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. Graveyard slots are usually situated in the early morning hours of each day, a time 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 may do engineering or other technical work (e.g. software and technology upgrades) or go off the air during these hours, and some audience measurement systems do not collect measurements for these periods. 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 or social media apps instead.
Programming
Overnight slot The most well-known graveyard slot in most parts of the world is the overnight slot, the daypart bridging the late night and breakfast television/early morning slots (between 2:00 and 6:00 a.m.). During this time slot, most people are either asleep or working overnight shifts (in some cases, doing so without access to a television set). Because of the small number of people awake at these times, the overnight shift was historically ignored as a revenue opportunity, although increases in irregular shifts have made overnight programming more viable than it had been in the past. In the United States, for example, research has shown that the number of televisions in use at 4:30 a.m. doubled from 1995 to 2010 (8% to 16%); this research coincided with the expansion of early morning newscasts by many local stations during this period.
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 1:00 a.m. ET and international financial markets with the ending of the Australasian (between 12:00 and 4:00 a.m. ET depending on Daylight Savings Time), midway through the Indian (trading ends at 6:15 a.m. ET), and beginning of the European trading day (between 2:00 and 5:00 a.m. ET), while NBC (which dropped its overnight news after an eight-year run in September 1998) replays the NBC News Now streaming news program Top Story with Tom Llamas (previously occupied by a replay of the fourth hour of Today from 2011 to 2022). Each network also produces its early morning newscast at 4:00 a.m. ET (with the exception of NBC's Early Today, which since 2017, has started at 3:00 a.m. ET, acting as a de facto overnight newscast in parlance) so that it may be tape-delayed to air as a lead-in to local news.
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.
The overnight period is also noted for the prevalence of cheaply produced local advertisements which allow an advertiser to purchase time on the station for a low cost, advertisements for services of a sexual nature (such as premium-rate adult rate entertainment services, adult entertainment venues, and adult products from companies such as Adam & Eve), direct response advertising for products and services (often marketed "As Seen On TV") otherwise seen during infomercials, and public service announcements (such as those commissioned by the Ad Council) airing in these time slots due to the reduced importance of advertising revenue.
Time-shifted programming Since the advent of home video recording, some programs in this slot may be transmitted mainly with time-shifting in mind; in the past, the BBC offered specialized overnight strands such as BBC Select (an often-encrypted block providing airtime for specialized professional programmes), and the BBC Learning Zone (which broadcast academic programmes, such as from the Open University). The BBC's current "Sign Zone" strand broadcasts repeat programmes with in-vision interpretation in British Sign Language. Some channels may carry adult-oriented content in the graveyard slot, depending on local regulations. Live events from other time zones (most often sports) may sometimes fall in overnight slots, such as daytime events from the Asia-Pacific region on channels in the Americas, and prime-time events from the Americas on channels in Europe for example. Some anime-oriented streaming services (such as Crunchyroll) have arrangements with Japanese networks to premiere episodes at the same time as their domestic television airings, often falling within the overnight hours in the Americas, particularly Cartoon Network's late night Toonami block on Adult Swim, which airs from Saturday nights to Sunday mornings.
From 1988 to 2014 in the United States, some cable networks (such as Nickelodeon, A&E, the Discovery Channel and The Weather Channel) aired educational programs during overnight hours as part of the Cable in the Classroom initiative, intended for educators to tape for later presentation to their students.
Syndicated programming Since the 1980s, graveyard slots on American broadcast stations, once populated by broadcasts of syndicated reruns and old movies, have increasingly been used for program-length infomercials or simulcasting of home shopping channels, which provide a media outlet with revenue and a source of programming without any programming expenses or the possible malfunctions which might come with going off-the-air. In the United States, graveyard slots are also used as a de facto "death slot" for syndicated programs that either failed to find an audience or which a station acquired but otherwise has no room to air in a more appropriate time slot where the program would otherwise benefit; in previous years, the most often seen original programming in the overnight period were low-rated game shows and daytime talk shows being burned off, with the former being more common in the 1980s and the latter the following decade. During the 1980s and 1990s, some stations—particularly news-producing stations that contracted with CNN or CONUS Communications to provide supplemental coverage of national and world news—also used the overnight period to simulcast 24-hour news services Headline News and All News Channel.
In many cases where a television station carries an irregularly scheduled special event, breaking news or severe weather coverage that preempts a network or syndicated program, the station may elect to air the preempted programming in a graveyard slot during the same broadcast day to fulfill their contractual obligations. Additionally, in markets with sports teams whose coaches' and team highlights shows preempt programs in the prime access hour before primetime, the overnight period also allows a preempted program to air in some form on a station without penalty to the syndicator, or for stations to air network programming preempted for local-interest programming, breaking news or weather, or sporting events.
In almost every market in the United States, MyNetworkTV has seen its timeslot downgraded to the graveyard slot, sometimes sharing secondary affiliations with digital multicast television networks carried on digital subchannels. Originally launched as a general broadcast network in 2006 meant for primetime clearance, following the merger of two smaller networks—The WB and UPN—into The CW, the network (which primarily signed with affiliates of the two moribund networks that did not take the CW affiliation) saw its entire slate of original programming fail in the ratings, and by 2010 the network transitioned to a syndication service carrying nightly rerun blocks of syndicated programming from broadcast networks and cable channels. Generally, this is done as the stations of MyNetworkTV have become part of duopolies with major network affiliate stations (and even those owned by its parent company, Fox Television Stations, whose former UPN affiliates formed the nucleus of MyNetworkTV) and those stations have used the network's affiliates to carry extended primetime local newscasts, local sports and encore runs of its sister Fox affiliate's syndicated programs which provide steadier ratings and revenue than MyNetworkTV's non-original schedule.
News programming Local news programming has also aired in the overnight slot in various forms; between the 1960s and the mid-1980s, many American television stations ran abbreviated "sign-off editions" providing brief summaries of local (and more prominently), national and international headlines, sports scores and a short- to medium-range weather forecast, including overnight breaking news stories that may have occurred after the station's late newscast earlier in the evening. One such station, Chicago independent station WFLD (now a Fox owned-and-operated station), utilized the KeyFax teletext system to provide an overnight news service, known as Nite-Owl, that aired until the resumption of regular programming each day from 1981 to 1982. Beginning in the late 1970s and early 1980s, many news-producing stations began to rebroadcast their late-evening newscasts (updated during severe weather events to incorporate live cut-ins providing current radar data and active alerts in place of the newscast's original weather segment, and additional updates on breaking news from the original broadcast) and live sports scores (primarily for games on the West Coast and games that were in overtime when the late newscast began), primarily for the convenience of late-shift workers who were not awake hours earlier for the broadcast's initial airing.
By the 2000s, with the increasing prominence of online news coverage by many stations, the practice of airing late news rebroadcasts went into decline in favor of syndicated programs, extended feeds of overnight network newscasts and infomercials, though some NBC affiliates that abandoned the practice years earlier would bring back late news rebroadcasts to their late-night schedules after the network ceded the 1:35 a.m. ET timeslot following the 2021 cancellation of A Little Late with Lilly Singh. Since the late 2000s in the United States many stations have offered an increasingly early local newscast, which now begins as early as 4:00 a.m. in some major and mid-sized markets, targeting those who work early shifts (including assembly line workers, longshoremen and farmers) or are returning from late shifts; this early newscast would fit into the overnight daypart rather than the early morning slot.
Public affairs and educational programming