work and clean-up. Television broadcast The Ten Commandments was first broadcast on the ABC network on February 18, 1973, and has aired annually on the network since then, with the exception of 1999, traditionally during the Passover and Easter holidays. Since 2006 the network has typically aired The Ten Commandments on the Saturday night prior to Easter, with the broadcast starting at 7:00 p.m. in the Eastern and Pacific Time Zones and 6:00 p.m. in the Central, Mountain, Alaska and Hawaii Time Zones. (Exceptions occurred in 2020 when the film aired prior to Palm Sunday, which that year was April 4, due to the COVID-19 pandemic; and in 2022, when the film aired on April 9, the Saturday before Palm Sunday, due to an NBA game telecast scheduled on the night before Easter the following week.) The film is one of only two pre-scheduled ABC Saturday Movies of the Week every year, the other being The Sound of Music. Unlike many lengthy films of the day, which were usually broken up into separate airings over at least two nights, ABC elected to show The Ten Commandments in one night and has done so every year it has carried the film, with one exception; in 1997, ABC elected to split the movie in two and aired half of it in its normal Easter Sunday slot, which that year was March 30, with the second half airing on Monday, March 31 as counterprogramming to the other networks' offerings, which included CBS' coverage of the NCAA Men's Basketball Championship Game. The length of the film combined with the necessary advertisement breaks has caused its broadcast window to vary over the years; today, ABC's total run time for The Ten Commandments'' stands at four hours and 44 minutes, just above one hour longer than its three-hour and 39-minute length. This requires the network to overrun into the 11:00 p.m./10:00 p.m. timeslot that belongs to the local affiliates, thus delaying their late local news and any other programming they may air in the overnight hours. Affiliates may also delay the film to the usual start of prime time at 8:00 p.m./7:00 p.m. to keep their schedules in line for early evening, at the cost of further delaying their local newscasts or forgoing them entirely. In 2010, the film was broadcast in high definition for the first time, which allowed the television audience to see it