it means 9:00 PM standard time and 8:00PM central time

The US is split into time zones, so national television has to be split up the same way. If they just said "Tune in at 9 o clock" the people in the central time zone would be an hour off.

9 (9pm eastern standard time) 8c (8pm central "something" time) -Append- The TV networks use this strange kind of shorthand and assume everyone knows what it means. Obviously, from the answers so far, not everyone does know. The basic idea is that there is a "prime time" schedule every evening. (Outside of evenings, the same rules may not apply.) The hours for prime time are 8:00 pm to 11:00 pm in the Eastern and Pacific time zones, and they are 7:00 pm to 10:00 pm in the Central and Mountain time zones. (Don't ask me why. Something to do with generally accepted working hours and bedtimes, but obviously it's not a very good generalization.) So when they say 10/9c, it's shorthand for the third hour of prime time, whichever time zone you're in. In other words, it's 10:00 Eastern and Pacific, 9:00 Central and Mountain. They're not telling you the whole thing. You have to figure it out if you're in the Mountain or Pacific zones. If it's a live event, then all bets are off. In some cases, it may really be broadcast live in all time zones. Then it would be 10:00 Eastern, 9:00 Central, 8:00 Mountain, 7:00 Pacific. But that kind of telecast is fairly rare. More usually, the network will broadcast a tape-delayed version in prime time even while saying it's live. It may really be live only in the Eastern and Central zones. Very confusing. Then there are the smaller networks and cable stations, who often don't have as many different "feeds" as the major networks. Note that the regular system of 10e/9c/9m/10p requires three different broadcasts because 10e and 9c are the same time, 9m is one hour later, and 10p is two hours later than that. The smaller networks tend to have two feeds, one for Eastern and one for Pacific. Then they feed Central and Mountain with the closest one. For Central, it's the same as the big guys, but the Mountain zone gets all screwed up. For Mountain, the Eastern feed is an hour too early (prime time from 6:00 to 9:00) and the Pacific feed is two hours too late (prime time from 9:00 to 12:00). I know. I live in Arizona. Probably too much information, but if anyone has read this far, thanks for reading my outpouring of trivia! http://www.eduqna.com/Trivia/1230-1-trivia-4.html

The event will happen at 9 o'clock eastern standard time, which is 8 o'clock central standard time in the USA (0200 your time:)). I guess the tune stayed on--like tuning a radio signal.

It is 9:00 Eastern time, 8:00 Central Time.