Breakfast television (Europe and Australia) or morning show (Canada and the United States) is a type of news or infotainment television programme that broadcasts live in the morning (typically scheduled between 5:00 and 10:00 a.m., or if it is a local programme, as early as 4:00 a.m.). 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.
Contents
Format and style
"I like to think viewers never knew what was round the corner," says Owen. "One minute it would be a laugh a minute with Eric Morecambe ... the next minute it would be a top government official."
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 (either on a national or regional basis), and traffic reports (generally common with locally produced morning shows on terrestrial television stations serving more densely populated cities, though this has begun to filter down to smaller markets as intelligent transportation system networks have spread further into smaller communities).
Combining serious news and informal segments is breakfast television's appeal to viewers. 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 (generally before 10:00 a.m. local time), 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. (Most local stations originally displayed the current time and temperature only during their morning newscasts, though many began to extend this display within their logo bug to their midday and evening newscasts starting in the mid-1990s, starting in major markets and eventually expanding to stations in smaller markets.) 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 (although these may be shown during rolling news blocks or throughout the programming day on cable news outlets, some local stations that have utilized tickers solely for their morning shows have extended them to later newscasts, whereas others only display them during their morning news programs).
History
United States
The first morning news program was Three to Get Ready, a local production hosted by comedian Ernie Kovacs that aired on WPTZ (now KYW-TV) in Philadelphia from 1950 to 1952. Although the program (named after WPTZ's channel number, 3) 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 (later re-used as the title of the network's early-morning newscast from 1987 to 2024) aired as a straight one-hour morning newscast that had a high rate of turnover among its anchors. In January 1979, CBS launched Morning (titled in accordance with the day of the week, such as Monday Morning, and airing Sunday through Friday), 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 (it continued on weekend mornings before ending altogether in 1984), 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 (which was produced primarily by a unit of the network's entertainment division) 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 (this time featuring a format focused more on hard news and interviews, excising lifestyle and infotainment segments) in January 2012; CBS This Morning proved to be more successful, but anchor turnover (especially after the removal of Charlie Rose after allegations of workplace sexual harassment) 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.
United Kingdom
In the United Kingdom, breakfast television typically runs from 6:00 a.m. to between 9:00 a.m. and 10:00 a.m.
Television broadcasting hours in the United Kingdom until early 1972 were tightly regulated and controlled by the British government under the control of the Postmaster-General. Restrictions were placed on how many hours per day could be used by licensees for television broadcasts. By the mid-1960s, this was allocated at seven hours per day (Monday through Fridays) and 7.5 hours per day (Saturdays and Sundays), thus providing a 50-hour broadcasting limit per week. Certain programming was exempt from these restrictions (schools, adult education, religion, sport); however no time was allocated to breakfast television until the early 1970s.
In January 1972, under the then-Conservative government, the Minister for Posts and Telecommunications, Christopher Chataway, announced to the British parliament that all such restrictions would be lifted, and daily broadcasting hours could now be set by the individual broadcaster. By October 1972, both the BBC and ITV were providing daytime television programmes, with the commercially licensed ITV taking full advantage of the relaxed broadcasting hours. However, due to financial issues and the economic problems of the 1970s, breakfast television was not considered until later in the decade.
After a nine-week trial in 1977 on the regional television stations Yorkshire Television and Tyne Tees Television, the Independent Broadcasting Authority (which oversaw all ITV licensees) considered breakfast television so important that it created an entire franchise for the genre, becoming the only national independent television franchise. At the end of 1980, this franchise was awarded to TV-am. Initially planned for launch in 1982, it was delayed until the start of 1983 so that it did not take any oxygen from the launch of the UK's fourth channel. This allowed BBC1 to launch its own morning programme first on 17 January 1983, Breakfast Time. TV-am, with Good Morning Britain as its flagship programme, launched just over two weeks later. on 1 February. TV-am struggled at first because of a format that was considered to be stodgy and formal compared to the more relaxed magazine style of the BBC's Breakfast Time, and a reliance on advertising income from a timeslot when people were not accustomed to watching television. However, it eventually flourished, only to lose its licence at the end of 1992, after being outbid by GMTV.
List of morning television shows
The following is a country-ordered list of breakfast television and morning show programs, past and present, with indication of a program's producing network or channel:
Canada
All Global stations, with the exceptions of Global Okanagan and Global Lethbridge, air their own local morning shows titled Global News Morning. In May 2015, Global made changes to their Morning News programs east of Alberta; instead of the entire show being anchored locally, 16 minutes of each hour is anchored in Toronto for national and international news stories. Each Morning News program starts at 6 a.m. and ends at 9 a.m., with the exception of Global BC, Global Calgary, and Global Edmonton, which start their broadcasts at 5 a.m.. These three stations also air weekend editions of Morning News which start at 7 a.m. and end at 10 a.m. on Saturdays and Sundays. In 2013, Global Toronto's The Morning Show was extended by half an hour. The additional half-hour is broadcast on every Global station at 9 a.m..
Instead of a morning show, most stations air a broadcast of the CBC Radio morning shows from their corresponding radio station, other stations may air the CBC News broadcast
This is followed by a broadcast of the CBC Kids block and then CBC News at 12 p.m. local time
Chile
Several regional morning shows also exist on Chilean television.
Indonesia
Most of these programs are the morning edition of its respective flagship news program, and hard news in format. Some of them, especially the news-oriented network, has two morning news programmes – while the first are the hard news, the latter are the talk show format.
United States
Locally produced programs featuring a franchise title on affiliates of Fox, the CW, MyNetworkTV, independent stations and associated Big Three television networks (ABC, CBS and NBC):
Daybreak - This title is used by WISH-TV in Indianapolis to brand its morning newscasts, and has been branded Daybreak for as long WISH-TV has produced Morning Newscasts, and when they were once affiliated with CBS. Daybreak is also used by Gray Television's KKCO/KJCT-LP in Grand Junction, Colorado.
Good Day – Fox's local morning news show format is used by both stations that are either owned-and-operated or affiliated with the network (i.e., Good Day L.A. in Los Angeles). The program may have a different name in several markets (e.g., Fox 6 WakeUp News on WITI in Milwaukee), but the format is the same from market to market. WAGA-TV adopted the name of their local morning newscast Good Day Atlanta in 1992 while still affiliated with CBS and taking the place of the first incarnation of CBS This Morning. ABC affiliate WATN-TV in Memphis which was once affiliated with Fox uses the title Good Day Memphis for their morning newscasts.
Good Morning [region] – used by local ABC affiliates to complement Good Morning America (e.g., Good Morning Twin Tiers on WENY in Elmira, New York). KTVK which was once an ABC affiliate from 1955 until 1996 and is now an Independent/CBS alternate station; continues to use the title Good Morning Arizona for their morning newscast that runs from 4:30 a.m. until 10:00 a.m. WHBQ-TV, a Fox affiliated station in Memphis but once affiliated with ABC uses the title Good Morning Memphis for their morning newscasts.
An earlier variant is A.M. [region] (such as with AM Buffalo on WKBW-TV in Buffalo, New York), which was later adapted by ABC for AM America, a short-lived morning show that aired on the network for eleven months in 1975 before it chose to adapt Cleveland affiliate WEWS' local program The Morning Exchange into the future national format for Good Morning America. The 1980s PBS program A.M. Weather also used the same title form.
[Station Calls/Branding] Morning News – The defunct Tribune Broadcasting's local morning news show format usually seen on the company's Fox- and CW-affiliated stations (such as WPIX in New York City, New York; WGN-TV in Chicago; KTLA in Los Angeles; KCPQ in Seattle; and WXIN in Indianapolis), though this format has also been used on Fox and CW stations – as well as a few ABC, CBS and NBC stations – not owned by Tribune (such as the Fox 25 Morning News on KOKH in Oklahoma City) under a more generic title form. Tribune was purchased by Nexstar Media Group in 2019, with WPIX sold to the E. W. Scripps Company at the same time (WITI and KCPQ were sold to Fox Television Stations in March 2020), though no changes are expected to any of those programs or their titling. Scripps sold WPIX to Mission Broadcasting in 2020, which allows Nexstar to operate the station.