Breakfast television

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.
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). 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).
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).
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).
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 (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 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 (NBC News at Sunrise, ABC's World News This Morning and the early-morning iteration of the CBS Morning News; the former has since been replaced by Early Today, while the latter shows are now titled Good Morning America First Look and CBS News Mornings). 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 (where they normally compete with syndicated programs on ABC and CBS stations, and the third hour of Today on NBC stations) 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 (and even gradually expanding into mid-size and some smaller 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 (which inherited the Morning Blend format originated in 2006 by the Journal Media Group following its 2015 acquisition of that company's stations) and Tegna Inc. (which inherited many of the local talk/lifestyle shows originated by Belo – such as Good Morning Texas on Dallas ABC affiliate WFAA – prior to the 2014 acquisition of the latter group by the predecessor broadcasting unit of Gannett), 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.
Cable news outlets have adopted the morning show format as well. Fox & Friends on Fox News follows a similar format to the networks' morning shows (though it incorporates conservative commentary similar to that featured on other Fox News programs), while MSNBC's Way Too Early and Morning Joe follow a pundit-driven format with a larger focus on political analysis and panel discussions. Some morning shows have been television simulcasts of talk radio shows, including Imus in the Morning (which aired on MSNBC from 1997 to 2007, when the network cancelling its contract for the program after host Don Imus made a racially charged remark during a broadcast, and subsequently aired on Fox Business and later RFD-TV before being cancelled in 2018), and sports talk programs such as Boomer and Gio (originally simulcast on MSG Network in the New York market from 2010 to 2013, and then nationally on CBS Sports Network starting in 2014) and The Dan Patrick Show (which has been simulcast on various cable networks and streaming platforms since 2009, and since 2020, has streamed on Peacock).
CNN had primarily aired rolling news blocks (such as Early Edition and CNN Live This Morning) in the morning hours until it debuted American Morning, which followed a format focusing upon news and political headlines, in 2001. In 2011, the program was replaced by Starting Point, which focused more upon topical discussions. Amid low ratings, Starting Point was replaced in 2013 by New Day, shifting towards general news and politics. In 2022, New Day was replaced by CNN This Morning, an attempt by then-CNN president Chris Licht to emulate the CBS This Morning and Morning Joe formats he had installed during his tenures at CBS News and MSNBC. It was cancelled in 2024 amid another change in leadership and associated cuts; a block of CNN's daytime program CNN News Central was moved into its timeslot, while the This Morning branding was retained by CNN's weekend morning show, and repurposed by CNN's early-morning program Early Start (which had originally premiered alongside Starting Point).
The Weather Channel originally has long featured forecast programs with a primary emphasis on business travelers and work commuters, culminating in the debuts of Your Weather Today (in 2000) and its business travel-focused, early-morning counterpart First Outlook (in 2001). Since 2014, America's Morning Headquarters (AMHQ), previously hosted by former Good Morning America weather anchor Sam Champion, has served as its main morning show; the program's weekday edition has expanded over time, extending to seven hours (lasting until 2:00 p.m. Eastern Time) by 2024, with a shorter four-hour edition on weekends. With a shift toward a mix of weather and infotainment programs in the late-2000s, TWC premiered Wake Up with Al, an early-morning show hosted by Today weather anchor Al Roker, in 2009. The show was cancelled in October 2015 amid a transition away from infotainment programming (it was the only TWC program to be produced primarily outside of Atlanta) with the timeslot filled by an extension of AMHQ.
Entertainment channels such as VH1 and E! have also aired morning shows (such as Big Morning Buzz Live and That Morning Show, and the 2020 version of E! News). 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.
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 didn't 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.
Breakfast television appeared on Channel 4 in April 1989 when it launched The Channel 4 Daily, which was conceived as a "newspaper" with a collection of various short-form segments. 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. The new format proved to be much more successful. 1989 also saw BBC2 launch a breakfast service: its news-based offering was launched to allow the BBC to provide a daily report on events at Westminster and was supplemented by teletext news pages from Ceefax and a 15-minute simulcast of BBC Breakfast News.
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. In September 2010, the full legal name of the licensing company was changed from "GMTV Limited" to "ITV Breakfast Limited", with GMTV closing on 3 September and Daybreak and Lorraine launching on 6 September 2010. 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. One of the co-hosts was Piers Morgan, until his departure in 2021, and the programme used his notoriety as a marketing point, to middling success.
The regional variations of BBC One and ITV1, the only terrestrial networks that provide localized news bulletins, do not air local breakfast television programmes, though abbreviated regional news opt-outs are provided each half-hour during BBC Breakfast and Good Morning Britain. Outside of these short bulletins, local breakfast programmes in the vein of those broadcast in North America were largely nonexistent in the UK for most of the history of British television. From 2007 to 2009, now-defunct local channel Channel M, which served Greater Manchester, broadcast a three-hour breakfast programme called Channel M Breakfast; it was cancelled in May 2009, amid significant local programming and staffing cutbacks at the station. Several local television channels launched during the 2010s as part of then-culture secretary Jeremy Hunt's Local Digital Television Programme, particularly those owned by Local TV Limited, broadcast two hours of local news at breakfast as part of their news and public affairs programming remits.
Since its launch in 2021, news channel GB News has aired a breakfast show called The Great British Breakfast. It was originally anchored by three presenters in the style of Fox & Friends, but soon shifted to a two-anchor format.
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:
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..
Several regional morning shows also exist on Chilean television.
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.
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):