Before School in 1986: What Was Actually On at 7 AM

The bowl is on the coffee table, the bus comes in forty minutes, and the set is already on. Every kid who grew up in 1986 remembers that window, and almost nobody remembers it the same way, because the country was not watching the same thing. Before school was the one daypart 1980s television never organized nationally, and by 1986 the reason had a name: the morning belonged to the news.

Before school in fall 1986 there was no national cartoon lineup, because the three networks had given their weekday mornings to news programs. Kids' morning television lived on PBS, which ran Sesame Street and Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, and on independent stations filling early hours with syndicated shows. Captain Kangaroo, pushed off CBS in 1984, returned that fall on more than 180 public television stations.

How the networks lost the morning

The clearest way to see what happened to before-school television is to follow one show out the door. Captain Kangaroo launched on CBS on October 3, 1955, ran Monday through Friday, and by the 1980s was the longest-running children's program on a commercial network. Then the morning got valuable to somebody else.

As UPI put it in November 1986, in the 1970s NBC's Today and ABC's Good Morning America "set a new tone for morning programming and CBS wanted a piece of the action." The squeeze followed in stages. In 1981 CBS cut the Captain from a full hour to thirty minutes to make room for an expanded morning newscast. In 1982 the network moved him off his historic weekday morning slot to weekends for the same reason. At the end of 1984 he was gone from CBS altogether.

Keeshan did not describe this diplomatically. The Chicago Tribune, reporting in August 1986, wrote that CBS "expanded the news show, buried his program in a pre-wake-up time slot and eventually shoved him completely off the Monday-through-Friday schedule," an action Keeshan branded "child abuse." He used the same two words to UPI three months later.

That is the whole structural story of before-school TV in 1986 in one show. The morning hours a child could actually watch had become the most contested real estate in daytime television, and children were not the audience being fought over.

The class of fall 1986

Two things stand out about that list. The first is that the reliable, findable, same-every-morning programming is almost entirely public television. The second is that the commercial side of the roster was thinning: The Great Space Coaster, a first-run syndicated half-hour co-created by original Muppet designer Kermit Love, reached its last season in the row's own year after 250 episodes.

The one morning that can actually be documented

There was no national before-school grid, so no honest capsule can print one. What exists instead is what contemporaneous press recorded station by station, and the Tribune recorded one in detail.

In Chicago, WTTW-Channel 11 picked up the returning Captain Kangaroo for weekdays at 10:30 a.m., starting September 29, 1986, running after two other children's shows: Mister Rogers' Neighborhood and Sesame Street. That is a verified sequence for one station in one city, and it is worth noticing what it is not. A 10:30 a.m. slot is not a before-school slot. The Captain came back to a preschool hour, for children already at home, because the hours before the school bus were no longer his to take.

Everywhere else, the shape varied. Independent stations built their own early mornings out of syndicated packages, and the same show could sit at 6:30 in one market and 11:00 in another. The Great Space Coaster is the standing example: it is remembered nationwide as a before-school show, and the surviving accounts of when it aired disagree with each other by hours, because they are describing different cities.

What Keeshan blamed

He was specific, and he said it in the row's own year rather than in retrospect. Speaking to the Tribune in August 1986, Keeshan tied the state of children's television directly to federal policy: "Children's television doesn't exist in any sense on commercial network television because the government has deregulated broadcasting and broadcasters don't have a responsibility any more... They don't worry about losing their license if they don't serve children. The FCC says the marketplace will take care of children. Well, it has."

He was not gentler about what filled the hours that remained. UPI ran through the Saturday fare of the moment, including Teen Wolf, the Ewoks, and Pee-wee's Playhouse, and reported that Keeshan grimaced. His summary: "Saturday morning is for the most part exploitive programming to sell toys."

On the networks' reasoning, he was blunter still. Keeshan told UPI, "You can't put a third gas station on the same corner and expect it to thrive," and added, "But that's the mentality of network executives."

He also named the change nobody was scheduling around. "Two-thirds of all mothers work outside the home," he told the Tribune. "When I went on the air, only about 22 per cent did." The audience sitting in front of the set before school in 1986 was, more often than in 1955, sitting there alone.

The honest bottom line

Before-school television in 1986 was the weakest daypart in children's programming, and the nostalgia should not paper over why. The networks had concluded that a children's audience in the 7 a.m. hour was worth less than an adult news audience, and the FCC of the period was not inclined to argue, so what a kid found before the bus came was whatever the local station had cheaply on hand plus whatever public television could fund. The Captain's return that fall is the tell: it took an 18-month hunt for an underwriter and a textbook company in Grand Haven, Michigan, to put a 31-year-old show back on the air, in reruns, at 10:30 in the morning. The affection is still earned, because for a lot of households PBS in the morning was genuinely good and genuinely free. It just was not the thing it had been, and the people who made it said so at the time.

Sources

• Chicago Tribune, "HEY, KIDS, THE CAPTAIN'S BACK", August 11, 1986 (the state of the weekday-morning children's daypart that season).
• Wikipedia, "Captain Kangaroo", "Romper Room", "3-2-1 Contact" and "The Great Space Coaster" (run dates, networks and syndication records).
• Wikipedia, "Children's Television Act" (the regulatory backdrop).
• Not a source, recorded for transparency: a 1982 New York Times piece was sought for this page and could not be retrieved (the archive route returned a CAPTCHA block page). It is not cited and nothing here rests on it.

Part of the Saturday morning 80s time-capsule series, which also tracks the weekday strip. Same season, other dayparts: After School in Fall 1986 and Saturday Morning Fall 1986.

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