For its first two years on the air, the Eternal Word Television Network broadcast almost nothing live. Tape delays, pre-recorded segments and a small production team working far outside their depth made a genuinely live broadcast too great a risk. That changed on August 15, 1983, the network's second anniversary, when Mother Angelica stepped in front of a studio audience and told viewers, in her own words, this is our first live, live, I mean really live television program.
The show that followed, Mother Angelica Live, became the network's defining on air identity for the next eighteen years. Mother Angelica taught Bible study and Catholic doctrine in a plainspoken, often funny style aimed at ordinary viewers rather than a specialist religious audience, and she took live call in questions from viewers whose situations sometimes became genuinely dramatic on air; during that very first live broadcast, a suicidal teenager called in while holding a gun to his own head, and a priest in his hometown recognized his voice on the broadcast and reached him in time.
Mother Angelica hosted the program herself until declining health forced her retirement in September 2001, ending an eighteen year run that had made her one of the most recognized Catholic broadcasters in the United States. She died in 2016. The original episodes continue to air today, packaged as Mother Angelica Live Classics, keeping her own voice and format in front of a new generation of EWTN viewers who never saw her host live.