Bob Newhart knows Billy Joel’s pain – at least in Albany.

Last Sunday, CBS aired a pre-taped Billy Joel concert as a television special. Well, because the previous program on the schedule – some golf tournament of note – ran a little long, the Billy Joel concert started a few minutes late.

That “few minutes late” meant that when Billy Joel took to the keyboard and sang his first major hit, “Piano Man,” and everybody in the audience – and most likely everyone at home – sang along like one does at a karaoke night – CBS ended the program in mid-song to throw to their local stations’ 11:00 news reports.

Owtch. Trust me, hell hath no scorn than millions of Billy Joel fans having their sing-along interrupted. Yikes.

Apparently CBS felt the backlash, and has scheduled a rebroadcast of the concert for this Friday. Which is fine, I guess. It’s not like CBS had anything worthwhile airing that Friday night anyway.

But this is not the first time that someone lopped off the last few minutes of an anticipated broadcast. Heck, it’s not the first time this happened in Albany. And it’s not even the first time this happened with the particular station – WRGB – who showed the Billy Joel concert and went to the news in the middle of the lah-de-dah-dee-dee-dah-dah chorus.

For this, we go all the way back to May 31st, 1990.

And this program.

Newhart was the second consecutive successful sitcom for comedian / actor Bob Newhart. The show featured Bob Newhart as a put-upon hotelier in a rural Vermont community, and featured a surreal cast of characters. Trust me, if I have to explain “Hi, my name is Larry, this is my brother Darryl, and this is my other brother Darryl,” then you’re just too young.

Newhart was extremely popular in its time, and its 194th and final episode was highly anticipated. As the final episode aired – which featured the twist that (spoiler alert) the entire Newhart series was a dram from Bob Hartley, the psychiatrist Bob Newhart played in his first successful sitcom, The Bob Newhart Show – yeah, nobody saw that coming. There were a few hilarious stinger jokes at the end of the episode, and it made for a nice, successful conclusion for the Newhart series.

Except … WRGB bungled the ending.

The last episode of Newhart ran a couple of minutes long, and WRGB had already programmed its “Here’s what’s coming up on the Channel 6 news” bumper to start at a specific time. Which … unfortunately … superseded the final two or three jokes of the Newhart finale.

OOPS.

Yeah, that turned into a tempest in a Capital Region teacup. Quel damage!

So what does this all mean?

Let’s face it. People make mistakes. It happens. Networks sometimes forget to change their programming timers. And in some cases … it can happen to the local broadcast as well.

I’ll tell you this, though … cutting off “Piano Man” is one thing … but if CBS had lopped a few moments off of, oh, I don’t know, “Captain Jack” – then there would have been hell to pay. 😀