“The competition won’t be pretty.” So went the tagline for America’s Next Top Model‘s seventh “cycle,” splashed above images of 13 contestants (in various earthtones) and host Tyra Banks (standing out from the crowd in crimson) in promotions for the season of the reality competition series that debuted in September 2006. Accompanying those fresh faces was a new logo: That of The CW, the result of a merger between UPN (where America’s Next Top Model got its start three years prior) and its rival netlet, The WB. In the cutthroat world of network TV circa 2006, The CW had its work cut out for it—“the competition won’t be pretty” could apply to this broadcast newcomer just as much as the young women vying for a modeling contract on its airwaves.
The CW’s predecessors had struggled for years, never establishing much of a foothold against the established likes of ABC, CBS, and NBC. Despite the combined efforts of the Star Trek franchise, Moesha, Buffy The Vampire Slayer (which ran on both networks), and Dawson’s Creek, UPN and The WB never had their answer to The Simpsons, In Living Color, or Beverly Hills 90210—to name just three of the primetime sensations that helped Fox loosen the grip of the Big Three in the ’80s and ’90s. But following the merger that was first proposed shortly after their respective launches in 1995, the upstart networks that made up The CW finally emerged victorious. And where it counted the most, at least in the eyes of the people running the show: The season-seven premiere of ANMT not only marked a new ratings high for the show, but it was also the night’s top-rated program among women under 35—exactly who The CW was trying to reach. Along with fellow holdovers like One Tree Hill and Supernatural, the network was proving that the baked-in viewership (as much as it existed) of The WB and UPN would likely surf over to these series’ new home.
It could be a rough start at times, but that fall helped The CW map out the kind of frothy, genre-heavy, and contemporary programming that became its claim-to-fame. For the time being, it was mostly the stragglers of a different era, but within five years, The CW would be crawling with vampires, witches, and monster hunters. Then came the superheroes of the Arrowverse, the Archie comics update of Riverdale, a woman who was accidentally artificially inseminated, and another who moved to West Covina for an ex. But even as the stakes grew higher and the premises increasingly out of this world, The CW would usually keep a toe in the small-town and teen dramas that were The WB’s bread-and-butter. (The Black-led series that built UPN’s reputation, however—not so much.)
But first, The CW had to contend with a skeptical industry, viewers who had trouble actually finding the network, and the relatively limited options left in the combined TV cupboards of the Warner Bros. and Paramount organizations. The WB’s popular Everwood was axed before the new network was launched; signature hits like Gilmore Girls, Veronica Mars, Reba, and 7th Heaven wouldn’t survive The CW’s first season. These cancellations certainly pissed off loyal fans, who were vocal about and campaigned hard to reverse the decisions at the time. In the face of these aging series, then-president Dawn Ostroff didn’t have much to fall back on. The CW kicked off with only two originals: the Donnie Wahlberg-led family drama Runaways (which aired only for three weeks before being pulled from the lineup) and Mara Brock Ali’s Girlfriends spin-off, The Game (which would last for nine seasons—though six of those came after it changed formats and moved to BET).
Despite these unfortunate results, or perhaps because of them, it became clear that The CW couldn’t just borrow from the netlets’ strategies to make its mark—not if it wanted a comparatively longer lifespan. It’s not like The CW was DOA, though. A month after it launched, ratings among its target audience were on the rise. The signs pointed to slower growth, and a programming strategy that favored something different and, dare we say, refreshing compared to what its rivals were serving up—which, in 2006, was mostly still broadly appealing fare in traditional TV genres (give or take a 30 Rock, Friday Night Lights, or Heroes).
Lucky for Ostroff and company, The CW’s arrival coincided with social media’s crossover into the mainstream. Tumblr went online only a few months later in February 2007, allowing Veronica Mars fans to cultivate an intense online fandom that had already bloomed across Television Without Pity, LiveJournal, and MySpace—just in time for The CW to pull the plug on the show. In a 2015 interview with The Hollywood Reporter, former network chairman and CEO Mark Pedowitz pointed out social media’s importance to the network at the start, referring to it as the “key to our success, despite what everyone else thought” because they wanted to meet the audience where they are in the digital age. And so they would: When The CW’s first true breakout, Gossip Girl, premiered the following fall, it quickly gained a reputation for having a larger footprint online than on the air. By 2012, when its rivals were still feeding in-season episodes to Hulu or licensing their old ones to Netflix, The CW had its own app for streaming current and past series.
With the rise of Twitter, Supernatural viewers had a new forum to discuss the show—as would the eventual audiences of The Vampire Diaries, The 100, and Riverdale. Where forum discussions and fan-theory dissections were mostly associated with more mature, explicit shows like Lost or 24, The CW’s originals seemingly connected with early adopters of the social-media age, who were more interested in tracking the adventures of Dean and Sam Winchester and the cases of Veronica Mars (and whether or not she should end up with Logan or Piz) in real time. A boon for The CW, and a harbinger of doom for the rest of us—in the form of relentless, often juvenile Twitter discourse about TV.
Over the last 20 years, The CW has—to paraphrase Riverdale—seen some epic highs and lows. At its peak, its slate was a robust hodgepodge of unserious sci-fi and fantasy, treacly romance, and fun coming-of-age stories, proof that the network had a knack for anticipating what its young, female-skewing audience would be into next. Merging two fledgling networks in 2006 led them to identify and fill a particular niche, and that became its legacy.
But as its stepsibling MTV eventually found out the hard way, chasing ever-shifting trends eventually grinds down even the most spritely of TV entities—particularly when those cycles move at the speed of the internet. Combine that with the next wave of social apps acting as replacements for, rather than supplements to, The CW, and the end of the network’s golden age looks inevitable. Supernatural dragged on for too long; the magic development touch that gave the world charming oddballs like Jane The Virgin, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, and Legends Of Tomorrow started producing a higher volume of single-season mishaps like Life Sentence and Valor instead. In a post-Peak TV age, is there even room for a less-traditional TV network that takes some risks, prefers decidedly soapy YA subject matter, and banks on fresh faces? Perhaps the lack of consistency that The CW launched with led to the loss of The CW as we know it.
It’s now been four years since the two entertainment conglomerates behind The CW (who are now planning a corporate wedding on a much grander—and potentially decimating—scale) sold most of their stake in the network to local station–gobbling behemoth Nexstar. The new majority owner has phased out the types of originals that distinguished The CW from its rivals; nothing resembling the YA soaps that once provided that exciting spark and inspired a devoted fanbase exists there anymore (these days, you’re likelier to find both on Prime Video). The network’s upcoming fall schedule features cost-effective game shows like Scrabble and Trivial Pursuits, sports docuseries, and a single scripted Canadian import. The competition still isn’t pretty for The CW, forcing it to forge a new identity under particularly penny-pinching ownership. But don’t look at what started in 2006 as a failed experiment when, in fact, it proved that even with modest ratings, The CW is relevant in the cultural zeitgeist whose influence continues to affect 2026’s streaming-focused TV era.
Saloni Gajjar is The A.V. Club‘s TV critic.
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