Trinity Broadcasting Network went on the air for the first time on May 28, 1973, from a rented UHF station in Santa Ana, California, with a single borrowed camera and a handful of hours of homemade Christian programming produced by two young couples, Paul and Jan Crouch and Jim and Tammy Bakker. The program the Crouches hosted that first night carried the name Praise the Lord, and it never left the network's schedule again, even after the Bakkers left within the year to found their own, separately named ministry.
That departure is worth naming plainly, because the two programs' similar names have confused readers before: Jim and Tammy Bakker's own later ministry became known as the PTL Club, a distinct organization the atlas records separately. Trinity Broadcasting Network's own program, hosted from the start by the Crouch family, kept the Praise the Lord title for more than forty years, broadcasting worship music, guest interviews and preaching from TBN's Trinity Christian City campus in Costa Mesa and its other production sites around the country.
The program's only real change of identity came on November 14, 2016, when TBN shortened the title to simply Praise. Continuity survived even that change: Matt and Laurie Crouch, the founders' son and daughter in law, host today, and Jim McClellan has served as the show's announcer for nearly forty years, a run of production continuity TBN's own history points to as evidence of the network's institutional stability across half a century of American religious television.