In the spring of 1975, Fred Pierce, the newly appointed president of ABC Television, convinced Fred Silverman to become the first president and director of programming of the independent television production subsidiary ABC Entertainment, created from the network's namesake programming division. In 1974, ABC premiered the detective series S.W.A.T. That same year, the network made the decision to compete with NBC's morning news-talk program Today. Its first attempt at such competition was AM America; however, that show's success was not straightforward. One of its affiliates, WCVB-TV premiered morning show Good Day!. First premiering in 1973 as Good Morning!, it was groundbreaking for being entirely produced on the road and broadcasting from locations outside of the Boston area. Also, in the summer of 1975, ABC discovered that its Cleveland affiliate WEWS-TV was producing its own morning program The Morning Exchange, which debuted in 1972 and was now locally pre-empting AM America; it was the first morning show to utilize a set modeled after a living room, and established a concept now commonplace among network morning shows in which news and weather updates were featured at the top and bottom of each hour. Discovering that their formats seemed to appeal to their viewers, the network became the first to adopt them for a new national morning show, Good Morning America, which debuted on November 3, 1975.
Which debuted earlier, The Morning Exchange or S.W.A.T?