Season 36 Pre-emptions Thread

Another station might have had a small change of heart at the last minute.

WSEE in Erie, Pennsylvania (which also serves as Puerto Rico's CBS affiliate) did not have the affected weekday episodes of Wheel or Jeopardy! scheduled at all. However, listings now show two airings of each show's Saturday rerun on Saturday: Wheel at 5:00 and 7:00PM ET, J! at 5:30 and 7:30. Although they are both listed as the same repeats, it is very likely that the 5:00 hour airings are make-up airings of this week's Thursday or Friday episodes. The station's website still has the 5:00 and 5:30 slots as Paid Programming.

KHOU Houston aired the rerun yesterday, meaning they skipped Thursday's episode altogether. Thanks to eybyon for verifying this. Wasn't able to check WMAZ Macon but I imagine they did the same.

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Local anomaly: WHIO Dayton is currently adding a crawl to Wheel warning viewers that DISH is threatening to drop the station. Since the crawl would otherwise interfere with the category strip, the footage is slightly "squashed" upwards. The crawl remains on screen for about the first 2 1/2 minutes of the show, then it disappears while still leaving a black void under the footage for another 3 minutes or so, before the footage reverts to its normal size.

Send a followup complaint pointing out that pre-empting Wheel in favor of a special that'll be aired multiple times over the following weekend doesn't make any sense whatsoever.

Translation: "We're not airing tonight's Wheel of Fortune and that's final."

Tonight's show must really suck in KOMU's opinion.

Nah, they just don't care. Look out how many stations refused to air last Thursday's episode (whether for March Madness or for local reasons) despite it being the only Bonus Round win of the week.

I sent another complaint under a different Email and used a different name and writing style. The same person (station manager) replied with the exact same response, and after I replied to that? Yep... "Thank you for sharing your opinion and concerns." again.

There are also complaints on their social media pages and of course those weren't acknowledged. At least KYTV Springfield, which also pre-empted Wheel last Thursday for a weather special, cared enough to move the episode to Saturday afternoon (but still really shouldn't have pre-empted Wheel in the first place especially since that episode had a home viewer sweepstakes attached to it).

Tonight's episode is being pre-empted entirely on WDRW in Augusta, Georgia (CBS) by a special on the Masters Tournament, which is traditionally held in that city and starts tomorrow. Wheel will not be airing at all. Jeopardy! is unaffected, because of course it is.


WRDW is one of those "If Jeopardy! is pre-empted, we move it; if Wheel is pre-empted, we do nothing" stations. They co-own the market's NBC affiliate WAGT, and J! always moves there if pre-empted (replacing a rerun of The Big Bang Theory), but Wheel never airs at all. This was also the case during March Madness.

I complained to them about their disregard for Wheel and this was their response:

It's odd how they imply that moving either show to a subchannel or sister station can only be done with advance permission, yet other markets like Providence and Atlanta always do so with no issues.

While it's nice to see a station finally give the "champion continuity" excuse for J!'s favoritism instead of "it has more viewers", it still shouldn't mean that Wheel can't air overnight or have the episode delayed to a weekend time slot, and of course since this special is only half an hour, they choose to save J!.

Or, duh! Why not keep Wheel where it is at 7:00, air the Masters special at 7:30, and then air J! on NBC so that everybody's happy? But nope, sabotaging Wheel for no reason yet again...

According to acwof , the first half of tonight's episode accidentally aired at 9:30AM ET this morning in the Atlanta market.

It happened on WATL (MyTV), which is not Wheel's main station in that area; they only air Wheel on Saturdays and whenever it gets pre-empted on the main station WXIA (NBC). WATL accidentally began airing what was likely tonight's episode of Wheel (contestants were Kiera/Brian/Halleh; theme was Wheel Around the World) instead of a rerun of the 10/07/18 episode of Millionaire. The mistake was realized by the end of Round 2; as soon as that puzzle was solved, the show abruptly cut to a brief commercial break, then the Millionaire rerun returned at the start of a new segment.

There are no scheduled pre-emptions for Atlanta any time soon, so this was definitely unintentional.

CBS affiliate KTAB in Abilene, Texas is pre-empting tonight's Wheel with a city council debate. Wheel will air at 12:37AM CT after Corden in place of Paid Programming.

^ At least it’s better than none.