From its inception, The CW was different. Formed in 2006 as the successor to UPN and The WB, The CW offered something that no other network did: programming designed to appeal to a younger demographic. The home of iconic mid-2000s shows like 7th Heaven, Gilmore Girls, One Tree Hill, Smallville, and Supernatural after The WB’s closure, The CW would go on to define genre television in the 2010s, with shows like The Vampire Diaries, The 100, all of the Arrowverse, The Originals, Roswell, New Mexico, Riverdale, and many, many more. The network would adopt the slogan “dare to defy” and it’s programming did just that, offering unique series that defied expectation and demographic to become pop culture juggernauts.
But in 2022, everything changed. Nexstar officially purchased the network and with that purchase came a content shift. On May 12, 2022, The CW unleashed a so-called “Red Wedding” with a mass cancellation of seven shows in one fell swoop—4400, Naomi, Dynasty, Charmed, In the Dark, Roswell, New Mexico, and Legacies. Two other shows, Batwoman and DC’s Legends of Tomorrow, had already been cancelled just weeks earlier and, in the months that followed, even more shows were cancelled, including Nancy Drew, Stargirl, The Flash, and Riverdale. Eventually, four pre-Nexstar scripted series remained, but they, too, would soon wind down and today, The CW is nearly recognizable with just one pre-Nexstar series remaining, All American, entering its final season this July. When the series ends, it will officially mark the end of an era, but four years on, genre television still hasn’t recovered from that one day in May.
Perhaps one of the greatest things about The CW was that none of its original shows were basic. Instead, these were series that took risks that the main networks rarely did and did it with a focus that prestige television couldn’t. Shows like Crazy Ex-Girlfriend—which was originally developed for Showtime but found its home on The CW—was a romantic comedy-drama with a twist: it was also a musical. The series, which followed lawyer Rebecca Bunch (Rachel Bloom) who ditches her successful life in New York City to move to West Covina, California all to pursue her ex-boyfriend from a high-school summer camp, featured original music numbers in each episode and, more than that, utilized the show’s elements of musical theater and comedy to tell rich, nuanced, and human story about mental health. The series wasn’t particularly a ratings hit, something that would have gotten it axed on just about any other network, but it had a devoted following and critical acclaim and was allowed to flourish on The CW.
The network also took big chances on genre as well, with The 100 bringing sci-fi to its younger demographic in a post-nuclear apocalypse drama following a group of teenagers sent back to Earth to see if the planet was habitable years after cataclysm. The show started out as something so bad it was almost good but hung in there to become a challenging and surprisingly dark coming of age survival story where the heroes and villains were both frequently shades of gray rather than stark black and white. The Arrowverse, with shows like Arrow, The Flash, Supergirl, and Legends of Tomorrow not only proved that the superhero universe could work on the small screen just as well as the blockbuster Marvel Cinematic Universe did on the big screen, but it arguably improved on it, giving fans seasonal crossovers that brought all the heroes together in a massive way. The Arrowverse even pulled off an Avengers: Infinity War/Avengers: Endgame scale event with Crisis on Infinite Earths so well it made pretty much everything DC canon. There had been nothing like it before—and probably will be nothing like it again.
Every single show on The CW tried things that you just didn’t see elsewhere, and that made it such a fascinating and exciting network. Depending on the night of the week that you tuned in, you might find everything from superheroes to musicals to telenovelas to dark sci fi to horror, to straight up nostalgia. The effects and other elements weren’t always great—there is a running joke about the wigs on The CW series if you look on the internet long enough—but the shows themselves were always interesting and pushing boundaries in ways no one else did. Even with the shows largely skewing towards a younger audience, these were shows that everyone could tune into—and often did.
After Nexstar, however, all of that risk taking and uniqueness in television came to an end. Starting in 2023, The CW began focusing not on unique, groundbreaking television series that would make their way to streaming, but on linear and sports. Instead of original scripted programming, the network started acquiring shows from outside of the United States like The Chosen, and co-produced series like Sullivan’s Crossing and Wild Cards. There was also a push for unscripted content, as well as more sports.
But while The CW completely changed, the challenging and innovative shows that The CW had created that not only garnered awards and acclaimed but had major cultural impact didn’t find their way anywhere else. Turn on any of the major broadcast networks or even most premium cable networks and you won’t find anything that even remotely resembles what The CW offered. Sure, you can find sci-fi and horror and drama just about anywhere—and some very good shows that fall under those umbrellas—but you don’t find anything with the same edge or even a broad appeal. On The CW, the whole family could sit down to watch Oliver Queen try not to fail his city on Arrow, but HBO’s The Penguin isn’t exactly all ages television. Nor is Peacemaker. The CW’s franchise of shows that dealt in the world of vampires and witches and werewolves was accessible to everyone, with The Vampire Diaries, The Originals, and even Legacies full of adventure and melodrama. AMC’s Interview With the Vampire (soon to be called The Vampire Lestat) and Mayfair Witches are notably darker and more mature, and not to mention not nearly as interconnected.
This leaves a hole in programming, an open space. In a sense, The CW was television’s “third space”, that spot audiences could go to that wasn’t the big networks or prestige television, a place where everyone was welcome. Now, four years after one of the most brutal days in television history, it just doesn’t exist anymore. and we’re only now starting to understand what we truly lost.
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