A New Day Is Dawning for Morning Shows

Fox has a cheeky puppet and bungee-jumping grandmothers. CBS is going with a new cast of news personalities and more talk about freeway snafus. ABC has countered with new digs and a new brunet.

Morning television has never been so crowded, so competitive, so, well, chaotic. And for good reason: big bucks.

While the networks have seen the size of their audience stagnate or decline in every other part of the schedule for the last several years, the available audience on weekday mornings has increased, broadcast executives say.

The three network morning shows raked in a combined 20% more ad revenue last season (reportedly about $300 million) than just two years before. And fledgling local morning shows, such as KTLA-TV Channel 5’s “Morning News,” have thrived, generating millions of dollars for their stations that never were there before.

So to battle.

“Good Morning America,” striving to regain the top spot it lost about 18 months ago to NBC’s “Today” show, recently unveiled a fresh, homier set and replaced newscaster Morton Dean with the younger Elizabeth Vargas as it aims for youthful viewers.

CBS, the perennial loser in that network battle from 7 to 9 a.m., has scraped Paula Zahn and Harry Smith and will roll out a revamped version of “This Morning” on Monday that pays homage to the success of local morning shows by opening much of the program to its individual affiliate stations so they can provide more local weather, traffic and news.

Fox, meanwhile, also will plunge into the fray Monday, but at 9 a.m., where it will challenge morning kingpin “Live With Regis & Kathie Lee” with “After Breakfast,” essentially the same critically lauded talk show of chaos and celebrities that had been airing on fX cable.

“After Breakfast,” hosted by Tom Bergeron, Laurie Hibberd and Bob the Puppet--a fuzzy, wart-riddled, tart-tongued monster--takes place in a fully functional New York apartment. Celebrity visitors drop by each day to hang out in whatever room they feel comfortable. On fX, the Pointer Sisters sang in the kitchen. Corbin Bernsen, the former star of “L.A. Law,” chose to be interviewed in a closet. Mary Tyler Moore was so impressed with the apartment’s decor that she accepted the challenge to run around the place for 60 seconds and take home whatever she could carry.

“It’s organized chaos, much more loosey-goosey than any of the other shows, much more comfortable, and so you see a whole different side of the celebrities when they come here,” Bergeron said. “Nothing is planned out, and I think a lot of people find our improvisational kidding and gagging refreshing compared to the usual four-minute, sit on stools or on the couch grilling and pre-planned performance that you often see elsewhere.”

To complement the indoor shenanigans, the show also employs four reporters who scour the country searching for real people doing unusual things. One day, a 92-year-old woman bungee jumps for the first time; the next, the crew spotlights how a community bands together to protect a tiny vegetable patch at a housing project in Chicago from vandals.

Peter Faiman, the executive producer of “After Breakfast” and president of programming and production at Twentieth Television, said that Fox chose the 9 a.m. hour because many of its affiliates, including KTTV-TV Channel 11 here, already air their own local morning news shows from 7 to 9 a.m. But he downplays the competition with “Regis & Kathie Lee.”

“It’s not an us-or-them situation,” Faiman maintains, “because there is plenty of hunger out there right now for entertaining television that doesn’t make you feel afterward that you need a shower like some of those daytime talk shows do.”

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For those early hours when many in the audience actually are taking their morning showers, the plan at CBS’ “This Morning” is to capture them with a show that is part typical network morning fare and part local news and personality.

Local CBS stations will be given the choice of airing all of the 7-to-8 a.m. version of the network program--to be hosted in New York by Jane Robelot and Jose Diaz-Balart--or just small pieces of it. To compete with non-network stations such as KTLA, many of the larger CBS stations, including KCBS-TV Channel 2 here, will use most of that hour to broadcast local information. During that hour, Channel 2 will air only 15 minutes of the network show and fill the rest with its own local newscast.

In exchange for that first hour flexibility, CBS expects all of its affiliates to air the entire second hour of its morning show, which will be hosted by Robelot and former “This Morning” weatherman Mark McEwen.

More changes are in store even earlier in the morning. KCBS, which has ceded the 6-7 a.m. battle until now to KNBC-TV Channel 4 and others, will unveil a 90-minute local newscast beginning each weekday at 5:30 a.m. It will be anchored by Kyra Phillips and Kyle Kraska, with Lance Orozco doing the weather.

With many Southland residents making longer commutes as the most affordable housing moves farther and farther from the city’s working center, early-risers are more and more the norm, said Larry Perret, KCBS’ news director.

“It’s just too big an opportunity,” Perret said. “The 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. time period is growing faster than any other news time period, both here and all over the country, in terms of available audience. The other time periods--in the afternoon and evening and at 11 p.m.--are not growing. More and more people are turning to local news in the morning and this is a long-term opportunity that we need to take advantage of.”

It won’t be easy. Perret acknowledged that the competition from his local rivals is formidable and well-established. He would not reveal details about the new broadcast, but he said that success in the morning depends on the personalities of the on-air talent, a predictable format with regular and dependable weather and traffic reports and a preview of news likely to be made that day.