UPDATE: RTV not doing something so annoying after all

Well, you know the old saying: "If you don't like the TV listings around here, stick around; they'll change." Something like that. Anyway, I reported last week on upcoming schedule changes on my local RTV affiliate, as reflected in the on-screen program guide listings I checked out. Well, over the weekend, I noticed those listings have changed, and while I did offer a caveat when I mocked the changes I saw last week, I did mock them, and they may not have been ever "official," and they're not in place now. So as I remain ever an 'umble blogger, guv'nor, I apologize to RTV and to my readers for jumping the gun.

The good news is that the actual new fourth-quarter 2010 program schedule is better than the third-quarter lineup in some ways, and it's much, much better than I feared it would be because it does not include the odd insertion of more paid programming. On the contrary, RTV in the DC metro area is expanding its daily programming hours by shifting its Saturday morning E/I stuff to weekdays from 8:00 to 9:00. It's not a substantial change, but it's a step in the right direction, and it makes way for the new gloriously UN-"Educational/Informative" Saturday morning block of mostly Filmation cartoons.

The best news is that WJLA's RTV lineup has tweaked its late-night schedule, and while I don't think "Daniel Boone" is a great fit remaining at 11:00 P.M., at least there's not an infomercial in there. More promising is the move of "Rifleman and "Cisco Kid" to weekday afternoons, where they seem a better fit, and the return of "Alfred Hitchcock Presents" to the schedule (hopefully with the later seasons that were skipped over in the past) at midnight, followed by "Peter Gunn" at 12:30. The Hitchcock/Gunn hour (Hey, doesn't THAT sound like a nice and goofy old Filmation cartoon?) strikes me as a much better way to close out the day. I'd still love to see a little more black and white at 1:00 A.M., but, hey, this is pretty good.

"Leave it to Beaver" loses one showing per day as it moves to 5:30, displaced by the aforementioned combo of westerns. Other than that, it's pretty much business as usual--not the freshening up the schedule really needs, but not the fiasco that showed up last week with "paid programming" getting two more slots in the lineup.

There are some weekend changes, too, to accompany the kids' block, most notably the addition of "The Adventures of Robin Hood" and what I believe is the departure of "Wagon Train," but I don't want to delve into that scenario right now. After all, it, too, is likely subject to change, or to have never changed at all, or at least to have not changed the way I thought it did...and I'll stop now because even I'm confused.