CW wants to kick it with the young crowd
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NEW YORK — Say goodbye to Veronica Mars, Lorelai Gilmore and the Rev. Eric Camden.
They’re being replaced by snobby prep school students, a Pakistani exchange student and a bounty hunter for Satan.
After an uneven freshman year, the CW is rebooting its schedule with a new class of shows, hoping to corner the market on the elusive 18-to 34-year-old audience with a mix of oddball comedies and teenage pathos.
The broadcast network, an amalgam of the WB and UPN, is adding six new shows this fall, triple the number it brought on last year when CW executives decided to rely on established programs from its two predecessors to launch the new network. But that strategy failed to deliver: The CW averaged about 3 million viewers this season, about the same number that the WB and UPN each attracted on their own.
On Thursday, network officials promised that the CW would expand its reach during its sophomore year.
“Last season was about establishing the network,” Dawn Ostroff, the network’s president of entertainment, told advertisers assembled in Madison Square Garden for the annual “upfront” presentation of the fall network lineups. “This season is about creating new hits that will better define the CW.
“We know the key to our success lies in developing the next big hit,” she added.
The CW is confident that’s going to be “Gossip Girl,” an adaptation of the popular young-adult novels by Cecily von Ziegesar that explores the lives of the privileged youth of Manhattan’s Upper East Side.
The drama, produced by Josh Schwartz of “The O.C.,” is going to “do for Manhattan what ‘The O.C.’ did for Orange County,” Ostroff promised, adding that it will be “everybody’s guilty pleasure.”
Perhaps the network’s most ambitious effort is “Life Is Wild,” a drama based on the British series “Wild at Heart.” It will follow the adventures of a New York veterinarian and his family who relocate to South Africa. The network is positioning the program, filmed entirely on location, as one of the few family-friendly programs on the air.
The CW’s third new drama has a decidedly different tone. In “Reaper,” a series with an irreverent sense of humor, a 21-year-old slacker learns that his parents sold his soul to the devil. In return, he is forced to work as the devil’s bounty hunter, reclaiming souls that have escaped hell. The series is produced by Mark Gordon (“Grey’s Anatomy,” “Criminal Minds”) and Tom Spezialy (“Desperate Housewives”) and Kevin Smith (“Clerks,” “Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back”), who also directed the pilot.
The network picked up one comedy, “Aliens in America,” that explores contemporary race relations through the evolving friendship of an insecure 16-year-old (Dan Byrd) and a Pakistani Muslim exchange student (Adhir Kalyan).
Trying to stay in step with the millennial generation, the CW also is premiering two weekly unscripted shows aimed at capturing its target audience’s fascination with pop culture and technology.
“CW Now,” a fast-paced collaboration with “Extra,” will survey the latest trends in fashion, beauty and entertainment, a “watercooler show for the 18-to 34-year-old set,” Ostroff said. The series evolved from the network’s successful “content wraps,” pop-oriented features created on advertiser messages during commercial breaks.
It will be paired with “Online Nation,” an “America’s Funniest Home Videos” for the YouTube era. The clip show will be hosted by popular bloggers who will direct viewers to the best content on the Web and spotlight user-generated submissions.
The gang from the popular teen soap “One Tree Hill” will be back, but not right away. The CW is holding the program for midseason, and when it returns, Lucas, Nathan and the rest of the crew will not only have graduated high school but will also be out of college.
Executives are hoping the new lineup will help resolve the identity problems that dogged the network in its first year, when it tried to capture young viewers by mixing the WB’s pop teen soaps with the UPN’s urban comedies. But concentrating teen-skewing fare on one network didn’t translate into a large share of that demographic, the very audience most likely to be sampling entertainment from a variety of platforms.
Compounding the CW’s challenges was the station shuffle triggered by the merger between the WB and UPN, which forced viewers in many markets to search for their favorite programs on different channels.
The remade schedule will be buttressed by a new theme. Gone is the “Free to Be” motto. Instead, the new theme is “Get Into It,” with a song by the same name performed by one of the Pussycat Dolls, who starred in one of the CW’s few hits this season.
“The Pussycat Dolls Present: The Search for the Next Doll” will be back, along with “America’s Next Top Model” and “Beauty and the Geek.”
Not coming back: the critically acclaimed yet low-rated “Veronica Mars,” which CW had paired with the now-defunct “Gilmore Girls” in the hopes of boosting its viewership. Also going off the air: “7th Heaven.”
maria.elena.fernandez@latimes .com
Times staff writer Maria Elena Fernandez contributed to this report.
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CW lineup
The fall prime-time schedule:
Monday: “Everybody Hates Chris,” “Aliens in America,” “Girlfriends,” “The Game”
Tuesday: “Beauty and the Geek,” “Reaper”
Wednesday: “America’s Next Top Model,” “Gossip Girl”
Thursday: “Smallville,” “Supernatural”
Friday: “Friday Night Smackdown!”
Saturday: No network programming
Sunday: “Online Nation,” “The CW Now,” “Life Is Wild,” “America’s Next Top Model” reruns
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