From airings of the special "Broadway and Beyond at the Tonys", that week's edition of "60 Minutes" and, of course, the Tonys themselves. This was the 77th annual show and CBS' 44th year of airing it (the CBS network has aired the Tonys since 1979, but the Tonys have had to skip 2020 because of the COVID-19 pandemic and the resulting closure of all Broadway theaters, which pushed the 74th Tonys to a date of September 26, 2021).
COMMENT: Ever since I started to regularly use Puffer to record off-air material, I have wanted to record one of those annual airings of the Tonys, one of the strategies I take to keep something of my New York heritage alive. I made one attempt to record them last year (when the WGA strike meant that the entire ceremony was unscripted and anything that could go wrong on live TV went more wrong than usual). As a bit of TV viewing karma, in addition to the ads, promos and station and network IDs, I also included the most repetitive Breaking News banner you will ever see (which, curiously, still has the logo that KPIX retired during the 2022 holiday season; I'm guessing CBS' attempts to get the Group W font off the TV screen weren't entirely successful after all). Also, if I'm not mistaken, this might set a new record in terms of the running times I have for videos that consist entirely of commercial breaks. I took four hours and 45 minutes of something I recorded on a Sunday afternoon's journey into night that I spent with the Tiffany Network and boiled it down to . . . one hour and twenty minutes. Yep, you'll be spending quite a long time with this beauty, that's for sure. It is also the riskiest attempt to record something off the air that I ever undertook. It took as long to edit as it took for the Tonys to unfold. A really risky job, but worth it, especially for someone who was originally from NYC.