A graveyard slot (or death slot) is a time period in which a television audience is very small compared to other times of the day, and therefore broadcast programming is considered far less important.[1] Graveyard slots are usually in the early morning hours of each day, when most people are asleep.
With little likelihood of a substantial viewing audience during this daypart, providing useful television programming during this time is usually considered unimportant; some broadcast stations go off the air during these hours, and some audience measurement systems do not collect measurements for these periods. Some broadcasters may do engineering work at this time. Others use broadcast automation to pass-through network feeds unattended, with only broadcasting authority-mandated personnel and emergency anchors/reporters present at the local station overnight. A few stations use “we’re always on” or a variant to promote their 24-hour operation as a selling point, though as this is now the rule rather than the exception it was in the past, it has now mainly become a selling point for a station’s website instead.
Network overnight programming
The Big Three television networks in the United States all offer regular programming in the overnight slot. Both ABC and CBS carry overnight newscasts with some repackaged content from the day’s previous network news broadcasts, with an emphasis on sports scores from West Coast games that typically conclude after 1 a.m. ET and international financial markets with the ending of the Australasian and beginning of the European trading day, all of which takes place between 2 and 5 a.m. ET, while NBC (which dropped its overnight news in the late 1990s) replays the fourth hour of Today. Each network also produces its early morning newscast at 4 a.m. ET so that it may be tape-delayed to air as a lead-in to local news. A growing trend in the United States is an increasingly early local newscast, which now begins as early as 4:00 a.m. in some major markets, targeting those who work early shifts or are returning from late shifts; this early newscast would fit into the overnight daypart rather than breakfast television.
The graveyard slots’ lack of importance sometimes benefits programs; producers and program-makers can afford to take more risks, as there is less advertising revenue at stake. For example, an unusual or niche program may find a chance for an audience in a graveyard slot (a current-day example is Adult Swim’s FishCenter Live, which features games projected onto the video image of an aquarium), or a formerly popular program that no longer merits an important time slot may be allowed to run in a graveyard slot instead of being removed from the schedule completely. However, abusing this practice may lead to channel drift if the demoted programs were presented as channel stars at some time.[5]