RIP, The CW: Too Good For This World, Too Pure

It’s the end of The CW as we know it, and nobody is feeling fine. Not the showrunners and writers who used to work on series for the network. Not the fans. Not the critics. Even The CW itself, once the home of the three “S”s (sex, superheroes, and the supernatural), seems to be on halting life support as it figures out what it will become next, once it has divested of the types of shows that made its mark for nearly two decades (the network officially launched on September 18, 2006). It’s a sad ending to one of the most reliably earnest and inclusive places on television, and it’s possible we may never know its like again.

To be clear, the body isn’t in the ground quite yet. The CW will still exist, at least in name only, over the course of the 2023-2024 TV season, under the stewardship of owners Nexstar. There will even be some CW programming continuing, including neo-Western Walker, and sports drama All American. As of this writing, three more shows — Superman & Lois, Gotham Knights, and All American: Homecoming — have yet to be canceled, though it’s likely they will be by the time the network’s Upfront presentation rolls around on Thursday, May 18.

Every other show on the network that wasn’t already canceled during the bloodbath that happened right before Nexstar officially bought a majority stake in the network (Batwoman, DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, Legacies, and more), or was allowed to come to a natural conclusion (Riverdale, The Flash, Nancy Drew) has been canceled over the past few weeks, including Kung Fu, Walker: Independence, and The Winchesters.

In their place, with empty hours of programming to fill, Nexstar has vowed to make the never-profitable network, well, profitable. That vision has already begun to take shape in the form of reality TV shows like Fboy Island, canceled by Warner Bros. Discovery’s Max and picked up for a new season alongside spinoff Fgirl Island. It also means sports, including the already successful relative to regular CW ratings LIV Golf. And on the scripted side, you’ll still get to see stalwarts like One Tree Hill and Riverdale ex-pat Chad Michael Murray, but on cheaply licensed imports that have already aired in Canada. The licensed shows bit was something that was already happening under the previous stewardship, but with Nexstar, it’s arguable The CW now stands for “Canadians Watched (first).”

It’s entirely possible these shows are good. A light-hearted procedural starring Lea Thompson as a novelist who teams up with her daughter to solve mysteries titled The Spencer Sisters? Sounds fun to me! A show based on the writings of the same author as Netflix hit Virgin River? Sure, why not! These sorts of series might have even shown up in places on the old CW as part of its constant push to try to capture an adult audience*, only to be canceled a season later. It’s also not the first time The CW itself has been reinvented — or rather, invented. The network started as the cobbled-together parts of the beloved The WB network, and the slightly less beloved UPN.

(*Little did we know, as revealed by Nexstar, the average age of CW broadcast viewers is 58.)

But what seems to be missing in this newer lineup are the ingredients that made viewers such devotees of The CW, under the steady hand of former CEO Mark Pedowitz. Though often derisively characterized as “teen shows,” what actually connected the programming on The CW was earnest positivity. It felt scrappy and young even beyond the allegedly teen-oriented content, and given the viewership of the shows was never competitive with other broadcast networks like CBS, NBC, ABC, and even Fox, it was the underdog. You weren’t just a fan of the shows, you were rooting for the CW to succeed as a whole.

Yes, as has already been mentioned ad nauseam, not a lot of people were watching these series. But the people who did watch The CW were devoted to the shows, and the channel, in a way that would make any other network (and by extension their advertisers) enviable. Out-of-context plotlines and clips made the programming seem like soap opera cheese, and sometimes it was. Heck, often it was. But when it was good, it was good. Like Battlestar Galactica? Then why weren’t you also watching The 100, which pushed the envelope on how far you can take a teen apocalypse drama, and then went even further? How about the DC superhero universe called the Arrow-verse, which embraced the multiverse concept and explored it in wild directions for years before it took over movie screens? And that’s not even mentioning how the network and shows constantly strived to be more inclusive of diverse talent in front of, and behind the camera, and tell stories about people from every end of the ethnic and sexual spectrum.

That last part in particular is something The CW consistently owned and laudably promoted, making concepts like “Open to All” a cornerstone of not just their advertising, but their casting and writing process. Similarly, a year-long initiative “Dare to Love, Defy Hate,” helped raise awareness about mental health and cyberbullying through PSAs and plotlines on shows. And despite the bulk of their programming filmed in Canada and with strong fanbases in places like Brazil, The CW picked up the ball dropped by previous youth-skewing networks like MTV and regularly had their stars try to get out the vote in America.

Not every part of The CW was beloved, and plenty of controversies erupted. But even those showed off the passion and creativity of the fans, as well as the general openness of those behind the scenes to feedback. The 100 is a great example, a show that killed off the canonically queer character Lexa (Alycia Debnam-Carey), sparking a fierce debate about the “Bury Your Gays” trope that helped transform how showrunners on all networks approach queer characters on TV (your mileage may vary on how The 100 itself responded, but that’s a whole other article). Another queer issue? Not canonizing the fan-favorite couple Lena Luthor (Katie McGrath) and Kara Zor-El (Melissa Benoist) on Supergirl, aka Supercorp, led to calls of queerbaiting, and an entire alternate reality on social media where fans managed to convince legit press outlets that a cut of the finale existed where the two kissed (they did not). Other controversies were embraced by the network, like a public outcry over the sexual content of Gossip Girl that was subsequently turned into the show’s iconic ad campaign: press quotes of “Mind-blowingly inappropriate,” “A nasty piece of work,” and “Every parent’s nightmare” helped the show go from water cooler buzz to overnight sensation.

But ultimately The CW’s greatest strength was almost certainly the source of its downfall: its reliability. Not just in terms of the product it was creating, but the fact that Pedowitz almost belligerently refused to cancel shows. It was almost a joke how rarely The CW canceled series, which amped up the shock factor when whole swathes of the network disappeared over the past year. But that passion that Pedowitz and his crew had for television helped foster an atmosphere that was a rarity in show business, one that allowed showrunners the time to figure out their shows creatively and explore them without the Sword of Damocles hanging over their heads. Shows were canceled when they just weren’t bringing in audiences, of course. But even then most of the time they’d be allowed to finish out their season, instead of abruptly getting shuffled off air after the first two episodes didn’t hit. The most frequent refrain you would hear from Pedowitz on conference calls about scheduling was how much they loved the shows, and how badly they wanted them to work. And that was sometimes to a fault.

Take one of the network’s biggest successes, Supernatural, which ran for hundreds of episodes and spawned a whole mini-empire of conventions and merchandise. Even up until the finale, Supernatural was a hit by CW standards, and stars Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki stayed in the fold for new series (one of which is Walker, and is continuing in the Nü CW; the other is the canceled spinoff The Winchesters, which Ackles is trying to shop around). But by the end of the run, the show definitely wasn’t bringing in new fans, it was catering to the base. The Arrow-verse was another example, which expanded from two hit shows — Arrow and The Flash — into nightly superhero series that nearly took over the entire CW schedule. These shows ranged from creative hits like DC’s Legends of Tomorrow to cultural milestones like having the first lesbian superhero lead (and then Black lesbian superhero lead) with Batwoman. But even for devotees, it was a lot of real estate. Because of The CW’s passion for what worked, what was a novelty grew to become an obligation for viewers.

Perhaps part of the reason for this dogged need to revisit the same territory, time and again (multiple Vampire Diaries series, 90210, and Melrose Place reboots) is that experiments rarely hit. The critically acclaimed musical series Crazy Ex-Girlfriend is one of the rare exceptions, a show that actually garnered awards for a network that seemed invisible to awards bodies, even when the work was awards-worthy. But mostly, a show that didn’t fit into one of the three “S”s would fizzle quickly. The fans were passionate about what they loved about The CW; they ignored the rest.

And understanding the viewing habits of this audience was another “blessing and a curse” type situation. An innovative and lucrative deal with Netflix led to an explosion of interest in CW shows. But after a phenomenon henceforth called The Netflix Bump doubled the audience for Riverdale from Season 1 to Season 2, subsequent bumps didn’t arise, and viewers quickly realized they could wait and binge whole seasons at a shot on the streamer instead of dealing with a spotty, nine-month-long broadcast schedule. Very quickly, Riverdale and the like became Netflix shows for viewers, rather than associating them with The CW.

Similarly, The CW was one of the first networks to put their whole catalog up for next-day streaming, knowing the audience was rarely watching live. But that ate into the broadcast audience (perhaps leading to that 58-year-old average viewing number) and meant the network had to look more at streaming increases than broadcast numbers. A good, forward-thinking strategy that instead often got sold as “The CW’s viewership is cratering” instead of what it was: The CW’s viewership was mostly still there, they were just watching on their own schedule, on various platforms. For a streaming service, that might be fine; for a broadcast network, not so much.

All of that is in the rear-view mirror, though. It’s too late for The CW to correct any mistakes because The CW is all but gone. In its wake it will leave a legion of devoted fans, and perhaps even more importantly, an entire generation of creators who got their start in the business working on shows for the network. What the Writers Guild of America (WGA) is striking about right now is what The CW, through its producing partners like Warner Bros. Television and CBS, provided… An actual training ground for creators to move up the ranks and get a shot at learning how television works. As the industry continues to squeeze out creators in favor of automation and genericized content, The CW looked to the models of the past to help foster the writers, directors, and actors of the future.

That gets to the core of what Mark Pedowitz, and by extension the rest of The CW network did: they focused on passion at the expense of profits. A losing prospect for a company, but a net positive for the world. That’s why fans flocked to the network, and why they’re rejecting so many others. You could feel the human touch in every frame of film that hit the air, the devotion to keeping those shows going and let them grow. The CW cared.

The network may not exist the same way beyond this week, but those series, the careers, and the devotion of the fans will live on.