I thought last night was to be 3 hours, but it ended 15-20 minutes short of that and they put in filler. So I'm not sure about the 1 minute cut. Doesn't make sense to me.
"but it ended 15-20 minutes short of that and they put in filler."
No commercials.
I don't know why yours was short. Ours seemed to fill the entire time. We DVR'd it and watched it later, but the countdown time was still the allotted time for the show.
The explanation for that, Rush learned, was that they had originally filmed it for advertising (commercial) spots, but decided to air it uninterrupted. So in a 3 hour movie you would have had about 20 min. commercial time.