Breakfast television
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.
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).
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.
(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.)
The first[1] 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.
KABC-TV's AM Los Angeles launched the national career of Regis Philbin and was a direct predecessor to his syndicated talk show Live!.
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.
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.
A few of the major Spanish language broadcast networks also produce morning shows, which are often focused more towards entertainment and tabloid headlines, interviews, and features, rather than hard news.
[9][10] 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.
[11][12] 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 (although the number of these programs have dwindled on the local level since the 1990s, three such programs still exist in national syndication, the weekdaily AgDay and the weekend-only U.S. Farm Report and This Week in Agribusiness (the latter of which was created and remains hosted by former U.S. Farm Report personalities Orion Samuelson and Max Armstrong), which have also received national distribution on cable and satellite via RFD-TV; the latter program had also previously aired on WGN America until 2008).
More traditional local newscasts began taking hold in morning timeslots (mainly on stations that maintain their own news departments) in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
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.
Sports channels sometimes carry morning shows (such as ESPN's Get Up and NFL Network's Good Morning Football), with a focus on news headlines (including highlights of events that occurred the previous day, and previews of events occurring that day) and topical discussions.
Certain programming was exempt from these restrictions (schools, adult education, religion, sport); however no time was allocated to breakfast television until the early 1970s.
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.
In 1992, after failing to attract an audience, Channel 4 replaced it with The Big Breakfast — a more informal morning show with a focus on entertainment and comedy, presented from studios constructed in an actual house.
In 2010, ITV plc, which by then owned 75% of GMTV, gained full control of the station after it acquired the remaining 25% stake held by The Walt Disney Company.
ITV had big difficulties with the slot as well; Daybreak was eventually cancelled in 2014 due to low ratings, and was replaced by Good Morning Britain on 28 April 2014.
The series continues to trail BBC Breakfast consistently, and has marketed with the traditional Today format mixed with political debates.
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):
