Breakfast television

U.S. TV dayparting; breakfast television is blue and labelled "Early Morning".

Breakfast television (Australia, Ireland, New Zealand and United Kingdom) or morning show (Canada, Indonesia and United States), is a type of infotainment television program, broadcast live in the morning (typically scheduled between 6:00 and 10:00 a.m.). Often hosted by a small team of 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 January 14, 1952, on the U.S. television network NBC. For the next 60 years, the Today show was number one in the morning ratings for the vast majority of its run and since its start many other stations around the world followed NBC's lead and copied their successful format.

Format and style

Breakfast television programs are geared toward popular and demographic appeal. The early half of a morning program is typically targeted at those preparing to go to work with a focus on hard news segments; often featuring updates on major stories which occurred overnight or the previous day, political news and interviews, reports on business and sport-related headlines, weather forecasts (either on a national or regional basis), and traffic reports. Later in the program, segments will typically begin to target a dominantly female demographic with a focus on "soft news", such as human-interest, lifestyle, and entertainment stories.

Morning programs that air across national networks may offer a break for local stations or affiliates to air a brief newscast during the show, which typically consists of a recap of major local news headlines, along with a weather and traffic update. In the United States, some morning shows also allow local affiliates to incorporate a short local forecast into a national weather segment—a list of forecasts for major U.S. cities are typically shown on affiliates which do not produce such a "cut-in" segment.

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 the lead of NBC's Today as 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 television series Captain Kangaroo. The network abandoned the morning show in 1957. In the late 1960s throughout the 1970s, the "CBS Morning News" aired as 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, debuted 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 Early Show, in 1999; The Early Show, in turn, ceded to the new version of CBS This Morning in the beginning of 2012.

ABC was a latecomer to the morning show competition. Instead of a national show, it instead adopted the "AM" franchise of local stations in 1970. AM Los Angeles launched the national career of Regis Philbin and was a direct predecessor to his syndicated talk show Live! AM Chicago would later evolve into The Oprah Winfrey Show. Morning Exchange was Cleveland's entry into the franchise; with its light format, ABC (after a brief but failed effort to launch the Los Angeles version nationally as AM America) launched a national version of Morning Exchange in fall 1975 under the name Good Morning America. GMA has traditionally run in second place (ahead of CBS but behind Today) but, since 2012, has occasionally surpassed Today in the ratings. Since the 1980s, Live! (now hosted by Kelly Ripa and Michael Strahan) has been produced and distributed by ABC's syndication arm, primarily for ABC stations, but produced by ABC's New York City station, WABC-TV.

Fox, the last of the "Big Four" networks, does not have a morning show and has only once attempted such a show; the network attempted to transition sister cable network FX's Breakfast Time in the mid-1990s to Fox as Fox After Breakfast, to little success. The CW (and before that, The WB) airs The Daily Buzz for a morning show on its small-market cable- and multicast-only network; this show is produced by Mojo Brands Media (it was, for its first eleven years on air, owned and produced by ACME Communications, a company founded by The WB's original CEO Jamie Kellner) and also airs on other stations outside that network in syndication.

Cable news outlets have adopted the morning show format as well. Fox & Friends, Early Start and New Day 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), ESPN2's Mike and Mike in the Morning, and NFL Network's NFL AM. 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. Entertainment channels such as VH1 and E! have also aired morning shows. NBC Sports Network airs a highlight-intensive morning show, The 'Lights, with virtually no conversation (or even any on-camera anchor) and consisting only of highlights and scores of the previous day or night's sporting events. ESPN's morning programming is branded, like all of its newscasts, as SportsCenter.

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 half-hour or 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 1990s. During the mid-2000s, the addition of hours on co-owned/managed stations or stations with no common management but maintain news share agreements with major network stations became popular. In the late 2000s and early 2010s, however, the trend of earlier news has returned, 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 January 17, 1983. TV-am, with Daybreak and Good Morning Britain being its flagship programs, launched just two weeks later on February 1, 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 The Walt Disney Company 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 September 3 and Daybreak and Lorraine launching on September 6, 2010.

List of 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