Reminiscing about The WB and UPN
Paying tribute to two television icons
I’ve spent the past month reading Season Finale: The Unexpected Rise and Fall of the WB and UPN by Susanne Daniels and Cynthia Littleton. I highly recommend the book because it gives a lot of great insight into how television networks operate or at least how they operated in the 90s and early 2000s. It’s also a nice dose of nostalgia if you grew up with both channels like I did. After finishing it yesterday, I feel a bit sad. Not because of anything that was written in the book but because I finished it.
Reading it felt like I was traveling back in time to when I watched wrestling for the first time on UPN using a CRT TV and saw this episode of Smackdown or when I used to come home from school and watch Static Shock reruns on Kids WB. I’m sad that I’m not going to be able to wake up tomorrow and read a chapter about how UPN canceled a black sitcom because they were trying to appeal to “Middle America,” aka white people, or the behind-the-scenes story about the making of a hit show like Buffy the Vampire Slayer or Dawson’s Creek. To cope with this case of the “Post-Book Blues,” I thought that I’d just talk about my memories of both channels and how they both merged to form the CW.
I honestly can’t really remember my first experience with either channel. Knowing me it was probably Kids WB. That’s where most of my memories with the WB actually come from. It’s crazy to think that at one point you could watch a new episode of the Spectacular Spider-Man and The Batman in the same morning. X-Men Evolution also aired during Kids WB as well. After reading Season Finale, I realize how good The WB was as a network.
They essentially were the network for an entire generation of teenagers. With Kids WB as a weekly programming block, they were also able to be the network for an entire generation of kids like me. With the way things are going in regards to the internet and streaming, that’s never going to happen again.
Speaking of never happening again, how about that UPN lineup? The Hughleys, Half & Half, Moesha, Girlfriends, All of Us, One on One, and The Parkers; These were all black sitcoms that were on UPN, and that’s not even all of them. Other than TV One or BET, I’ve never seen a channel with that many black shows. The crazy thing is that it wasn’t even a black channel. I remember that UPN got stereotyped so much that I thought it was a black channel.
Growing up, I experienced all of these shows as a kid through their syndicated reruns on other channels like BET and The N, a defunct programming block for teens on Noggin. It’s a shame how a lot of these shows got the ax when they became part of UPN’s identity. A decent amount of them weren’t even canceled due to low ratings. When UPN merged with The WB to form The CW in 2006, certain shows didn’t survive the transition for one reason or another.
My most fond memory of UPN is watching wrestling for the first time in 2005. I had known about it for years thanks to playing the video games but this one kid at summer camp wouldn’t shut up about Rey Mysterio so I decided to finally watch it. Ironically the first thing I saw watching WWE was Rey Mysterio getting beat up while Eddie Guerrero watched. I don’t know why but I never tuned in to watch wrestling for another year. When I did, I found out that Eddie had died and that Rey was now world champion. For some reason, I don’t know why, I didn’t watch Smackdown for weeks after I started watching it again in 2006.
When I tuned into UPN that September, I was confused why Smackdown wasn’t on. I found out later that it was now on the CW and that UPN didn’t exist anymore. This was how I discovered the CW as a kid. From the first time I watched Smackdown on the CW, I basically watched or at least tried to watch it every week from September 2006 up until around 2013 or 2014 when I started to occasionally watch.
Those first few years of the CW as a kid introduced me to so many shows thanks to reruns. I fell in love with the Bernie Mac Show, My Wife and Kids, the Simpsons, and Malcolm in the Middle. I definitely shouldn’t have been watching some of these shows at 9 and 10 years old but I’m glad that I did. I did end up catching an episode of Smallville when it aired only because Kane from WWE was a guest star.
The CW’s current situation is actually why I decided to read Season Finale. People are questioning its future in the wake of the recent Discovery Warner merger the same way people questioned the future of The WB after the infamous Time-Warner AOL merger in 2001. UPN’s status was also up in the air after Viacom originally merged with CBS back in the 2000s.
This book showed me that the more things change, the more they stay the same as even back then in 2006, the internet was being blamed for the changing of the television landscape. Because of nostalgia, I’d hate to see the CW disappear. Even as an adult, I had some fond memories of watching the Arrowverse shows and iZombie.
Back to The WB and UPN for a moment. I honestly think that the WB was better because it had a vision. It set out to be THE channel for teens/young adults. UPN wasn’t sure what it wanted to be and suffered from it. Maybe if they stuck to chasing black viewers instead of that “Middle America” audience they never actually got to watch the network it would have survived longer? Who knows. All I know is that I will always miss the time I spent with both of these channels and their shows. Streaming services are great but they’ll never be able to capture the feeling I had watching these channels as a kid.
Bonus: Enjoy some of the last footage of The WB.