Sounds like he got incredibly lucky then. Having not been to Los Angeles in years, I haven't been to any eight-hour tapings, but I've certainly heard the horror stories.
The horror stories you've heard have been about the new breed of shows, the ones that are highly complicated, or (more commonly) that want to look as slick and polished as possible. The classics like Wheel, Jeopardy and Price are run much more efficiently.
The record for efficiency in my personal experience has to be Craig Ferguson's show. My wife and I attended a two-show tape date a couple of years ago that got done in under two hours. That's right,
even with a break between shows, they got the whole thing done in LESS than real time! They typically spent as little as thirty seconds in commercial breaks, and both shows were later padded slightly with short comic videos that the studio audience never saw.
