Can someone explain the West Coast Delay?

The show goes out live to the east coast and the record it for broadcast to the West Coast 3 hours later. What they had to do was switch over from the feed from the playback as News 60 was starting and do the replacement in the same time space as they used when they did it the first time. Then switch back to the recorded version when they finished.

Larry

Most "live" shows and events (i.e. SNL, The Oscars) are only truly live for the East Coast. They are recorded and shown 3 hours later for the Pacific time zone. So if something goes monumentally wrong with the live east coast feed, you have a few hours to change it before it airs "live" on the west coast. If they aired it live everywhere it would come on at 8:30pm in California.

Occasionally SNL will change the west coast broadcast to replace sketches that didn't really work on the east coast broadcast with funnier ones from the taped dress rehearsal. In the Studio 60 ep, I think they had to write and perform a sketch in the 3 hour difference, which I'm not sure they have ever had to do on SNL. That would be extreme.