoids affecting the Pacific broadcast so CBS has to try to air Piano Man a third time.
I’ve been to a variation of this meeting many times. It’s always ridiculous. I can also tell you that no matter how much you DO plan, it’s always the thing you don’t see coming that gets you.
When I wore a younger man’s clothes, Gene Burns did a broadcast from the White House with President Clinton. Gene was hosting a nationally syndicated radio show. Such shows come with CLOCKS (an agreed upon plan for when the breaks will be.) Clocks have “soft breaks” which you can take whenever, and “hard breaks” which come at a certain time. In this case, 15:29:50.
I have no memory of what the actual plan was. With the breaks, and a hard break at 15:29:50, the most the interview could have been was around 20 minutes.
Anyway, the President ran late. Understandable.
I was running “local” which means taking the network feed from eight feed away and playing it back for WOR New York. These days a computer would do that.
As the President joined Gene at 15:20-something, I started doing some time calculations in my head and I could see the train coming. I bet you can see the train coming.
Surely you wouldn’t take the hard break in the middle of interviewing the President! After all, what news could possibly be bigger? You’re already talking to the President - this IS the story.
And 15:29:50 came and…..the network took the break.
Which was a good thing, because that way we were on time for the 3:30 news, during which we learned what the president had to say to Gene Burns just seconds earlier.
Nobody told Gene (or Bill) what had happened, and they continued their now-private interview.
I am still laughing about this 30 years later.
BORING TECHNO-SECTION YOU SHOULD SKIP
Option 1: DON’T take the break. This will throw off some automated stations in Podunk because they will miss their cue-tone and all their commercial breaks will be thrown off until a human shows up. They should have paid someone to run the board.
Option 2: The local guy (me) could have taken the raw feed and kept WOR New York live with the President. Hey I was 20-something, not my call. Yell at the adults. You take a break, I pot up the news. That’s the job. (To be fair, I didn’t think of this solution until April 17, 2024.)
Option 3: Maybe pre-tape the thing?
Also while I was away. Iran attacked Israel. What was interesting to me, is the networks (at least CNN and ABC, I got my information from a TV at a Chipotle and didn't have access to their remote) brought in the A-Team on a Saturday Night! I saw David Muir and Wolf Blitzer at their proverbial desks! This was interesting, because as I have written previously. news has a way of breaking at inconvenient times.
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Yeah, but how many camera shots did the Billy Joel concert have of Taylor Swift?