CBS Goes Down in Middle of S--tkicker NYE Show

[Mark Jeffries]

Wednesday night at around 11:12 p.m. ET, in the middle of Lainey Wilson singing, CBS' New Year's Eve show from Nashville (from the producer of this year's Kennedy Center Honors fiasco) went abruptly off the air--after a long series of promos, New York fired up a rerun of "Matlock" (the current Kathy Bates version, not the Andy Griffith version) and then 12 minutes later went back to Nashville and hosts hack comic Burt Kreischer and singer HARDY (a guy, I thought that going by one name only meant they were a woman and was some sort of Internet influencer) saying that there was a power outage in Nashville and joking that it wasn't their fault:

https://deadline.com/2026/01/cbs-nye-special-nashvilles-big-bash-tech-issues-matlock-1236659616/

And although one would think they could edit it out in time in Studio City, the cockup was on the delayed West Coast telecast.

[Jim Ellwanger]

One precedent here is World Series Game 3 in 1989, where after ABC lost their feed from San Francisco due to the earthquake, they went to reruns of "Roseanne" and "The Wonder Years" before the connection could be reestablished:

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[Kevin M.]

CBS… now with even more BS

It is true that anyone with a half-decent cellphone can produce content, there still needs to be experts and technicians (not just one guy in a basement with a laptop hardwired to the affiliates) to produce and transmit broadcast television. Live TV is doubly precarious. Some buffering is expected on YouTube, but not at the network level. 

More and more, I’m noticing huge variations in volume between stations (and between shows), and although modern cameras and switchers automatically color-correct… they still need to be fine tuned, and it isn’t happening. 

Test patterns and color bars (with tone) exist for a reason, specifically as a uniform standard to calibrate color and volume and signal. But nobody knows how to use a waveform or vector-scope anymore, so things will just keep spiraling downward. 

Live TV requires an assortment of engineers in NYC and LA, in coordination with engineers at wherever the signal originates. To save money, networks have bought into plug-and-play technology, and though it isn’t deeply flawed, when it goes wrong, there is nobody there to troubleshoot. Frankly, on NYE, it’s kind of a miracle there was someone in the head-end at CBS capable of cueing up an old Matlock. 

Kevin M. (RPCV)

To view this discussion visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/tvornottv/E055523B-88E3-492E-87F1-24EB53C44296%40ellwanger.tv.

[David Bruggeman]

I think, even if there weren't the staff shortages that Kevin posted about, that cutting 12 minutes of technical difficulties is still going to require filling that gap in some way that the network and/or its affiliates either couldn't address or lacked alternatives.

In other words, could the affiliates have started their next programs 12 minutes earlier or have 12 minutes of stuff they could plug in with little advance notice?  I don't know the answer, but I'm leaning towards no.

And FWIW, at least in Sacramento they aired the countdown in both the East Coast and West Coast timeslots.

David

[M-D November]

"Their next programs" in this case would have been whatever was scheduled to start post-NYE programming (paid programming or - shudder - "Comics Unleashed"), which likely would have been as jarring as anything else. And I wouldn't be surprised if many smaller local affiliates had the bare minimum staff on duty (if not running entirely off automation).

Now, why the NETWORK couldn't have vamped for 12 minutes with canned s**tkicker footage is another question entirely.