Monday Night Football puts Season 41 in trouble on ABC

WPBF actually is not doing this. They are keeping Wheel at 7:00 and moving J! overnight, putting it in a double run with Daytime J!

WABC aired Wheel in its entirety starting around 2:47 AM ET. Tamron Hall was joined in progress after it finished, and luckily for DVR recordings, the start of the Tamron slot was during the commercial break before TTU, so nothing should have been missed if you recorded both shows. Annoying that we had to record 90 minutes of programming and the episode is split under two different titles, though, since they still never fixed the overnight listing and R1-3 is still under ABC World News Tonight.

KAIT-TV! That's in my hometown of Jonesboro, Arkansas!

Not yet confirmed if every Monday will have a pregame show. Wheel is still listed at the normal time on WABC for 10/2 and 10/9 as of now.

Still, this is not good news for the West Coast.

^ It is because of the strikes. ABC doesn't have enough programming for Monday nights now, and they refuse to do reruns of their scripted shows or take a page out of the other networks' books and acquire international or streaming series.

If there's any good news here, it's that the new deal to have MNF every week is only effective for this year because ABC hopes their scripted shows can return in 2024.

Granted, the strikes have no relation to airing pregame at 7:30 since that slot is not primetime.

It's sadly ironic that Wheel is one of the few shows that can continue production without any problem during the strikes, and yet it's suffering because of strike-related decisions from others. Even when Wheel has a production advantage over J!, the latter is still making out better in the end.

If ABC decides to make MNF weekly again next season, something's gotta give over at Wheel. Either CBS Media Ventures has to allow scheduling outside of the 7 PM hour, or Wheel has to learn not to put out new episodes on Mondays during NFL season.


As of this post, the added ABC broadcasts are now listed on MNF's Futon Critic page. There are no pregame shows listed between 9/18 and 12/11 (even though WRIC claimed that there will be one on 11/20).

The East Coast was not affected at all when MNF used to be on ABC every week, or when it was local markets only, except if an affiliate opted to air a local pregame special. ABC never preceded its NFL broadcasts with pregame until this year.

The West Coast's ABC affiliates would delay Wheel a day during the entire NFL season and run weeks from Tuesday-Saturday with no Saturday rerun. However, that was before ABC began airing college football games every Saturday evening. I imagine in those days, ABC fed reruns of random primetime shows for the West Coast to air after the game on Mondays. Nowadays, they leave primetime to the affiliates and the West Coast will usually put Wheel between 9 and 11 PM but the problem is the games almost always run over and some affiliates will cut Wheel off or skip over it when this happens. Having witnessed this situation on pretty much all of them, it only happens to Wheel if anything; J! never gets cut off or skipped unless the game ran so long that Wheel was already lost; KATU always does news from 8-9, infomercials at 9, J! at 10, and Wheel at 10:30; the news always runs in full which means the infomercials and J! start late, then Wheel gets JIP'd as soon as J! finishes, or they skip right to the 11:00 news).

The same goes for the Saturday reruns which are usually scheduled in the same fashion. Basically, the West Coast ABC's get Wheel four days a week at the normal 7:00/7:30 and two days a week two or three hours later than that. KABC would sometimes go the Tue-Sat route if they aired a MNF game locally, but since it wasn't a national game, they were still obligated to air the regular ABC primetime shows after the game and had no room for any Wheel to air on Monday.

Due to MNF ending around 10:50 PM CT, KAIT had started airing Wheel at around 12:58 AM CT (could have been closer to either 12:55 AM or 1:00 AM). Only the toss-up rounds appeared in Wheel’s DVR recording, so I recorded the encore of Live with Kelly and Mark that KAIT airs daily (at 1:00 AM) to get the full episode.

WABC-TV aired a promo that Monday’s episode will be seen overnight. I set my DVR at the scheduled 2:37 am time slot. This morning when I checked they aired a rerun of World News Tonight with David Muir instead of Wheel. I wondered if WABC-TV changed the air time at the last minute or did not air it at all.

As of now at least, Wheel is showing on my program guide for Monday on WABC at its regular 7:30pm time slot.