Almost 30 Years Later, The WB Is Still TV's Greatest Experiment

Almost 30 Years Later, The WB Remains One of TV’s Greatest Experiments

There are few things more iconic than the teen drama. Star-crossed lovers, jocks vs preps, Friday night football games, and the occasional vampire or extraterrestrial, if the teen drama in question resided on the now-dead (but never forgotten!) WB Network.

Remaining on air for 11 years (a mere blip in TV’s grand history) and boasting titles like Gilmore Girls, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Dawson’s Creek, The WB was a surprisingly short-lived TV experiment whose most popular shows remain cultural staples to this day. Amidst the age of constant cancellations, the thought that a network like The WB could crumble after hardly a decade is a discouraging thought, with how many risks taken, great shows produced, and iconic moments hit the airwaves of the once-prolific network.

The WB’s sorted history begins on January 11, 1995. As its initials would suggest, The WB was created by Warner Bros., developed to expand programming and eventually phase out independent networks and stations that weren’t garnering as much revenue or viewership.

August 1996 saw The WB’s premiere of 7th Heaven, whose status as a family drama solidified the next ten years of programming viewers could expect from the network. Mere months later, the world came to know Buffy Summers, who hardly needs an introduction, and from Buffy came Angel, the spinoff about her crime-fighting vampire ex-boyfriend. Buffy alone should’ve been enough to save The WB in the long run. It’s thanks to The WB that TV changed forever; as critic Robert Moore once said, “[Buffy] was not merely a great TV series in its own right, it helped redefine what TV could do.” The WB was ushering forward a new era of television with the shows it was putting out—an especially impressive feat considering it hardly lived to see its eleventh birthday. The teen drama alone, a cornerstone of the network, earmarked a golden age of television from the mid-90s up until the end of the ‘10s, and found some of its greatest entries on The WB.

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Despite its iconic roll call, The WB was often a little fish in a big broadcast pond (existing alongside the “Big Four,” networks ABC, CBS, NBC, and FOX). And despite the cultural acclaim these series almost universally cherish, the network never scored a Top-20 show. How this is possible with titles like Buffy, Charmed, Gilmore Girls, and One Tree Hill, I’m not entirely sure. But perhaps that’s what made The WB so special: while the Big Four broadcasters chased rising ratings and four-quadrant hits, the series that have allowed this network to live on in spite of their comparatively small success have been shows that catered to a specific demographic and fostered dedicated fanbases that skewed more niche than anything a more universality-focused network desired.

The WB was largely geared towards a teenage audience. Dawson’s Creek, One Tree Hill, and Gilmore Girls were all coming-of-age dramas following the lives of mundane young people. Unfortunately, media with heavy teen representation is often seen as melodramatic and hardly a marker of intellect. It didn’t matter how much these characters and these shows meant to viewers—they weren’t as “crucial” to save if the audiences could be so easily pushed aside and deemed unimportant.

Alongside straight dramas, teen-focused sci-fi and fantasy series were also subject to the double standard that plagues media geared towards young people and women. Why is it that, in a world in which Star Wars is one of the biggest franchises of all time, stories of witches and aliens were still cast aside as frivolous teenage television? Charmed (1998) aired on The WB in its entirety alongside the original Sabrina the Teenage Witch (after it left ABC). In the same vein, Smallville (2001) followed a young Clark Kent, pre-Superman, airing until its move to The CW. Aliens were all the rage, hiding in plain sight in Roswell (1999), a show about aliens attending a high school in New Mexico, unbeknownst to most of their (human) classmates. Each of these series maintains a solid spot in nostalgic pop culture and were each successful at the time, sure, but were never truly celebrated to the extent that they should’ve been until now.

But despite finding success with the now-legendary Supernatural and remaining loyal to its brand identity, by 2006, The WB and CBS affiliate UPN announced that they were ceasing operations, joining together to form The CW. Faced with mounting losses and pressures from shareholders, the two former rivals merged, creating a fifth network that aimed to squeeze into the Big Four. Known for its own iconic teen dramas in its over 20-year lifespan, The CW has now faced its own almost-collapse in the wake of the unstable television landscape. The loss of both The WB and joint venture The CW proves that the more mergers and acquisitions plague our entertainment industry, the less creativity and counter-programming will be allowed to thrive on screen.

Is the kind of television The WB excelled at truly dead? No. But with cable TV on the rapid decline with the rise of streaming services, it’s fair to assume that network TV will never be the same as it was in the golden days of the 2000s and 2010s—it already is so drastically different in just the few years it took for things to change. Gone are the days of anxiously staying up in middle school, sitting on your couch until the clock struck 8/7c and your favorite show finally aired, live and complete with frustrating commercial breaks at the worst possible times. I live and breathe TV, and while I love the ease that the five (or so) streaming services I’m subscribed to afford me, nothing can ever beat what once was.

Natalie Finn from E! News once quipped, “From Dawson’s crying face to the rapid-fire banter between Lorelai and Rory to the eternal question that is Angel vs. Spike, [The WB’s] shows subtly shaped what we think about when we think about what gave millennials all the feelings.” Millennials may have staked their initial claim, but The WB’s impact lives on in the hearts of Gen Z everywhere who are discovering these shows and these characters for the first time.

When compared with the lifespan of TV shows today, viewers both then and now are allowed the privilege of spending a considerably extensive amount of time with characters from The WB. Gen Z audiences get to immerse themselves more fully into their favorite characters’ worlds, having a guarantee of at least three or more seasons from the network’s most popular titles before having to finally say goodbye. These days, we’re hardly given the guarantee of one season (and with seasons getting shorter, this is usually a measly six-to-eight episodes, compared to the previous 20-to-24).

With characters that feel lived in and real, The WB’s legacy remains its long-lasting shows and its devotion to its audience, and that same affection has transferred to generations discovering these shows on Netflix or Max. The WB was an essential pillar of TV history, and even over 30 years since its inception, it remains strikingly relevant and aspirational as a hub where niche audiences and creativity on TV once thrived—a rarity in our continually more homogenous entertainment landscape.

Gillian Bennett is a writer and editor who has been featured in Strike Magazine, Her Campus, and now Paste Magazine. She enjoys watching copious reruns of Buffy the Vampire Slayer and fantasizing about living in London. You can find more of her neverending inner monologue and online diary on her Twitter or her blog.

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Almost 30 Years Later, The WB Remains One of TV’s Greatest Experiments