Even before cable made 24-hour television a national reality network programming adapted to and changed daily cycles. Prime time denoted highly competitive evening hours, while daytime offered a melange of soap operas, game shows and occasionally children’s programming, targeting a female householder, and late-night television became the province of talk and movies. Within this clock, early morning weekday television became the moment to capture viewers with useful information and ephemera that provide backgrounds for breakfast and departures. Morning television, then, has produced a curious combination of news, weather, financial information, sports and chat that has become one of the established features of contemporary television, local and national, and an area of growth (12.8 million viewers) even against cable competition in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.

NBC’s Today show, running since 1952, is the most successful model. Perhaps preceded by local farm reports, children’s programming, or news, it takes over the screen from 07:00 till 10:00. Although current watchers may not remember that the first host, Dave Garroway, was paired with a chimp (1953–77), both the team formula and established rhythm of repetitious information and coffee-cup chat survive. Successive hosts/partners, including Barbara Walters, Hugh Downs, Jane Pauley, Bryant Gumbel, Debra Norville, Katie Couric and Matt Lauer, have updated the formula, with comic relief supplied by weathermen like Willard Scott (1980–). The show opened its glassenclosed studios to New York (a 1950s strategy revived in 1994) and has gone on location around the world. Authors, sports people and politicians have used it as a forum, and have been caught by questions not necessarily expected in “infortainment.” Other network pairings have competed on ABC (Good Morning, America) and CBS (CBS This Morning), in 1999 they snare only half the market and 75 percent of Today’s advertisement revenues.

Later morning television provides a transition to daytime as local shows and syndicated talk continue the coffee and conversation format. Daytime talk shows have stirred a great deal of public debate with their focus on controversial, lurid topics of sex and violence. In 1999 networks also began exploring this space. Public television generally provides an early morning alternative in children’s programming (Sesame Street, PBS, 1969–).

Weekend differences are clearly marked as well. Saturday morning, with school out, is the terrain of kids (sometimes mimicking the infotainment format of the 1990s). Sunday, meanwhile, has been a graveyard of public service, press interviews and reflective television (Charles Kurault’s essays or the political forum of Meet the Press, NBC, 1947), while “real” Americans are at church or play.