Season Finale’s history is flawed, but intriguing
Posted on Tuesday, January 22, 2008
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In its heyday, no TV network seemed more alive, more naturally homegrown and more on-target than The WB, which launched Jan. 11, 1995.
In the new book Season Finale: The Unexpected Rise and Fall of The WB and UPN (HarperCollins, $ 25. 95 ), former WB Entertainment President Susanne Daniels and Variety reporter / editor Cynthia Littleton chronicle the creation of The WB and UPN, The WB’s distinctive brand identity and the downfall that resulted in both networks shuttering and the formation of The CW.
For those intrigued by the TV business and its history, Season Finale is a worthwhile read to learn how best intentions can go awry, egos get in the way, dysfunctional business partnerships will destroy an endeavor and how believing your own hype can be a dangerous thing.
Since it’s Daniels’ book, the focus is more squarely on The WB than UPN, noting UPN’s “inane comedies” but skimming over or ignoring some of The WB’s flops. And the book fails to tell the story behind the recasting of the captain on UPN’s Star Trek: Voyager (Kate Mulgrew replaced Genevieve Bujold after a few days of filming ), an intriguing footnote, perhaps, but it’s an important bit of early UPN history.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer fans may also blanch to read Daniels and Littleton describe Charisma Carpenter’s character as a “sexy campus vampire” (Cordelia wasn’t a vampire ). They also mistakenly call The WB’s 2003 series The O’Keefes a drama (it was a single-camera comedy ).
These goofs aside, there are trivia morsels TV fans will enjoy: Beau Bridges was WB executives’ first pick to play the Rev. Camden on 7 th Heaven, but his going rate was more than the network was willing to pay. And Season Finale finally confirms what was speculated years ago: Lori Rom quit The WB’s Charmed after filming the pilot because “she could not reconcile her spiritual beliefs with the witches-and-warlocks theme of the show.”
What’s most intriguing about the book is the obtuse business dealings behind the scenes at both networks. Think your company is dysfunctional ? It may be nirvana compared with the internal structure of UPN, which was made up of two warring corporate factions.
Then there was The WB, led by maverick creator Jamie Kellner, who set out to right the financial wrongs he felt were done to him following his successful launch of the Fox network. But Season Finale says Kellner ditched The WB’s “all for one, one for all” corporate culture in a get-richer-quick bid to launch his own station group of WB affiliates.
Although The WB won virtually every creative battle opposite UPN, in the end UPN won the war as its entertainment president, Dawn Ostroff, went on to lead The CW. The WB’s creative executives were largely out of the picture.
Season Finale suggests many reasons for the demise of The WB, including Kellner’s departure, the lack of owned and operated stations, a failure to develop many new hits after 2002, Time Warner’s decision to merge with America Online and allowing Buffy the Vampire Slayer to move from The WB to UPN for its last two seasons.
Daniels, now entertainment president at Lifetime, said that the primary cause for the network’s death was a lack of fervency within Time Warner to build it into a long-lasting entity. She recalled her job in comedy development at Fox before the launch of The WB and the investments Fox impresario Rupert Murdoch made (buying stations, landing the rights to the NFL ).
“He made some huge investments in programming, and he said, ‘I’m going to spend money, and I’m going to do this, I’m going to build this network, ’” Daniels said. “Nobody did that at Warner Bros., and it’s why I left the network [in 2001 ]. I didn’t see that happening. After [executives ] Bob Daly and Terry Semel left Warner Bros., it just wasn’t the same. Nobody was saying, ‘ We’re going to make this network work.’ If you don’t have that, forget it. That’s what killed it.”
Daniels said she wrote Season Finale with Littleton because she’s a fan of television history and books about TV’s past. She also saw the book as a memorial to The WB, which she loved and secretly feared may go the way of DuMont, a network that fizzled in the mid-1950 s after a decade of broadcasting.
“I didn’t want The WB to be another DuMont, which is to me something that came and went,” Daniels said. “And in fact it is. That’s part of what motivated me to do this book. I needed more to come out of it than that.”