Breakfast television
Breakfast television or morning show is a type of news or infotainment television programme that broadcasts live in the morning. Often presented by a small team of hosts, these programmes are typically marketed towards the combined demography of people getting ready for work and school and stay-at-home adults and parents.
The first – and longest-running – national breakfast/morning show on television is Today, which set the tone for the genre and premiered on 14 January 1952 on NBC in the United States. For the next 70 years, Today was the number one morning program in the ratings for the vast majority of its run and since its start, many other television stations and television networks around the world have followed NBC's lead, copying that program's successful format.
Format and style
Breakfast television/morning show programs are geared toward popular and demographic appeal. The first half of a morning program is typically targeted at work commuters with a focus on hard news and feature segments; often featuring updates on major stories that occurred overnight or during the previous day, political news and interviews, reports on business and sport-related headlines, weather forecasts, and traffic reports. Later in the program, segments will typically begin to target a dominantly female demographic with a focus on "infotainment", such as human-interest, lifestyle and entertainment stories. Many local or regional morning shows feature field reports highlighting local events, attractions and/or businesses, in addition to those involving stories that occurred during the overnight or expected to happen in the coming day.Morning programs that air across national networks may offer a break for local stations or affiliates to air a brief news update segment during the show, which typically consists of a recap of major local news headlines, along with weather and, in some areas, traffic reports. 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.
During the early morning hours, local anchors will mention the current time – sometimes, along with the current temperature – in various spots during the newscast, while national anchors of shows covering more than one time zone will mention the current time as "'xx' minutes after the hour" or "before the hour"; the time and/or temperature are also usually displayed within the station or programme's digital on-screen graphic during most segments within the broadcast. Especially with their universal expansion to cable news outlets in the early 2000s, many news-oriented morning shows also incorporate news tickers showing local, national and/or international headlines; weather forecasts; sport scores; and, in some jurisdictions where one operates, lottery numbers from the previous drawing day during the broadcast.
The three breakfast morning shows in the United States air live only in the Eastern Time Zone. Stations in the remaining time zones receive these programs on a tape delay, with an updated feed broadcast to viewers in the Pacific Time Zone. Occasionally, a morning show may be broadcast nationwide if their staff is handling coverage of breaking news during its broadcast hours, or special live news events.
History
United States
Network and local programs
The first morning news program was Three to Get Ready, a local production hosted by comedian Ernie Kovacs that aired on WPTZ in Philadelphia from 1950 to 1952. Although the program was mostly entertainment-oriented, the program did feature some news and weather segments. Its success prompted NBC to look at producing something similar on a national basis. Following the lead of NBC's Today, which debuted in January 1952, and was the first morning news program to be aired nationally, many other broadcast stations and television networks around the world followed and imitated that program's enormously successful format with news, lifestyle features, and personality.CBS, in contrast, has struggled since television's early age to maintain a long-term morning program. Though it initially tried to mimic Today when it debuted a morning show in a two-hour format in 1954, the show was reduced to one hour within a year in order to make room for the new children's television series Captain Kangaroo. The network abandoned the morning show in 1957. From 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, CBS launched Morning, which focused more on long-form feature reports, a format that would be most closely associated with its Sunday edition, although it emphasized hard news during the week. This format, however, was relegated exclusively to Sundays after two years, and still airs under the title CBS News Sunday Morning. It was not until 1982 that Captain Kangaroo ended its run on weekdays, 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; with its awkward mix of news, entertainment and comedy bits, the program was heavily panned by critics. After that, however, came This Morning, which has to date had the longest run of any of CBS' morning show attempts. This Morning was eventually cancelled 12 years later, being replaced by The Early Show in 1999; The Early Show, in turn, ceded to the new version of CBS This Morning in January 2012; CBS This Morning proved to be more successful, but anchor turnover and other factors eroded its audience, resulting in its replacement by CBS Mornings in 2021—a program that carries a skew towards news and lifestyle content similar to its competitors.
ABC was a latecomer to the morning show competition. Instead of carrying a national show, it instead adopted the AM franchise introduced by many of its local stations in 1970. KABC-TV's AM Los Angeles launched the national career of Regis Philbin and was a direct predecessor to his syndicated talk show Live!. AM Chicago on WLS-TV would later evolve into The Oprah Winfrey Show, which went on to become one of the most successful programs in the history of American television syndication. The Morning Exchange on WEWS-TV was Cleveland's entry into the franchise; with its light format, ABC launched a national program based closely on the format of The Morning Exchange and Good Day! in November 1975 under the title Good Morning America. GMA has traditionally run in second place, but has surpassed Today in the ratings a few times throughout its history. Since the 1980s, Live! has been produced and distributed by ABC's syndication arm, primarily for ABC stations, but produced by ABC's New York City owned-and-operated station, WABC-TV.
Members of PBS, the nation's main public television network, typically air children's programming from the network's PBS Kids lineup during the morning and daytime hours. Some members may also carry exercise-oriented programs as early-morning programming. From 1974 to 1995, Maryland Public Television offered A.M. Weather, a 15-minute national weather update staffed by meteorologists from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. From 1994 to 2002, WPBT distributed the Morning Business Report, a 15-minute financial news spin-off of the syndicated Nightly Business Report.
Fox, the youngest of the "Big Four" broadcast networks, does not have a morning show and has only once attempted such a program; the network attempted to transition sister cable network FX's Breakfast Time to Fox as Fox After Breakfast in 1996, to little success, but instead has ceded to its local affiliates and Fox Television Stations, which have programmed fully local morning news programs that are at parity or have overtaken their Big Three network counterparts.
The CW carried The Daily Buzz for its national small-market feed, The CW Plus from 2002 to 2014, in lieu of a national program; that program was also mainly syndicated to affiliates of The CW and MyNetworkTV as well as several independent stations until its abrupt cancellation in April 2015. Generally since then, outside of a few select CW and MyNetworkTV affiliates, stations usually program infomercials, a local extension of a Big Three sister station's morning newscast during national morning shows, or as Sinclair Broadcast Group did from July 2017 until March 2019, returned to programming for children under the KidsClick block. In 2021, Sinclair launched a rolling syndicated newscast, The National Desk, formatted as a "commentary-free" hard news program ; the program has since expanded to include evening and weekend editions, along with a companion to the morning broadcast, The National Weather Desk.
A few of the major Spanish language broadcast networks also produce morning shows, which are often focused more on entertainment and tabloid headlines, interviews, and features, rather than hard news. ¡Despierta América! is the longest-running Spanish language morning program on American network television, having aired on Univision since April 1997. Similar to CBS's struggles to maintain continuity with its morning shows, Telemundo had made several attempts at hard news and traditional morning shows dating to the late 1990s, including Cada Dia, and Un Nuevo Día, which launched in 2008 under the title ¡Levántate!, and would win the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Morning Program in Spanish in 2015 and 2017. In 2021, Telemundo attempted another relaunch of its morning show, Hoy Dia, which was positioned as a news-centric morning show closer in format to its NBC counterpart Today. However, in 2022, Telemundo used a hiatus for the 2022 FIFA World Cup to move Hoy Dia from its news department to its entertainment division, resulting in the program transitioning to an entertainment-oriented format.
Local television stations began producing their own morning shows in the 1970s, most of which mirrored the format of their network counterparts, mixing news and weather segments with talk and lifestyle features; stations in many mid-sized and smaller markets with heavy rural populations also produced farm reports, featuring stories about people and events in rural communities, rundowns of agricultural product exchange data from the previous day and weather forecasts tailored to farmers.
More traditional local newscasts began taking hold in morning timeslots in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These programs began as half-hour or one-hour local newscasts that aired immediately before the national shows and were led in by more hard news-focused, early-morning network newscasts. However, since that time, they have slowly expanded, either by pushing an earlier start time or by adding additional hours on other stations that are owned, managed or which outsource their local news content to that station, thereby competing with the network shows.
Similarly, following the launch of Fox in the late 1980s, many news-producing stations affiliated with major networks not among the traditional "Big Three television networks" or which operate as independent stations began producing morning newscasts that compete in part with national counterparts in part or the entirety of the 7:00 to 9:00 a.m. time period; by the late 2000s, these stations began to expand their morning shows into the 9:00 a.m. hour and in some markets, expanded into the 10:00 a.m. hour by the late 2010s. The expansion of news on Fox affiliates, along with advertising restrictions involving with the Children's Television Act, effectively ended the morning children's television market on broadcast television by the mid-2000s. Beginning in the early 2010s, stations began 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. Some local morning newscasts, which formerly had both softer "morning" musical and graphical packages and lighter news, along with feature segments with local businesses and organizations, now resemble their later-day counterparts with hard news coverage of overnight events.
Some locally produced morning shows that utilize a mainly infotainment format still exist, most prominently among some large and mid-market stations owned by the E. W. Scripps Company and Tegna Inc., and often serving as lead-outs of national network morning shows. These shows are not usually produced by a station's news department, as they are intended as a vehicle for advertorial content that promotes local businesses and events.