Slippery Network Affiliation is essentially a repost from twenty years ago. I wrote about Gilmore Girls, then a favorite show of my wife and myself. The television coverage is no longer the same in northern New York. I’m fascinated that this was the first long post on this blog.
I had set the VCR to tape at home. But I neglected to tell my wife that she needed to put in a FRESH (just like the WB!) tape, and the incumbent tape ran out of space about 20 minutes into the show! (I would have changed it, except I was out of town.)
Since I was still in Lake Placid on Tuesday, I went to my room after the SBDC awards banquet at about 10 p.m., turned on the TV, flipped through the channels, and came across a Gilmore Girls episode. Initially, I assumed it was a rerun broadcast on ABC Family cable, but it soon became evident that it was THAT NIGHT’S episode, which I watched.
But why was it on at 10 p.m.? Was there some (amazingly rare) Presidential news conference or major catastrophe that backed up the programming?
Nah.
There is no WB affiliate in the Plattsburgh, NY/Burlington, VT television market, so WFFF in Burlington (actually Colchester), FOX 44, broadcasts the 8-10 pm WB shows from 10 pm to midnight!
Big city TV
Those of you in large markets may not appreciate this fully. When I was a kid, there were seven stations in New York City: 2 (CBS), 4 (NBC), 7 (ABC), 13 (PBS), and 5, 9, and 11 (all independents). Eventually, 5 became a Fox affiliate, 11 became the WB’s outlet, and 9 went with UPN (and moved to New Jersey).
(Incidentally, this numbering is why most fictional TV stations in those days were 3, 6, 8, or 12, the remaining numbers on the VHF dial, or some upper number on the UHF dial, Channels 14-83. WJM, Channel 12, Minneapolis, is most notable on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. And if you don’t know what the heck I mean by VHF and UHF, look here.)
Small town TV
But in a smaller market, such as Binghamton, NY, where I grew up (and at a time when there were only the three “major” networks), there were only two stations, WNBF, Channel 12 (CBS), and WINR, Channel 40 (NBC).
Then, one Saturday morning in the fall of 1962, I turned on the TV just before 7 a.m. to Channel 34. Where there was nothing, suddenly we had a third station! It was WBJA, an ABC affiliate. My TV viewing choices had just increased by 50%!
I didn’t realize until later that Channel 12 (and perhaps Channel 40) was broadcasting some ABC programming before Channel 34 came on the scene. Lawrence Welk, an ABC program, was showing on Channel 12 on Saturday nights at 6 or 6:30 pm. I recall that other ABC shows such as Bachelor Father, The Flintstones, Hawaiian Eye, Leave It to Beaver, Ozzie & Harriet, The Real McCoys, and Top Cat would show up on the schedule, often on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, outside of prime time (which was usually 7:30-11 pm in those days.) I remember these shows quite clearly; most were off the schedule by the fall of 1962. I must have seen them SOMEWHERE. Cable didn’t exist, and I didn’t go to New York City that often.
Subsequently, I learned that some stations would swap in a popular show on their secondary affiliation, dump the primary affiliate’s show, or relegate it to an off-peak time slot.
Shows broadcast by one network appearing on the affiliate of another network were common in most small markets from the mid-1940s to the mid-1950s, when there was a fourth network, Dumont.
You big-market folks don’t understand the confusion!¦
The description of the movie The Life of Chuck on 
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