Catching unsuspecting viewers in a time warp

If you've ever found yourself negotiating dinner plans with a control queen, then you know the feeling. You suggest 7 o'clock, and the control queen counters with 7:30. You offer 7:15, but the control queen can't possibly make it until 7:20. Soon, the bottom of all reason falls out, and the rendezvous is set for 7:23 and 30 seconds, sharp -- in the control queen's neighborhood, of course.

This season, now that it finally has a handful of hits to feed its hungry ego, ABC has become the raging control queen of the nightly grid. The newly flush network of ''Lost" and ''Desperate Housewives" has taken to lifting a minute of our time here and a minute there, thereby throwing our viewing schedules completely out of whack. For example, rather than ending ''Lost" on Wednesdays at 9 p.m., in keeping with the hourly and half-hourly scheme we've abided by since the beginning of time itself, ABC will end episodes at 9:01 or slightly later. Its goal: to manipulate us out of the agreed-upon standard and suck us into its own temporal warp for a few hours.

If you've watched any Nielsen ratings hits in recent years, then you know that ABC is not alone in playing this petty game. CBS does it with ''CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" and ''Everybody Loves Raymond," and Fox does it with ''The O.C." And NBC is the most notorious of all, after having pioneered time banditry with its ''Super-size" Thursday night sitcoms. In the guise of kindly tossing us a few extra morsels of ''Friends" and ''Will & Grace," the slickest of networks was actually working to deter us from other networks' lineups. If we watched ''Friends" until 8:45, NBC honchos knew, we probably weren't going to jump to CBS and begin a show in medias res. They were bribing us into surrender for the night.

For the networks, the advantages of time banditry extend beyond the psychology of subordination. By carrying ''Desperate Housewives" for 61 minutes Sunday nights, ABC can attach more higher money-generating ads to that show than the lower rated series that follows, ''Boston Legal."

But ultimately for ABC, it's all about putting the alpha in ''alphabet network." At a time when viewers are gaining the power to watch shows on their own time, all of the TV outlets are fighting back. We're armed with digital video recorders (DVRs) such as TiVo and VCRs, and we can order shows ''on demand." They're armed with a little time-based mind game that can foil TiVo's automatic recording ability, since the machine can't cope with conflicts. We're armed with the ability to fast-forward through commercials. They're armed with product placement, which drops name brands conspicuously into shows from ''American Idol" and ''Survivor" to ''American Dreams." Ultimately, people have the power, as Patti Smith put it, but the networks certainly aren't going to concede that.

Trying to control viewers is the network's mission, of course. Their financial goal is to keep you in their realm for as long as possible, watching their shows, watching their ads, justifying the raising of ad rates. When they come up with one hit, they try to spread that viewer love across the night -- something CBS has done quite successfully with ''CSI: Crime Scene Investigation" and ''Everybody Loves Raymond," which has been supporting a lineup of mediocre comedy clones for a few years now. They try to foster viewer passivity, to lure us away from the remote control for the night; and, sadly, it often works. CBS even managed to use two or three shows in this manner to hoist itself to the top of the network heap.

Remember, the last thing the networks want is for you to watch their shows at your leisure, zipping through movie promos and hard-sell ads featuring SUVs amid the beauties of nature. They need you in real time, so they can guarantee advertisers that they have a captive audience. A few eager outlets have actually given away DVDs of premiere episodes in magazines and on AOL -- Showtime's ''Huff," for example, and Fox's ''House" -- to seduce you into a first taste. But still the ultimate goal is for you to pay for viewing, usually with your precious time.

My hope is that as the networks try to clock us into submission, we become even more deliberate when selecting what to watch. We need to learn how to manually adjust our TiVos and VCRs to get around the silly little millimeter war. And we need to be more mindful about what starts when, and use our remotes to take charge of the schedule as much as we can. Remember: Give a control queen a minute, and she'll take an hour or two.

Matthew Gilbert can be reached at gilbert@globe.com.