ABC star Michael Rowland’s exit reveals brutal truth about breakfast TV

Michael Rowland is the latest in a long line of Aussie breakfast TV hosts across all networks to quit their jobs citing one of two reasons.

Longtime ABC News Breakfast host Michael Rowland didn’t mince words when he announced his imminent departure from the job on-air this morning.

“After 15 years of 3am starts my body is screaming ‘enough!’ … and so, too, is my wife,” he said. “The hours have finally caught up with me.”

Noting that “there has been an enormous amount of family sacrifice that has gone on to enable me to do the job for 15 years,” Rowland apologised for the somewhat hasty goodbye – he’ll finish up at the end of next week – and confessed that he refused his ABC bosses’ pleas to stay in the job at least until the next federal election next year.

“That [election] may not be until May … I’ve decided that now is the right time,” he said.

Rowland (right) will finish up next week, after his longtime co-host Lisa Millar (left) exited in August.

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Rowland is the latest in a long line of breakfast TV hosts to speak frankly about the brutal reality of the job when announcing their decision to quit. It comes mere months after his co-host of five years, Lisa Millar, also quit the show, after she unleashed on “disgusting” online trolls who’d criticised her appearance back in March, while also slamming media coverage of the abuse she’d copped.

At the time, Millar said she had been “violently abused day after day for whatever reason bullies can find,” and said she worried it might make others think “that it’s not worth it to be a woman in the public arena.”

Time and again, when breakfast TV hosts leave their jobs, these seem to be the two deciding factors: Punishing, anti-social hours, coupled with an uncomfortable level of public scrutiny, particularly for women.

Sunrise co-host Sam Armytage quit the show after eight years in early 2021, revealing at the time that the recent death of her mother and wedding to new husband Richard Lavender had contributed to her decision to leave the show.

After a family loss and a new marriage, Sam Armytage said it was a “relief” to quit Sunrise in 2021.

MORE: Top 4 benefits of quitting before finding a new job

But she was more emotional during her final show a few days later, tearfully railing against the scrutiny she’d felt from “bullying media” and “nasty viewers” during her time in the job.

She later said she felt “giant relief” to have left the job, and to have rediscovered a life where she could stay up past 8pm.

Last year when David Koch announced he was finishing up as Sunrise host after 20 years, he told viewers it was “now time to work in business hours, have a bit of flexibility and focus more on our big family. He said after two decades of early starts, “I’m frankly finding it harder to get off the ground.”

Back in 2014, Georgie Gardner cited the toll the job was taking on her personal life in her decision to leave Nine’s Today show, saying the hours had been “gruelling” and it was time for her husband and children “to have present mummy as opposed to grumpy mummy.”

And earlier this year, Today entertainment reporter Brooke Boney ended her five years on screen to embark on a complete life change: She’d soon move overseas to study at Oxford University, making her possibly the first in the breakfast TV host to uni student pipeline.

Boney had been a divisive figure among viewers ever since her first weeks on air, when the former Triple J presenter and proud Indigenous woman delivered an impassioned speech about why she believed the date of Australia Day should be changed.

Brooke Boney left Nine this year to start a new life as a UK uni student. Picture: Nine

She later said that that she hadn’t anticipated the viewer backlash to that moment be as “big or as severe“ as it was.

“There were people saying really awful things about me, about my family — it’s really hard when people say threats,” she confessed.

Sometimes the scrutiny gets so intense that management take the decision out of the stars’ hands: See Karl Stefanovic, axed from the Today show in 2018 after a dramatic twelve months that saw him finalise his divorce with ex-wife Cassandra Thorburn and wed new wife Jasmine Yarbrough (like Gardner, Stefanovic later returned to the job – although unlike Gardner, he’s still on-air today).

The stress and scrutiny of the job is not just confined to television, either.

When Georgie Gardner quit Today in 2024 she said the hours had been “gruelling.”

Radio host Jackie O hid a debilitating drug addiction as she fronted up for her early morning radio show each day.

Breakfast radio veteran Jackie “O” Henderson recently revealed in her tell-all memoir that she’d been battling a secret addiction to several prescription drugs in recent years.

In an interview with news.com.au, GP Dr Zac Turner said Jackie O’s lucrative breakfast gig may have been a key factor in her crippling drug addiction.

“That morning timeslot is really unhealthy as a long-term career. You look at people on TV and people who have to get up at that time, and it’s so difficult to have a life, to have fun and see people, and also be waking your body up at a time when it’s still needing different phases of sleep,” he said.

When News Breakfast host Millar announced her imminent departure in August, Rowland was no doubt eyeing her new schedule with some envy when he tweeted his congratulations: “Enjoy the sleep-ins!”

Later this month, for the first time in 15 long years, he’ll finally get to do the same.