Primetime Live in its heyday was a successful hard-hitting and investigative live newsmagazine. The program in its “Thursday”-days wasn’t as strong, likely due to the lack of energy anchors Diane Sawyer and Charles Gibson could afford to spend on the show considering their GMA-day jobs. To fix things, ABC appointed a prominent producer, renamed the show and added a whole bunch of anchors. Charles Gibson was dropped as an anchor officially, but continued to contribute to the program. Diane Sawyer does still anchor, rotating with Chris Cuomo, Cynthia McFadden, and John Quiñones. A new theme along with a totally new graphics package was introduced. In 2005 the program dropped the “Live” off of its name, simply now being called Primtime.

In 1998 Primetime Live dissapeared. It merged with 20/20 so that ABC had just one newsmagazine brand with multiple episodes a week. It worked for Dateline NBC, which at its height aired four times a week. But it did not work for ABC. In 2000 Primetime resurfaced as Primetime Thursday. Diane Sawyer now anchored the program alongside Charles Gibson. Why the name change? Well, the program wasn’t live anymore but pretaped. Both anchors had early morning duties at Good Morning America, preventing them from anchoring a live weekly newsmagazine in primetime. The theme that was used this theme, an update of the original. The orchestration was slightly updated and it’s significantly shorter.

This program was created by Roone Arledge and signed on for the first time in 1989. It was anchored by Diane Sawyer and Sam Donaldson in front of a live studio audience. Most elements of the show, such as interviews, were live with room for audience participation. The format, however, did not catch on, which is why it was revised within a year. They started focusing on hidden camera investigations, which during the 1990s became the trademark of the show. The theme is composed by Bill Conti, a composer famous for scoring the “Rocky” movies (as well as the themes to ABC’s Turning Point and Our World), and features the unmistakable ABC News signature.