Enigmarch 2026, Day 17: AIR

[tahnan]

Every puzzle writer reaches a point where they must decide: do I not use "Helena, Hussy of Horror" because it is too obscure? Or can I not possibly not use "Helena, Hussy of Horror" because it is too awesome?

I think it's clear how I answered. Sorry this took forever to post; I had the idea and then had to keep tweaking it until I got something that worked. I think there's a lot to say about elegance of design and where it can or can't get compromised, but I'll just leave this here.

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We Regret the Airer

We here at Rerun Television have updated our nightly schedules for our eleven channels. We've even updated our midnight block of "Re-Reruns", where each channel reruns a show from a different channel, though we might have lost track of that somewhere.

Channel	8pm-9pm	9pm-10pm	10pm-11pm	11pm-midnight	Midnight-6am: Re-Reruns
RTV-①	EastEnders	iCarly	SpongeBob SquarePants	TekWar
RTV-②	The Bletchley Circle	Between the Lines	Pawn Stars	Square Pegs
RTV-③	Castle	Forever Knight	The Joey Bishop Show	The King of Queens
RTV-④	9-1-1: Nashville	Austin City Limits	Helena, Hussy of Horror	Percy Jackson and the Olympians
RTV-⑤	Boston Legal	$#*! My Dad Says	Star Trek	T. J. Hooker
RTV-⑥	Below Decks	Green Acres	Perry Mason	Third Watch
RTV-⑦	Being Human	Kindred: the Embraced	Port Charles	True Blood
RTV-⑧	Grey's Anatomy	Orphan Black	The Real Housewives of Orange County	Red Dwarf
RTV-⑨	Dead Like Me	Frasier	iZombie	Reaper
RTV-⑩	Big Brother Brazil	Diners, Drive-ins and Dives	Monuments, Memorials, & Museums	Wow! Wow! Wubbzy!
RTV-⑪	Georgie & Mandy's First Marriage	Jon & Kate Plus 8	Law & Order: SVU	Love & Hip Hop

Worried that we have half-hour shows in hour blocks? It's fine; we just added more commercials so that everything can start on the hour. That should make it easier to cycle through the channels looking for your favorite show. There's an obvious way to cycle, of course, but here's what our resident critic had to say about the Re-Rerun block:

Reed M. Innordar, TV critic: Once you've found the right way to cycle through the channels, you'll want to switch back to the first channel in the cycle, which obviously is RTV-4. Then flip through the channels in this order: 4th in the cycle (which again is obviously RTV-2), then 3rd, 6th, 8th, 10th, 2nd, 5th, 7th, 11th, and 9th.

It's all a bit confusing, we realize, and we really hope we didn't misread what Reed was telling us. If so, we regret the error.

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Curb Your Enthusiasm? Press Your Luck? Check Your Answer?

Comments

[lorelei]

I really like the way this one worked out. A nice diversity of connections, and I even learned a few things as I started to put things together.
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