CBS will rebroadcast Sunday's night's special, Billy Joel: The 100th – Live at Madison Square Garden, after it was cut off halfway through the finale of "The Piano Man."
The network released a statement saying, “A network programming timing error ended last night’s Billy Joel special approximately two minutes early in the Eastern and Central Time Zones. We apologize to Mr. Joel, his fans, our affiliated stations and our audience whose viewing experience was interrupted during the last song. Due to the overwhelming demand from his legion of fans, ‘Billy Joel: The 100th — Live at Madison Square Garden’ will be rebroadcast in its entirety on CBS on April 19th at 8 p.m..”
Instead of having the credits start rolling over the performance, many stations just cut mid-verse over to local programming, meaning the 11 or 10 o'clock newscasts.
The problem was that The Masters golf tournament ran over a half-hour late, pushing all of CBS's programming back that evening. Those stations went to local news at 11:30 ET or 10:30 PT.
While Joel did not comment on the snafu, his fans certainly did with one in the New York-area writing, "Hey CBS, WTF is this? You cut off Billy Joel during 'Piano Man' of all songs? And then didn't come back to it?!?! No wonder network TV is a mess..."
Billy is down to the last four shows of his monthly Madison Square Garden residency -- April 26th, May 9th, June 8th, and the finale, July 25th.
You can check out the original statement about it here on CBS' Official Instagram.