One of my billionaire fantasies was to one day archive all of TV Guide and then use that to line up airing blocks for each decade at the start of every decade and then have it available as a streaming option.
Either way! Thank you so much for this!
Then, most of these are missing. Archive.org's collection is thread-bare. For most calendar dates they only have one, and which market it is for is just random (though, it favors the big ones... California, NYC/NJ, etc).
After that, each page of listings is just bad. It's not as easily OCRed as more traditional multi-column magazines. The listings often don't make mention of which episode is being re-run, title only quite often. This affects afternoon cartoons on UHF quite a bit, since they'd do alot of the short film Looney Tunes and Woody Woodpecker. You don't get any information on pre-emption at all. No sports-going-in-to-overtime or President-Reagan-has-an-important-announcement-about-the-commies. Daytime soaps can probably be pieced together just from the date (but that isn't perfect over long stretches and mixups accumulate, the NY Times lost track of their issue number and by the time they noticed they were off by 5000).
Hell, I wonder how many different edited-for-tv edits of movies there are, for at least a few there might be more than one because there's more reasons to do it than just bleeping out profanity.
It is pretty comprehensive and obviously it keeps the same market (NY). On your last point yeah the amazing thing is just how variable the length of movies are. Also just how many there were! Over 26 thousand unique films played on the 60ish channels in the New York Times in the 90s. Around 100 a day. Some films have like 40 votes on IMDb and played 20 times on television.