By Lisa de Moraes
Wednesday, January 25, 2006
Fans of WWE's "Smackdown!" and "Gilmore Girls" will have a lot in common come September when UPN and the WB are shuttered and their most successful programming is used to launch a new network called The CW.
The network, announced yesterday at a news conference in New York, will be a 50-50 partnership between CBS, which owns UPN, and Warner Bros., a division of Time Warner, the majority owner of the WB.
Like UPN and the WB, The CW (named in tribute to CBS and Warner Bros., and if you think that's lame you should see the new network's logo) will chase the elusive 18-to-34-year-old viewer with such shows as "America's Next Top Model" and "Smallville."
UPN and the WB will continue to operate independently until September, reporters at the news conference in the St. Regis Hotel learned from CBS President and CEO Leslie Moonves and Warner Bros. Entertainment Chairman and CEO Barry Meyer.
Dawn Ostroff, who has been in charge of programming for UPN since February 2002, was named president of entertainment for the new network.
And yet the list of series featured in the promo reel and news release shown at the unveiling included more WB programs than UPN ones. Shows like "Gilmore Girls" and "Supernatural," "One Tree Hill" and "Smallville," "Everwood" and "Reba," as well as the reality series "Beauty and the Geek."
The UPN shows mentioned were "America's Next Top Model," "Everybody Hates Chris," "Veronica Mars," "Girlfriends" and "Smackdown!" ("Veronica Mars," the least watched of these shows, reaches an anorexic audience of 2.6 million viewers on average. However, it's also produced by Warner Bros.)
The CW will adopt the WB's scheduling model, programming a total of 30 hours each week: Monday through Friday, 3 to 5 p.m. and 8 to 10 p.m.; Sunday, 5 to 10 p.m.; and a five-hour Saturday-morning animation block.
Like UPN and the WB, The CW will not program Saturday prime time. But then, as Moonves joked yesterday, neither do the other broadcast networks.
NBC reruns weekday programming and occasionally burns off theatrical inventory on Saturday nights, ABC mostly burns off theatricals and has done some "repurposing" of original programming, and CBS runs something called "Crimetime Saturday" -- just another way of saying "crime-drama reruns." Fox actually wins the night most weeks among the 18-to-49-year-olds the broadcast networks target with low-budget fare, including "Cops" and "America's Most Wanted."
Meyer said the new network is expected to reach more than 95 percent of the country at launch. It already has lined up stations reaching about 48 percent, including the 11 major-market UPN stations owned by CBS, which have signed a 10-year affiliation deal with The CW.
Making the same long-term commitment are the 16 major-market WB stations owned by Tribune Broadcasting, which has given up its 22.5 percent stake in the WB. Tribune partnered with Warner Bros. to launch the WB network 11 years ago this month. (UPN launched that same month.)
Eleven years ago, when CBS was averaging more than 20 million viewers, ABC nearly 19 million, NBC 16 million and Fox 11 million, the marketplace was presumed capable of accommodating a fifth and even a sixth broadcast network.
These days, facing so much more competition from satellite, digital cable and other forms of distribution, neither network seems likely to ever achieve parity with Fox -- the youngest of the Big Four (it launched in April 1987).
In terms of ratings, UPN's best season was its first, when it averaged 6.2 million viewers but programmed only Monday and Tuesday nights. Its shows included "Star Trek: Voyager," the latest incarnation in the then-still-powerful "Star Trek" franchise.
The WB's ratings heyday came during the '97-'98 and the '98-'99 TV seasons; it averaged 4.5 million viewers, programming Monday through Wednesday and adding Thursday nights for the latter season.
(CBS won the TV season that wrapped last May with an average of nearly 13 million viewers; ABC and Fox finished with an average of 10 million and NBC 9.8 million. WB and UPN trailed far behind with 3.3 million and 3.4 million, respectively.)
UPN has never been profitable and the WB turned a profit only a couple of years. This month the latter announced it would cancel its most watched program, "7th Heaven," because the network would lose about $16 million on that show alone this season.
"WB was always a strategic asset," Meyer told The TV Column yesterday, explaining that the goal was to create value for the programming produced for the network by Warner Bros. But looking at the economic realities of the network going forward, he said, "we were going to be creating less and less original programming and repurposing or repeating more and more of it." Programming produced jointly with CBS "is a much better way to serve our strategic end than to continue with WB," he said.
According to ad-buying firm Magna Global, the WB's lineup already is 51 percent reruns this season, the Associated Press reported.
Or, as Moonves so succinctly put it, "Fifty percent of a winner is better than 100 percent of something that's breaking even."
He told The TV Column: "UPN had made great strides over the last couple years" but was only approaching break-even.
"Looking down the road, there wasn't great upside."
The new deal leaves in the lurch some of the biggest UPN stations, which are owned by News Corp. When UPN launched in '95, a station group called Chris-Craft provided, among its stations, those in the country's three largest markets -- New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. In 2001, those stations later were sold to News Corp., which is also home of the Fox network. Nine News Corp. stations are currently UPN affiliates; yesterday a News Corp. spokesman told Reuters those stations will seek new programming, adding, "Every change is an opportunity."
UPN's affiliation deal with News Corp. is set to expire in August; ditto WB's affiliation deal with Tribune. That became a subject of conversation between Meyer and Moonves, who goes way back with Meyer, having formerly been head of WB Television, developing hit series like "ER" and "Friends."
"We were having dinner one night around Thanksgiving and looked at each other and realized that at that moment in time we were both being pushed by affiliate groups to make long-range commitments . . . and if we were going to find a way to do this together we had to do it now or probably be separated for many years to come," Meyer said.
"We both felt it made sense . . . and went from there. We were of unified purpose."
Yesterday they said that in spite of the costs involved in launching it, they expected The CW to be profitable its first season.
They would not discuss how many people would be laid off as a result of the merger.
In Washington, Tribune-owned WBDC, currently home to the WB network, will become a CW affiliate; News Corp.-owned UPN station WDCA will not.
Yesterday, WBDC General Manager Eric Meyrowitz was doing the happy dance, telling The Post's John Maynard he is "charged up" about the news because "it gives us a better platform to serve the market."
WDCA General Manager Duffy Dyer did not return multiple calls left at his office yesterday.
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