Let us sit upon the ground a while and tell sad tales of the deaths of networks.
So it was made official today: this fall, Paramount and Warner Bros. are closing the book on their respective grand experiments to start “The Fifth Network.” In about a generation, talking about UPN or the WB will be about as relevant a conversation as a comment about the Dumont Network is today. Now, to be fair, they’re planning a new joint venture, the moronically-named CW network, that’ll have programming from both the Warner Bros. and CBS/Viacom/UPN ends of the spectrum. But UPN and the WB will be DOA. As, perhaps, it could be said that they have been since January 1995.
I remember turning in for the first night of both that year, and I was doubly invested in the bold attempt to launch networks #5 and #6 – UPN would have the new Star Trek spinoff, and there was a better than even chance that the company I was working for at the time would be launching this area’s first UPN station (which, indeed, it did later that year; click the graphic above for that story). So admittedly, I had an investment in the UPN end of it, and I then proceeded to spend about four years of my professional life trying to push the UPN lineup and sell the UPN dream.
Which means I also got to see loads of classic UPN missteps.
Here’s the thing…I think either of these networks might have survived as cable entities, but when you have to recruit or build affiliate stations in every market in the country, support them with advertising co-op money and materials on an almost daily basis, and do things like custom promo shoots with show talent for them, your expenses skyrocket. Either WB or UPN would have thrived minus those expenses, when all they had to do was promote themselves instead of helping a combined total of 200+ stations all promote themselves against varying degrees of local competition.
And both Warner and Paramount should’ve bloody well known this, because they had both tried before. Paramount tried to launch a fourth network in the late 1970s, using – try to contain your shock here – a revived version of the original Star Trek (give or take a few characters – Leonard Nimoy wanted nothing to do with it) as its flagship show. But studio and network politics were different in the pre-Fox days, and Paramount’s top brass, to say nothing of their investors, didn’t have the confidence and nerves of steel it would take to shake up the broadcast landscape. That task fell to Barry Diller and Fox in the late 80s and early 90s. The Paramount Network never signed on, and that planned Star Trek series mutated into the first movie.
And it was only after Fox had reared its head, sounded its challenge and survived that Warner Bros. attempted its own “micro-network” in the form of PTEN, the Prime Time Entertainment Network. Launched by the “Prime Time Consortium,” a conglomeration including Warner Bros.’ domestic TV syndication arm and Chris-Craft, a major group of U.S. independent stations, PTEN tried to offer packaged nights of programming that could, in theory, fill out the weeknight schedule of a Fox affiliate (back when Fox was only broadcasting 3-4 nights a week). They had decent programming (much of it in the SF and action-adventure vein), but when the opportunity to get in bed with Paramount for a full network schedule beckoned, Chris-Craft bailed on PTEN and took its stations to UPN, and PTEN collapsed under its own weight. PTEN’s flagship show, the woefully under-promoted Babylon 5, actually outlived its network by getting a cancellation reprieve from cable network TNT. (And for what it’s worth, the ever-present threat of Babylon 5’s cancellation actually had a lot more to do with the ever-present threat of PTEN collapsing than it did with any studio heads not “getting” the show.) PTEN breathed its last in 1997.
So what went wrong? I can only speak for the UPN end of things, but the problems were manifold.… Read more
