The Bottom Line
Pros
- Folksy and down to earth
- In touch with its audience
- Easy paced and likable
- Excellent hosts
Cons
- Indoor audience is off-putting
- Easier style gives impression of poorer quality
Description
- Airs weekly at 7 a.m. EST on ABC.
- Debuted in 1975 as A.M. America. Floundered against the competition.
- New format in 1975 followed the successful format of a Cleveland show called The Morning Exchange.
- Team of Joan Lunden and Charlie Gibson carried GMA to ratings highs in the 1980s.
- XM Radio broadcasts a version of GMA called Good Morning America Radio
- Broadcasts from New York
Guide Review - Overview: Good Morning America
The real bottom line? Good Morning America simply tries too hard. Its hosts – Diane Sawyer and Robin Roberts (Charlie Gibson will be leaving to anchor the ABC News) – are competent and skilled and its features as interesting as the competition. But, as it goes in the entertainment industry, whatever works is copied a million times.
Most glaring is GMA’s use of an indoor audience to differentiate itself from The Today Show’s outdoor audience. Except the small indoor audience, standing as though it should be outside, is agonizingly out of place. To beat The Today Show, GMA simply needs to be itself, to look back into its own history when it regularly trounced Today in the ratings.
GMA’s format flows much the way a newspaper might, with national and world news reports and interviews up front in the first hour, with lighter human interest and entertainment news following in the later hours.
