In an age where a few nanoseconds can mean the winning edge, many TV viewers are stuck hours behind.
Not everyone, of course. Viewers in the Eastern and Central time zones are privileged to see everything on TV first. Lots of it, anyway.
Oh, sure. Maybe you're not the sort of person who grabs the front seat of the car so you can get where you're going ahead of the folks in the back seat. Maybe you're just not in that big a rush.
But if you reside in Oregon, don't fool yourself into thinking that you ever watch "Saturday Night Live." Wrong! You watch "Saturday Night Re-lived."
And if, while watching it, you find its humor a bit dated, no wonder: We saw it three hours earlier than you, when it really was "live from New York." Face it. West of Texas, that's an empty pledge.
Now what about the news? A network's evening newscast originates live from New York at 6:30 p.m. Eastern time. But if instead of Roslyn, N.Y., you happen to catch it in Roslyn, Wash., then you might be seeing it on tape, hours after the fact.
Sure, when events warrant, the broadcast is updated, sometimes from scratch. But otherwise, by the time you're tuned in, you're getting news from an anchorman who, like Elvis, has already left the building.
Does this preferential treatment for the nation's Eastern half seem fair? Don't you feel a little put off by TV's time zone tyranny?
Think back to last summer, when Kathie Lee Gifford left the side of Regis Philbin. After watching her farewell appearance as co-host of "Live!"(and watching as it happened) we had had a chance to dry our tears and go on with our lives before you West Coast fans could even start to deal with your loss.
Bad enough. But time-zone destiny can have an adverse impact on your TV watching in other ways, too. And that of your kids. Consider the plight of the Central time zone.
What network execs call an "8 o'clock show" might be suited to grown-ups and youngsters alike, whereas a "9 o'clock show" would probably skew toward mature tastes. But what about a so-called "9 o'clock show" as viewed in the Central zone? Why should children in Peoria be exposed to such a show at 8 p.m. - a show that kids in Pittsburgh, safe in the Eastern time zone's sheltering arms, might never encounter?
Don't worry about it, responds a network exec paid to understand these things. People in the Midwest, he explains, generally go to bed earlier. Therefore, 8 o'clock Central is the cultural equivalent of 9 p.m. Eastern, comfortably accommodating Midwestern lifestyles.
Maybe so. But what about the issue of heartland self-esteem? We in the East can only imagine what it's like to be a Central zoner languishing in our minus-60-minutes shadow. What kind of regional identity is that?
And why were these regions designated in the first place? Was our system of time zones (widely thought to have arisen in the 1880s to bring order to rail schedules) really meant to set the stage for certain viewers to get the jump on their western counterparts?
In any case, the also-ran West Coast gets consideration from the networks now and then. For instance, in September 1997, "ER" aired a live episode for Eastern and Central viewers - then telecast a full-blown encore performance for the Pacific zone three hours later.
Mountain time zone viewers? They, as usual, were caught betwixt and between. Many of them, poor dears, had to watch this "live" episode of "ER" on tape.
Not that there are enough of them to fret about. The Mountain zone, although covering a quarter of the continental United States, claims just 15 million residents, or a measly 6 percent of the nation's total population.
Besides, most of them are too busy skiing, rafting and camping out under the stars to squander their lives in front of the tube.
That's their problem. Those of us in TV's land of the temporally advantaged can relax. As the nation's leading couch potatoes, we see what we see before anybody else.
We forget it first, too.
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Copyright 2001 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed