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CW 2008-2009 PRIMETIME SCHEDULE, For The Record
That yawning sound you hear around Hollywood is the CW schedule. There are a lot of tipsters telling me that network boss Dawn Ostroff won’t be around to see the CW’s early launch on September 1st. She’s outsourced Sunday night’s scheduling to Media Rights Capital, but maybe she should have had all those smart people in India do Monday-through-Friday. A sexed-up Reaper with relationship problems makes no sense for midseason, and 90210 especially with Tori Spelling anywhere near it just makes anyone with sense ill. That said, there will be so many fashionista female clones on the network in the fall that each show will look amateurishly interchangeable. This is what happens when the worst exec (Ostroff) running the worst weblet (UPN) gets put in charge of the merged network. Remember when the old WB actually programmed quality and pleased underserved audiences? Now its successor, the CW, does nothing but pander and even ignores the sacrosanct 8 PM family hour. And its the affiliates and viewers who suffer. Enough!
MONDAY
8 PM: Gossip Girl
9 PM: One Tree Hill
TUESDAY
8 PM: 90210 (new)
9 PM: SURVIVING THE FILTHY RICH (new)
WEDNESDAY
8 PM: America’s Next Top Model
9 PM: STYLISTA (new)
THURSDAY
8 PM: Smallville
9 PM: Supernatural
FRIDAY
8 PM: Everybody Hates Chris
8:30 PM: The Game
9 PM: America’s Next Top Model (repeat)
Editor-in-Chief Nikki Finke - tip her here.
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Do you have some sort of personal vendetta against Tori Spelling? I don’t think most of the public seems to care about her one way or the other, but you seem to think she’ll send people away in droves. And I’m not really sure how the network that gave us Dawson’s Creek, Popular, Charmed, etc. was serving a different audience than the one CW does. Or why retooling Reaper slightly is a bad thing when everyone agrees the show wasn’t living up to expectations creatively?
Please let it be true that she’s leaving.
First off, she has ten hours a week to program and we’re still seeing a freakin’ TM encore. That strands the comedies out by themselves.
Second, GG/OTH isn’t exactly a blockbuster pairing, so why keep them together and have both new shows alone?
Third, nearly every show sounds the same.
Goodbye, Dawn!
just got back from watching the CW upfronts. this network is doomed. “Reaper” should have been a season launch. waiting until midseason is just going to kill any momentum it has/had. cbs should just buyout warners’ half of the network and turn it into cbs2. firing ostroff first should solve some, no, ALL of the problems.
warners doesn’t care anyway. thewb.com is their way of backtracking.
yes, i’m bitter.
Thanks, Nikki! As someone who belongs more to the Smallville-Supernatural-Reaper-Buffy part of The WB/CW’s demographics than the Gossip Girl-Gilmore Girls-OTH part of the demographics, I’d just like to say thanks for pointing out that the Empress Has No Network.
Best,
Rob Jensen
————–
OPEN LETTER TO
PETER ROTH,
President, Warner Brothers Television:
Dear Mr. Roth,
Please have a confab with your co-workers in the upper echelons of Warner Brothers Entertainment and Warner Brothers Television. Pull a palace coup and push out all of the CBS execs who have essentially ended The CW with this schedule. Reconstitute The WB and bring on your own existing show, Moonlight (The WB had a pretty good track record with Vampires, mind you.) And then maybe it’ll be easy to convince the Tribune stations that are changing their affiliations to Fox to come back to The Frog.
Best wishes,
Rob Jensen
Central Missouri
Self-serving PS: Oh, and please bring on that REAL conclusion to Gilmore Girls that fell to the stupidity of too many people, including CW execs, in late April of 2007, thus severely damaging the franchise’s reputation with its lack of resolution to its unfairly-maligned-but-nevertheless-unresolved seventh season. Amy Sherman-Palladino wants to do it, so why not?
Ah, no Aliens in America? Too intelligent for CW, I guess.
Rob 5:00 pm is right on about redoing the Gilmore Girls finale. The show and its viewers did not deserve that depressing hack job. We disagree about season 7 though – it too was a bungled hack job. Don’t have Lauren Graham promote it – she always seemed contemptuous of her own show and the fans in interviews. Probably the best show ever on WB. Really smart and clever.
When a creator with such input like ASP leaves a show CANCLE THE DAMN SHOW…the last season of gilmore girls, the 4 seasons of the west wing that weren’t done by aaron sorkin….don’t tv executives LEARN…when a creator has that much input and impact you can’t let them go and expect the show not to suck…these guys aren’t JJ Abrams who is content to slap the bad robot name on things he likes but has very little input on (yes folks, he has little to no input on LOST)…Lauren Graham and Scott Patterson hated each other, the show got royally stupid…and it was better just to end it when ASP left than to continue with the embarassment that was the last season.
Good television needs NO demographic…it just needs support and people to give it a chance, like brooklyn bridge needed, or sports night, or max headroom, or my so-called life.
Dear god i’m old.
As someone who’s dealt with Dawn Ostroff, I can honestly say she’s the luckiest woman in the world. This is someone who isn’t fit to spray people with perfume at department stores. How she even kept this job as long as she did is only proof that there’s no justice in the world. Unfortunately, she will probably end up getting some kind of production deal where she is further compensated for her incompetence.
Well at least smackdown is gone…baby steps?
someone smarter and funnier than me needs to write a song to the tune of mrs robinson and have the line
“Where have you gone brandon tartikoff, our nation turns its tortured eyes to you….oooh oooh ooh”
SD! may be down but as far as ratings go it was kind of a stupid movie. I’ll be pretty surprised if Everybody Hates Chris, The Game and a Top Model rerun do the ratings that SD did. It’s also nice to see that I’m not alone in thinking that giving Reaper a mid-season 13 pickup is counter-productive though.
The CW is dead to me now that wrestling is gone. Yes I’m a wrestling fan.
So is Smallville getting a 13 episode order only? or are they getting a full season and running straight through?
and about Dawn, can I just say it’s about damn time. The woman has turned The CW into a male bashing, ball crushing network. And really how many networks of those do we need?
Please CW if you had any brains fire Dawn, get Moonlight and Pair it with Supernatural.
It would be the two best shows on the network.
Disgusted- Is Dawn really that bad? I just assume she is, but damn..
I am not in this industry, but as a mere viewer, I have wondered why the CW doesn’t make it a top priority to get itself broadcast all over the U.S. I have many acquaintances who want to watch certain CW shows, and can’t, because the CW isn’t broadcast in their area. That alone has to be responsible, in large part, for their low ratings.
Earth to John, Smackdown is gone because WWE Executives saw the “writing on the wall” and knew it was time to leave the network. When you have a failed network like the CW, it is clear that a smart executive like Vince McMahon would move his network TV show to a different place. For Vince the location is My Network TV. Of course, this is shocking in itself because MNT was considered the bastard child to the superior CW, which was supposed to combine the best of both the WB and UPN.
As for the schedule, pass. Dawn Ostroff should be noted as the first and only network President of the CW and even that is a stretch. With all the troubles this network is having, I doubt that it will make its September 1st relaunch.
I am pretty sure Smallville got a 22 episode order, considering it was one of only a handful of shows that got an early pickup from CW., It joins Supernatural, Everybody Hates Chris, America’s Next Top Model, Gossip Girl and One Tree Hill as programs that were renewed waaay before all the other series..
Referring to an earlier rant.
No Lex Luthor
No Lana Lang
Miller and Gough leaving a show that lost its way a while ago.
JUST CANCEL IT ALREADY
Seriously…you want me to believe that mynetwork tv is a step up?
The only thing that makes less sense is wrestling on the sci-fi channel.
Jessy S, I think you are mistaken: It was the CW that dropped SD! not WWE that decided to move the show. Their ratings have dropped significantly since moving to Fridays and continued doing so awhile afterwards too. Their product isn’t the hot commodity it once was. If Vince was that smart why would he suddenly jump to a network that is barely a network and has less market penetration than The CW? Sorry but your comment makes absolutely no sense. CW booted WWE and MY Network was the only place that would/could pick up the program (due to some exclusivity clauses in their agreement.)
@John:
Actually, they do have Lana Lang and Gough and Miller were basically just observers the past few years.
As of now there’s no Allison Mack on Smallville either. Seriously, they should have ended it this season when they had the chance.
Re: TVFan @ 6:53 pm
Moonlight and Supernatural together. God, would that ever kick ass.
Also, they need to give Supernatural (and the other good shows on this network) back the budget that’s been getting hacked down every single season. Fans are organizing bottle drives to donate money to the production budget of their favorite show, for pete’s sake! Gossip Girl’s budget, of course didn’t get cut at all, or so I’ve heard, and 90210 got *extra money* for what’s her name to be in it. Or so I’ve heard.
Here’s a solution. Fire Ostroff, let, I dunno, a ferret or something run the CW (it can hardly do a worse job) and re-distribute her salary to the shows that had their budgets cut. Everyone’s happy. Except probably Ostroff, but whatever. I’m sure she’ll find a job somewhere else where she’s much happier and less reviled.
Sorry lana lang as a ‘recurring character’ isn’t the same…it’s a dying show that died a while ago and screwed up the canon too badly to recover.
Cancel it and figure out how to make gotham, superman has always been a very boring guy…also dumb as a box of hammers…batman is much more interesting
Well, Thursdays still look good. Not much to recommend the rest of the week. I would LOVE to see Moonlight there on the schedule instead of the ANTM encore. But its a forlorn hope, I know.
I just do not understand this all GG all the time strategy. It’s not as though GG is an actual hit. (Yeah, I know, define “hit” — that’s nonsense spin, Dawn and you know it, I know it, Nikki sure knows it)
Nikki, are they trying to sink the CW? Why?
Possibly no Allison Mack and definitely no Michael Rosenbaum in Smallville S8 screams that Smallville should not be going on. I heard Smallville had to slash its budget because the CW cut their licensing fee and the WB studios went along with it.
Unless they change their plans pronto regarding Allison Mack and Michael Rosenbaum, I definitely won’t be watching. It’s like the Xfiles without Mulder. I hate it when corporate greed ruins shows. I’m not surprised though because the CW has made bad decision after bad decision. The post above by “Disgusted” reinforced my own impression about Dawn Ostroff based on the decisions she’s made starting with the uber lame launch campaign. That hideous color green, the jarring theme song, the actors chosen to be in it and those excluded? Just pitiful. It wasn’t even in the same league as the stylish and memorable ad campaigns that the WB network used.
They should have let the WB heads run the CW. I give the CW one more season before a suit pulls the plug.