DIANE WERTS/Newsday | Posted: Tuesday, July 18, 2006 7:00 pm
HOLLYWOOD — Green isn’t just a marketing color for the new network calling itself The CW upon the September merger of The WB and UPN. While lime tones are being splashed across various media to promote this fresh entity, the Warner Bros.-Paramount partnership is also designed to rake in the green stuff from the ad community by offering one-stop shopping for messages aimed at 18-to-34-year-olds.
“We’re going to be targeting Generation X and Generation Y-ers, and that’s about 120 million Americans,” CW programmer Dawn Ostroff told TV critics Monday at the TV critics’ press tour. “That’s second in size only to the baby boomers.”
The CW cherry-picked existing series from TV’s two youth-aimed networks to launch its first slate Sept. 20 with mostly known quantities. Only one new drama and one new comedy will join returnees such as “Smallville,” “America’s Next Top Model” and Chris Rock’s “Everybody Hates Chris.” Ostroff thinks even long-running series can be reinvigorated as the youth spotlight narrows to a single network.
“A show like ‘Gilmore Girls’ has had incredible success and a lot of people know about it. The fact that there’s one less choice now and a big campaign (promoting The CW), we think might bring more viewers in.”
Even longtime WB mainstay “7th Heaven” is back Mondays at 8 (ET/PT), for an 11th season — a last-minute scheduling decision that upset “Everwood” devotees whose family saga was not renewed. Ostroff told critics “Everwood” skewed oldest in viewers of any WB or UPN series, and “had never been able to anchor a night.” The CW is eager to launch the drama “Runaway,” in which a father wrongly accused of murder takes his entire family on the lam. “We wanted to give that the best lead-in we possibly could,” Ostroff said.
The network also targets Sunday with African-American-cast comedies from both its predecessors, plus the new sports-wife comedy “The Game.”
CW’s first fall lineup rolls out over a two-week period, starting Sept. 20 with “America’s Next Top Model” and continuing through the Oct. 3 return of “Veronica Mars.”