It was 16 years ago this summer that some viewers — a lot of viewers, judging from the number of similar anecdotes — thought their cable had suddenly cut out at the very end of the final episode of The Sopranos. It didn’t. (Although it almost concluded with a very different song.) But something similar happened to some viewers of Sunday night’s airing of Accused, the new anthology crime drama that bowed on Fox — or least most of it did.
As per Deadline, more than a dozen markets — at least 8% of the country, but maybe much higher — were in for a downer ending to the show’s maiden episode. Instead of finding out what happened to the lead character, played by Michael Chiklis, many watched as stations suddenly and prematurely cut to local commercials. Deadline breaks down what went wrong:
The stations reportedly cut to local commercial at 10:55:45 PM and returned at 10:58:06 PM. The ad break was supposed to start at 10:58:20, following the sixth and final act of the episode. Instead, it pre-empted 2.5 minutes of action when key revelations about the case were revealed, rejoining the episode for the final 14 seconds.
Some of the areas affected by the snafu were Cleveland, Sacramento, St. Louis, Indianapolis, San Diego, Greensboro, Little Rock, Lexington, Honolulu, Springfield, Ft. Smith, Monroe, and Jackson.
There’s a happy ending, of sorts: Those unfortunate souls who were left hanging — and fuming on social media — can mosey on over to Hulu and watch the entire uninterrupted episode. Also good news (for Fox at least): Accused drew in 8.4 million viewers — a record for the network for a debut. Hopefully most of those people liked the episode enough to want to see how it ended.
(Via Deadline)