Breakfast television

Breakfast television (Australia, Ireland, New Zealand and United Kingdom ) or morning show (Canada and United States), is a type of infotainment television program, broadcast live in the morning (typically scheduled between 6:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m.). Often hosted by a small team of male and female hosts, morning shows typically target the combined demographic of people getting ready for work and school, and stay-at-home adults and parents.

The world's first breakfast / morning show on national television is Today, which set the tone for the television genre and began broadcasting on 14 January 1952, on the U.S. television network NBC. Nearly 60 years later, the Today Show still remains number one in the morning rating and since its start many other stations around the world followed NBC's lead and copied their successful format.

Format and style

Breakfast-television broadcast programming normally feature regular television news briefs and information reports on business and the stock market, sports highlights (on occasion), and weather and commuter travel ("traffic" in North American usage) — particularly in the "early half", when the bulk of the workforce demographic is still home. Later in the program, programming will shift to more homemaker-oriented entertainment programming, to reflect a dominantly female demographic. The time in between information segments is normally filled with discussions of major news stories, reviews of the day's papers, and entertainment news — news regarding media celebrities. Morning-show hosts are typically regarded as media personalities, and are likewise often regarded as celebrities.

Despite these programs often being produced by news organizations, their style is geared toward popularity and demographic appeal. Traditionally they are fronted by two presenters (one male, one female) on a sofa surrounded by a warmly colored (but not overwhelming) set.

History

United States

The first^[1] morning news program was Three To Get Ready, a local production broadcast by WPTZ from 1950 until 1952 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Its host was comedian Ernie Kovacs. Although Three To Get Ready (named after WPTZ's frequency of channel 3) was mostly entertainment-oriented, the program did feature some news and weather segments.^[1][2] Its success prompted NBC to look at doing something similar on a national basis.^[3][4] Following NBC's Today lead with the first morning news program to be aired nationally, many other channels around the world followed and copied their enormously successful format with news. lifestyle features and personality.

CBS has had a seemingly endless rotation of failed morning news shows. Though it initially tried to mimic Today when it debuted a morning show in a two-hour format in 1954, one year later, the show was cut to an hour because of the debut of the children's TV series Captain Kangaroo. The network abandoned the morning show in 1957. In the late 1960s throughout the 1970s, the "CBS Morning News" aired a straight one-hour morning newscast that had a high rate of turnover among its anchors. In January 1979 came the innovative "___day Morning" series, which focused more on lifestyle and features reporting; this format, however, was moved exclusively to Sundays after two years, and still airs under the title CBS News Sunday Morning. It was not until the early 1980s that Captain Kangaroo ended its run, allowing CBS to expand its morning show to a full two hours. However, the high rate of turnover among anchors returned. An ill-fated comedic revamp of the show, The Morning Program, took place in 1987. After that, however, came This Morning, which has so far had the longest run of a CBS morning show. This Morning ceded to the current show, The Early Show, in 1999; The Early Show, in turn, will cede to a new version of CBS This Morning in the beginning of 2012.

ABC's morning show, Good Morning America, debuted in 1975 as AM America and adopted its current name and format later that year. It has traditionally run in second place (ahead of CBS but behind Today). Since the 1980s, a separate show, Live!, has been produced and distributed by ABC's syndication wing, primarily for ABC stations, but produced by ABC's station in New York, WABC-TV. Fox, the last of the "Big Four" networks, does not have a morning show, though the network attempted to transition sister cable network FX's Breakfast Time in the mid 90's to Fox as Fox After Breakfast, to little success. The CW airs The Daily Buzz for a morning show on its small-market cable-only network; this show is produced by ACME Communications and also airs on other stations outside that network in syndication.

Cable news outlets have adopted the morning show format as well. Fox & Friends and American Morning follow the networks' morning show format on Fox News Channel and CNN respectively. MSNBC's Morning Joe follows a format more reminiscent of talk radio and is the only conservative show in the network's otherwise liberal lineup. Also following the "talk radio on TV" format is Fox Business Network's Imus in the Morning (which itself was aired on MSNBC until 2007) and ESPN2's Mike and Mike in the Morning. The Weather Channel introduced its own morning show, Wake Up With Al, featuring Today weatherman Al Roker, which supplements its regular weather-information program, Your Weather Today.

Local news stations began producing their own morning shows in the 1970s, though more traditional newscasts began taking hold in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They began as one-hour local newscasts airing immediately before the national shows. However, since that time, they have slowly expanded, either by pushing an earlier start time or by adding additional hours on sister stations, thus competing with the network shows. A typical start time for a local morning show was pushed back from 6 a.m. to 5 a.m. over the course of the late 1990s. During the mid-2000s, the addition of hours on sister stations became popular. In recent years, however, the trend of earlier news has returned in the early 2010s, as stations have begun experimenting with 4:30 a.m. and even 4:00 a.m. newscasts in some major markets, pushing local news further into what traditionally is known as an overnight graveyard slot.^[5] Some local morning newscasts, which formerly had both softer "morning" musical and graphical packages and lighter news, now resemble their later-day counterparts with hard news coverage from overnight events.

United Kingdom

In the UK, after a six-week trial-run on the regional ITV station Yorkshire Television, the Independent Broadcasting Authority considered breakfast television so important that it created an entire franchise for it, the only national ITV franchise except for news provider ITN. This franchise was awarded to TV-am, a breakfast-television station. However, delays to TV-am's launch meant that the BBC was able to launch its own program, Breakfast Time on 17 January 1983. TV-am, with Daybreak and Good Morning Britain being its flagship programs, launched just two weeks later on 1 February 1983. TV-am found it hard to survive at first because of a format that was starchy and formal compared to the BBC's more-relaxed magazine style and a reliance on advertising income from a timeslot where people were not accustomed to watching television. However, it eventually flourished only to lose its license in 1993 to GMTV, who outbid them. In 2010, ITV plc acquired the 25% stake owned by Disney gaining full control of the station. In September 2010, the full legal name was changed from GMTV Limited to ITV Breakfast Limited, with GMTV closing on 3 September and Daybreak launching on 6 September 2010.

Morning-television shows

The following is a country-ordered list of breakfast-television programs, past and present, with indication of a program's producing network or channel:

Argentina

NDTV
  7:30 AM
  Tea Toast & Sports
  8:00 AM
  Breakfast News
  8:30 AM
  Breakfast News