EXCLUSIVE UPDATE

CBS will rebroadcast the Billy Joel special after screwing it up last night. The new date is April 19th at 9pm.

In a statement, the network apologized to Joel, his fans, and CBS affiliated stations.

EARLIER:

CBS is busy finding a scapegoat for its screw up last night when they cut off Billy Joel’s special before it ended. They got some exec in Florida to say it was his fault. LOL. No, it was the network.

Maybe the network was getting back at Billy for his 1994 Grammys performance. Billy and co were in the middle of his song “River of Dreams” when the piano man just stopped cold in the middle of it.

Billy said, looking at this watch: “Valuable advertising time going by. Valuable advertising time going by. Dollars. Dollars. Dollars.”

Why? Because earlier in the show, the Grammys had cut off Frank Sinatra, the chairman of the effing board, before he finished speaking. They went to an ad, and that irritated Billy– and the audience.

Retribution last night? You never know. Networks have long memories.

Check it out at 2:35

Billy Joel is all over the charts today following the botched broadcast of his special last night.

CBS pulled the plug on the special, which was Emmy worthy, in the last ten minutes and cut to local news. Billy was in the middle of singing “Piano Man.” The whole MSG audience was singing along, and no doubt fans at home were, too.

Fans were outraged. A CBS insider told me: “In the old days, heads would roll over this considering how much effort went into the special.”

The ironic part is that the producers moved “Piano Man” to the end of the show. In concert, the classic song closed the show before encores. If they’d left it alone, CBS would have cut during “You May Be Right.”

Meantime, Billy sees six singles and six albums hit the iTunes charts today, with “Piano Man” at 43. The albums are all his greatest hits packages, and “The Stranger.” On amazon.com, same thing. So that’s some small consolation!

CBS had better re-air that special very quickly– and on the network, not Paramount Plus!

Turn the lights back on!

Whoever’s running the control room at CBS should be fired.

The network cut off Billy Joel’s two hour concert special tonight right at the end, as Billy was singing “Piano Man,” his most famous song.

Just as Billy was launching into the finale of the two hour show — the last verse of “Piano Man” with all of Madison Square Garden singing along — the screen went black.

When it recovered, it wasn’t Joel taking a bow with his band for what had been a remarkable, Emmy worthy special. No, it was the local news anchor (and not Dana Tyler).

CBS paid a fortune to put this show on two weeks ago the Garden, and this was how it ended.

Fans are demanding the whole show be rerun immediately on CBS, not just Paramount Plus. But this episode should be a lesson to CBS — their share of viewers is already diminished severely. They don’t need a boycott.

One reason this might have happened is because the Joel special was hitting the half hour mark at 11:30 and had already run 30 minutes past its allotted time. But that’s because the whole schedule was pushed because of golf. “60 Minutes” started late, followed by “Tracker,” so the Billy Joel show was tardy as well.

A real blot on the Tiffany network.