Broadcast programming is the practice of scheduling broadcast media shows, typically radio and television, in a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or season-long schedule.
Modern broadcasters use broadcast automation to regularly change the scheduling of their shows to build an audience for a new show, retain that audience, or compete with other broadcasters' shows. Most broadcast television shows are presented weekly in prime time or daily in other dayparts, though there are many exceptions.
At a micro level, scheduling is the minute planning of the transmission; what to broadcast and when, ensuring an adequate or maximum utilization of airtime. Television scheduling strategies are employed to give shows the best possible chance of attracting and retaining an audience. They are used to deliver shows to audiences when they are most likely to want to watch them and deliver audiences to advertisers in the composition that makes their advertising most likely to be effective.Eastman, S.T., and Ferguson, D.A. (2013). Media programming: Strategies and Practices (9th ed.), Boston: Thomson Wadsworth.
With the growth of digital platforms and services allowing non-linear, on-demand access to television content, this approach to broadcasting has since been referred to using the retronym linear (such as linear television and linear channels).
History With the beginning of scheduled television in 1936, television programming was initially only concerned with filling a few hours each evening – the hours now known as prime time. Over time, though, television began to be seen during the daytime and late at night, as well on the weekends. As air time increased, so did the demand for new material. With the exception of sports television, variety shows became much more important in prime time.
Scheduling strategies
Lead-ins and lead-outs Broadcasters may schedule a program to air before or after a widely viewed tent-pole program, such as a popular series, a special, or a high-profile sporting event, in the hope that audience flow will encourage the audience to tune-in early or stay for the second program. The second program is usually one that the broadcaster wants to promote to a wider audience, such as a new or lower-profile series. Lead-outs are typically chosen to appeal to similar demographics as the program which preceded it, in an effort to retain as much of the audience as possible; for example, Spike TV's scheduling of the mixed martial arts reality series The Ultimate Fighter as a lead-out for the professional wrestling show Monday Night Raw resulted in a 36% increase in viewership in the time slot, with the program retaining 57% of Raw's audience among young adult males. The Super Bowl has a long history of high profile lead-out programming, due to it being regularly one of the highest-rated broadcasts in American television.
In some cases, a lead-in may be an episode of a series that has a tie-in or relevance to the lead-out, such as BBC One scheduling a Doctor Who episode parodying the Eurovision Song Contest as a lead-in for its live broadcast of the 2025 edition. In turn, the episode was also a lead-out for the 2025 FA Cup final; the hammocking of the episode between two live events proved to be risky, as the episode could have been preempted if the FA Cup match went to extra time. However, this did not prove to be the case, and the episode was the third-highest rated program of the night, behind only the FA Cup and Eurovision themselves.
Lead-outs can sometimes help to launch new programs and talent. NBC premiered Late Night in 1982 as a younger-skewing lead-out for its long-running late-night talk show The Tonight Show Starring Johnny Carson. The series helped launch the career of its host David Letterman, and influence later entries in the genre.Bushkin, Henry. How Johnny Carson Nearly Quit 'Tonight' and Scored TV's Richest Deal Ever. The Hollywood Reporter. Retrieved September 4, 2014. Late Night would continue as a franchise with hosts such as Conan O'Brien and Jimmy Fallon—both of whom would later go on to host The Tonight Show.
A weak lead-in can have an impact on the viewership of programs that follow; NBC's 2009 attempt to strip the talk show The Jay Leno Show (a spiritual successor to Leno's tenure of The Tonight Show after Conan O'Brien succeeded him) in a 10:00 p.m. ET/PT timeslot proved detrimental to the viewership of late local newscasts on its affiliates.Pergament, Alan (November 17, 2009). The Leno Effect sweeping channel 2 at 11 . The Buffalo News. Retrieved 2009-11-17. NBC subsequently announced plans to shorten The Jay Leno Show to a half hour and move it to 11:35 p.m. ET/PT in late-February 2010, displacing The Tonight Show from its traditional timeslot. This proposal led to a public conflict between O'Brien and NBC, and ultimately resulted in his departure from the network, and the reinstatement of Jay Leno as host of The Tonight Show.
This is not always the case: in the 1993–94 season, Fox anticipated that its fantasy western The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. would be the tentpole of its Friday-night lineup. However, its lead-out—the supernatural drama The X-Files–proved to be significantly more successful, and would eventually run for nine seasons as one of Fox's flagship dramas. By contrast, viewership for Brisco County Jr. declined throughout the season, and the show was cancelled. Fox attempted to use other sci-fi shows as a lead-in for The X-Files (such as Sliders and VR.5), but these efforts were similarly unsuccessful.
A type of lead-out popularized by some series is an aftershow—a supplemental talk or magazine show devoted to the preceding program. They usually feature discussion and analysis of its most recent episode, interviews with cast members and celebrity fans of the series, behind-the-scenes features, as well as audience and viewer interactivity. These formats were employed by networks such as AMC (which aired series such as Talking Dead for The Walking Dead), where they served as a cost-effective lead-out that could retain viewers and appeal to fans of a popular series.
Blocks
Block programming is the practice of scheduling a group of complementary programs together. Blocks are typically built around specific genres (i.e. a block focusing specifically on sitcoms), target audiences, or other factors, with their programming often promoted collectively under blanket titles (such as ABC's "TGIF" lineup and NBC's "Must See TV").
Bridging Bridging is the practice of discouraging the audience from changing channels during the "junctions" between specific programs. This can be done, primarily, by airing promos for the next program near the end of the preceding program, such as during its credits,Ellis, J. (2000) Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty, London: I.B. Tauris. or reducing the length of the junction between two programs as much as possible (hot switching). The host of the next program may similarly make a brief appearance near the end of the preceding program (sometimes interacting directly with the host) to provide a preview; in news broadcasting, this is typically referred to as a "throw" or "toss".
A bridge was used by ABC between Roseanne and the December 1992 series premiere of The Jackie Thomas Show, a new sitcom co-created by Roseanne and Tom Arnold of Roseanne fame. A scene of the Connor family watching its opening on TV seamlessly transitioned into the program itself, with no junction in between. ABC commissioned a minute-by-minute Nielsen ratings report, which showed that the majority of viewers from Roseanne had been retained during the premiere.Carter, Bill. "ABC's Extra Careful Look At 'Jackie Thomas Show'." The New York Times, 1992-12-07, p. D8.Carter, Bill. "As Cliff and Norm Drink Up, In Walks Seinfeld." The New York Times, 1993-03-21, p. A31. In June 2007, CBS scheduled a prime time encore of the season finale of The Price is Right—the final episode hosted by long-time emcee Bob Barker—as a lead-in to its telecast of the 34th Daytime Emmy Awards (where Barker and Price respectively won the awards for Outstanding Game Show Host and Outstanding Game Show), with an additional bridge scene featuring Barker.
Owing to both programs' news comedy formats, the Comedy Central program The Daily Show used newscast-style toss segments to promote its new spin-off and lead-out, The Colbert Report, in which host Jon Stewart would engage in a comedic conversation with the latter's host, Stephen Colbert, via split-screen. On the December 18, 2014 episode of The Daily Show, this segment was used to seamlessly segue into the series finale of The Colbert Report. At its conclusion, the show transitioned back to Stewart (giving the impression that the entire Colbert Report episode was merely a segment of The Daily Show), who concluded his show with its traditional closing segment "Your Moment of Zen" (which featured an outtake from a previous toss segment) as normal.
In some cases, a channel may intentionally allow a program to overrun into the next half-hour timeslot rather than end exactly on the half-hour, in order to discourage viewers from "surfing" away at traditional junction periods (since they had missed the beginnings of programs on other channels already). This can, however, cause disruptions with recorders if they are not aware of the scheduling (typically, digital video recorders can be configured to automatically record for a set length of time before and after a schedule's given timeslot in program guide data to account for possible variances). For a period, TBS intentionally scheduled all of its programs at 5 and 35 minutes past the hour rather than exactly on the half hour (a practice it marketed as "Turner Time"), to attract viewers tuning away from other channels.
Crossovers
Crossovers can be organized between multiple programs, in which a single storyline is extended across episodes of two or more separate programs. Typically, these involve programs that form a single franchise or shared universe, such as the ABC dramas Grey's Anatomy and Station 19 (both created by Shonda Rhimes), CBS's NCIS franchise (which have done crossovers between each other, as well as with CBS's reboot of Hawaii Five-0), and NBC's Chicago franchise (which have done crossovers between each other, and with fellow Dick Wolf series Law & Order: Special Victims Unit).
Counterprogramming
Counterprogramming is the practice of deliberately scheduling programming to attract viewers away from another, major program. Counterprogramming efforts often involve scheduling a contrasting program of a different genre or demographic, targeting viewers who may not be interested in the major program (such as a sporting event, which typically draws a predominantly-male audience, against an awards show that attracts a predominantly-female audience). Despite frequently being among the top U.S. television broadcasts of all time, the Super Bowl has had a prominent history of being counterprogrammed in this manner. One of the most prominent examples of this practice was Fox's 1992 airing of a special live episode of In Living Color against the game's halftime show.