Morning show fans will soon bid farewell to the Disney-owned Good Morning America as we know it.
When it comes to television programming, fans often divide themselves among three categories: morning show fans, midday programming and soap opera fans, and late-night programming fans, the latter of which also includes fans of late-night talk shows, including ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel Live!
And within those categories, the breakdown continues as morning show fans are often loyal to one network’s offering over another, soap opera fans prefer Days of Our Lives over General Hospital and vice versa, and late-night talk show fans have their favorites among offerings from Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers, Stephen Colbert, and others.
Farewell to “Good Morning America”?
And for fans who are partial to the Disney-owned Good Morning America offering on ABC, times, as the song says, are a-changin’ as the company has decided on a big move for the popular morning show.
Soon, hosts Robin Roberts, George Stephanopoulos, and Michael Strahan will say good morning from a different location, rather than their Times Square studio. The change is part of a larger decision by The Walt Disney Company to move all of the Disney-owned New York properties to a building in downtown New York into a neighborhood known locally as Hudson Square. The move is slated to happen in 2025.
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The move will affect Good Morning America, as well as Live with Kelly and Mark and others. And though the move won’t take place for a while yet, some of ABC’s staffers are looking ahead at how the move could affect the fan-favorite morning show’s standing in the very competitive world of morning news shows.
“‘Good Morning America’ is defined by the strength of our team in front of and behind the camera, quality of our reporting, and the long, trusted relationship with our viewers,” ABC News said in a statement.
“Moving all ABC News teams to our new state-of-the-art building was a strategic decision that will allow for more collaboration and innovation.” The New York Post previously reported on GMA‘s soon-to-come-to-fruition move to Hudson Square.
Could This Mean Iger’s Not Selling ABC?
For some staffers, the move sounds exciting and could even boost optimism. Disney’s CEO Bob Iger has recently hinted at his interest in selling ABC, but the news of plans to move the production of ABC’s morning show to a new location could be indicative of Disney’s interest in keeping Good Morning America and possibly the ABC News division as a whole. That’s despite the possibility of another entity taking over the linear components of the network.
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In recent years, New York City’s Times Square has been helpful to Good Morning America in its age-old battle against the Today Show at NBC. Today Show anchors regularly step out into the streets of midtown Manhattan to visit with fans who gather daily outside NBC’s headquarters for the chance to appear on live television in the morning.
In a similar fashion, GMA embraced some of that same early morning Manhattan spirit when it moved in next door in Times Square as its studio allowed for some in the city to look in through giant windows of the studio that stood at street level.
For a time, “GMA” even welcomed a live audience into the studio during the second hour of the show, with those who lingered allowed to chat briefly with Roberts and Ginger Zee. In 2021, “CBS Mornings” took up residence in a studio across the street — meaning that when “GMA” exits, the third-place broadcast morning show could gain a new midtown profile.
“Good Morning America” has trumped “Today” in overall viewers for several years, with the NBC program maintaining a lead in the critical audience demographic of people between the ages of 25 and 54. Under executive producer Simone Swink, however, “GMA” has made new inroads into the demo, which is the most desired audience by advertisers in news programming.
The GMA brand remains strong, as seen when the spinoff show GMA3 recently overcame a scandal brought on by an extramarital affair between two of its hosts.
Disney’s Not Ditching NYC
Disney’s plans to move Good Morning America downtown doesn’t mean that the company is ditching New York City. The word on the street (pardon the pun) is that GMA producers plan to keep sending its hosts out across the city–and into cities around the country as part of its morning show broadcast.
