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 10:00a.m., or if it is a local programme, as early as 4:00a.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.
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 (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 10:00a.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).
The three breakfast morning shows in the United States (CBS Mornings, Today, and Good Morning America) air live only in the Eastern Time Zone. (Spanish-language shows air live in the Eastern, Central, and Mountain time zones.) 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 (such as British royal weddings).
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 (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.
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 (however, Oprah usually aired in the afternoon in most markets). The Morning Exchange on WEWS-TV 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 program based closely on the format of The Morning Exchange and Good Day! (a similar program that aired on Boston affiliate WCVB-TV) in November 1975 under the title Good Morning America. GMA has traditionally run in second place (ahead of CBS's various morning efforts but behind Today), but has surpassed Today in the ratings a few times throughout its history (first in the early 1980s, then from the late 1980s to the mid-1990s and again regularly since 2012). Since the 1980s, Live! (now hosted by Kelly Ripa and her husband Mark Consuelos) has been produced and distributed by ABC's syndication arm, primarily for ABC stations (although not exclusively, as it is carried on stations affiliated with other networks), 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 (such as Lilias, Yoga and You). 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 (NOAA). From 1994 to 2002, WPBT distributed the Morning Business Report, a 15-minute financial news spin-off of the syndicated Nightly Business Report (which was also distributed by the Miami member station).
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 (and before that, its co-predecessor The WB) carried The Daily Buzz for its national small-market feed, The CW Plus (as well as its predecessor, The WB 100+ Station Group) from 2002 to 2014, in lieu of a national program; that program was also mainly syndicated to affiliates of The CW and MyNetworkTV (and predecessors The WB and UPN) 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 (since renamed The National News Desk), formatted as a "commentary-free" hard news program (despite the company's history of requiring its stations to air conservative-leaning must-run news and opinion segments during their local newscasts); the program has since expanded to include evening and weekend editions, along with a companion to the morning broadcast, The National Weather Desk (focusing on weather news, climate reporting and regional forecasts).