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Question about The CW's origins


Devon

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Hi,

I'm looking to see if anyone has any info on this. I'm wondering approximately when did the heads of UPN and the WB begin talks about merging? I know the formal announcement came in Jan 2006, but is there a citable source that indicates when the talks actually began?

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From the book Season Finale: The Unexpected Rise and Fall of The WB and UPN (written by a former WB exec), the deal that became The CW as we know it stemmed from a casual conversation between Barry Meyer and Les Moonves at a dinner party in Haim Saban's Beverly Hills home in November 2005.

 

Meyer took Moonves aside and said "We should think about this". He didn't have to say UPN or WB, Moonves knew what "this" was.

 

UPN was still far away from turning a profit, and in the newly spun-off CBS Corp., Moonves was open to any offer that could help him manage those losses. A joint venture with WB would let him bury the smaller 50% share of The CW's red ink in the "investment" column of CBS Corp.'s books.

 

Likewise, The WB was in a rut, due to internal turmoil and corporate politics at Time Warner (Before approaching Moonves, Meyer attempted to woo ABC/Disney's Bob Iger for a deal. ABC would annex some of The WB's operations, and control the advertising sales. Disney at the time was turning ABC Family into a cable version of The WB by picking up syndication rights to a majority of their shows. Iger admitted as much to Meyer. However, Iger saw the writing on the wall about the state of broadcast television and passed on the deal).

 

The affiliation agreements for both The WB and UPN were set to expire at the same time, which Meyer was fully aware of. "I know where you are with Fox, and I know where we are with Tribune. If we don't take advantage of this now, the shareholders in both our companies will look at us in five years from now and think we were just really, really dumb."

 

The following Monday morning, Meyer informed Bruce Rosenblum of his conversation with Moonves. They followed up by getting in touch with Nancy Tellem and verified CBS' sincere interest in getting a deal done. The conceptual framework of The CW came together in a matter of days.

 

That's the quick and dirty gist of it. I recommend you pick up the book, it's really interesting.

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^ I also recommend picking up "Season Finale". It really gets into the whole thing. Quite interesting. I was working for CBS at the time. We also had a UPN operation that morphed into the CW. A lot of stuff made more sense after that book.

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