The WB Television Network (known simply as The WB, and nicknamed "The Frog" after its former mascot Michigan J. Frog)[3] was an American broadcast television network that launched on January 11, 1995,[4] as a joint venture between Warner Bros. Entertainment (the network's namesake and controlling owner), Tribune Broadcasting, and network president Jamie Kellner. It aired programs targeting teenagers and young adults aged 13 to 34, while its children's programming block, Kids' WB, targeted youth aged 4 to 12. On January 24, 2006, Warner Bros. and CBS Corporation announced plans to merge The WB and competitor UPN into a new network, The CW, later that year.[5] The WB ceased broadcasting on September 17, 2006, with some programs from both it and UPN (which shut down two days earlier) moving to The CW when it launched the following day, September 18. Time Warner re-used the WB brand for an online network that operated from 2008 to 2013 in the United States, which offered programs from the television network and the defunct In2TV service created before Time Warner's spinoff of AOL.[6][7]
History
1993–1995: Origins
Much like its competitor UPN, The WB was created primarily in reaction to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC)'s April 1993 deregulation of media ownership rules that repealed the Financial Interest and Syndication Rules (fin-syn), and resulting fear that networks would stop buying programs from independent studios.[8] Another reason was the success of the Fox network (which debuted in October 1986) and first-run syndicated programming during the late 1980s and early 1990s (such as Baywatch, Star Trek: The Next Generation, and War of the Worlds), as well as the erosion in ratings suffered by independent television stations due to the growth of cable television and movie rentals. The network can also trace its beginnings to the Prime Time Entertainment Network (PTEN), a programming service operated as a joint venture between Time Warner and the Chris-Craft Industries group of stations and launched in January 1989.
Programming
Much, though not all, of The WB's programming during its eleven-year run as a television network was produced by corporate cousin Warner Bros. Television. The network's schedule during its first two seasons – the 1995 midseason (when it inaugurated its initial Wednesday lineup) and the first half of the 1995–96 season (when the network expanded its programming to Sundays) – consisted entirely of sitcoms; the first drama series to debut on the network was the primetime soap Savannah, which debuted in February 1996 and ran for two seasons until its cancellation in February 1997. The WB's first reality series was the American adaptation of Popstars, which ran for two seasons from 2001 to 2003.
In addition to live-action programs, the network has experimented with primetime animated series; Pinky and the Brain was the first such series, airing as part of the network's Sunday lineup from September 1995 to July 1996, before moving exclusively to the Kids' WB Saturday lineup due to low ratings in its prime time slot. Most of the animated projects that aired afterward were adult animation series; the last such attempts being The Oblongs (running for one season in 2001, and was later revived on corporate sister Cartoon Network's Adult Swim block) and The PJs (which moved to the network in 2000 following its cancellation by Fox, and ran for only one additional season on The WB).
The WB also occasionally aired regularly scheduled repeat episodes of first-run series airing on other nights throughout the television season intermittently throughout its history; Sister, Sister was the first WB series to receive this treatment, with repeats of the sitcom's first two seasons (which originally aired on ABC) from August 1995 to August 1996, in addition to the first-run episodes it aired on Wednesday nights[20]
Differences between The WB and the "Big Four" networks
Scheduling
At the time of its shutdown, The WB ran only two hours of primetime network programming on Monday through Fridays and five hours on Sundays, compared to the three Monday through Saturday and four Sunday primetime hours offered by the Big Three networks (unlike The WB, UPN never carried any weekend primetime programming, though it did offer a movie package to its affiliates on weekend afternoons until September 2000, when the latter was replaced with a two-hour repeat block of UPN programs). This primetime scheduling allowed for many of the network's affiliates to air local newscasts during the 10:00–11:00 p.m. (Eastern and Pacific) time period.
The WB never ran network programming on Saturday nights – despite the fact that the network maintained a children's program block on Saturday mornings – allowing affiliates to run syndicated programs, sports, movies or network programs that were preempted from earlier in the week due to special programming, in the 8:00–10:00 p.m. (Eastern and Pacific) time period. The network's Sunday schedule was originally three hours when The WB began programming that night in September 1995, but expanded to five hours (from 5:00 to 10:00 p.m. Eastern and Pacific Time) in September 2002, with the creation of the "EasyView" repeat block (that block was retained by The CW, which initially adopted The WB's scheduling model until it turned Sunday programming over to its affiliates in September 2009).
In comparison to ABC and CBS, The WB also had the fewest hours devoted to daytime programming on weekdays between September 2001 (when the network dropped the weekday morning block of Kids' WB programs) and September 2006, running only two hours of programming each weekday afternoon (compared to 4½ hours on CBS and four hours on ABC) – NBC in comparison ran only three hours of daytime programming each weekday (not counting its morning news program
Affiliates
In 2005, The WB had an estimated audience reach of 91.66% of all U.S. households (equivalent to 90,282,480 households with at least one television set); the network was carried by 177 VHF and UHF stations in the United States. The WB was also available in Canada on cable and satellite providers through affiliates that are located within proximity to the Canada–US border (whose broadcasts of WB shows were subject to simultaneous substitution rules imposed by the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission to protect program rights held by a domestically based network), and through two affiliates owned by Tribune Broadcasting (WPIX in New York City and KTLA in Los Angeles) that are classified in that country as superstations, as well as the superstation feed of Chicago affiliate WGN-TV.
Station standardization
When The WB launched in 1995, the network began branding most of its affiliates with a combination of "WB" or "The WB," and the station's channel number. This meant that, for example, New York City affiliate WPIX and St. Louis affiliate KPLR-TV were both referred to as "The WB11" and "WB11" respectively (though WPIX branded as "The WB, Channel 11" until 1996, and KPLR as its pre-affiliation brand "St. Louis 11" until 1998). Fox originated such naming schemes, and CBS uses similar on-air branding for most of its owned-and-operated stations (NBC and ABC also utilize similar, but less extreme, naming schemes). While Fox and UPN mandated their respective branding schemes on all of their stations, The WB did not.
See also
- 2006 United States broadcast TV realignment
- UPN
- DuMont Television Network
- E!, a similarly developed network in Canada, not related to the American cable network
- The CW, the television network that replaced The WB and UPN, created by Warner Bros. and CBS Corporation
External links
- WB Network from The Encyclopedia of Television
References
- Aaron Greenhouse. The WB Television Network (Unofficial) cs.cmu.edu, Carnegie Mellon School of Computer Science, retrieved August 5, 2001^
- WB Television Network/The - Company Profile and News Bloomberg.com^
- Slanguage Dictionary: F Variety, February 20, 2013, retrieved June 1, 2021