While The CW is known for giving its longer-running series a proper goodbye, this season of Legends ended on a cliffhanger. Sources, however, pointed out that the characters can easily populate other series in the DC Arrowverse so you may see one or two of them in other shows.
That’s a wrap on Batwoman. The Arrowverse series has been canceled after three seasons. Showrunner Caroline Dries announced the news Friday on Twitter. Batwoman this season was averaging about 760,000 total viewers and a 0.2 demo rating (with Live+7 DVR playback factored in), down nearly 20% in audience from its sophomore run and ranking No. 13 in that measure out of the 19 dramas The CW has aired this tvseason.
Last but never least, The CW is the final broadcast-TV network to release its slate of spring (and early summer) season finales. To date, The CW has renewed for the 2022-23 TV season the following scripted shows: All American, The Flash, Kung Fu, Nancy Drew, Riverdale, Superman & Lois and Walker. Additionally, In the Dark, Roswell New Mexico and DC’s Stargirl all have new seasons yet to air.
The CW, a pioneer in converging broadcast and digital, is unifying its streaming presence with a single CW app, making programming easier to find and giving advertisers a simpler way to reach a larger young audience. The updated app streams the network’s original series, library series and content from CW Seed, the digital site it established in 2013. The app, soft launched earlier this year, is free to download on all major platforms including Roku, Amazon Fire, Vizio, LG Smart TV, iOS, Apple TV’s tvOS, Android TV, UWP Xbox One and Google Play, and content is free to stream on demand with ad support.
The hour legal drama from SEVEN24 Films and Lark Productions stars Jewel Staite and Victor Garber.
Tom Swift has an early-summer date with The CW. The Nancy Drew spinoff series starring Tian Richards will premiere at 9 p.m. Tuesday, May 31, following a new episode Superman & Lois. The series follows the serialized adventures of its titular character (Richards), an exceptionally brilliant inventor with unlimited resources and unimaginable wealth who is thrust into a world of sci-fi conspiracy and unexplained phenomena after the shocking disappearance of his father.
Exclusives
The CW has handed early renewals to a large portion of its scripted schedule: All American, The Flash, Kung Fu, Nancy Drew, Riverdale, Superman & Lois and Walker. Traditionally, the youth-skewing network hands out early renewals, sometimes as early as January, to the majority of its slate — a boon for its owners CBS and Warner Bros. However, this year, the broadcaster’s future is up in the air with local affiliate group Nexstar circling and Deadline understands that a new majority owner will likely have a say in some of its renewal decisions.
The CW is taking another swing at a Supernatural spinoff. The network’s first pilot orders of the 2022 cycle include The Winchesters, a Supernatural prequel following the parents of Dean (Jensen Ackles) and Sam (Jared Padalecki) in the long-running series that concluded in 2020. The network has also ordered a pilot for Walker: Independence, a prequel to Padalecki’s current series, and Gotham Knights, a DC Comics show from three Batwoman writers. Additionally, The CW has ordered six more scripts for a Zorro drama that counts Robert Rodriguez among its executive producers.
The CW will joins the parade of TV networks returning to in-person upfronts, with a presentation slated for Thursday, May 19 in New York City. Time will tell whether the network will present as a joint venture of ViacomCBS and WarnerMedia or under the aegis of a new corporate owner.
The CW is bringing back three of its popular alternative series for the 2022-23 broadcast season. The network has renewed Penn & Teller: Fool Us and Masters of Illusion for a ninth season and World’s Funniest Animals for a third season. Premiere dates are TBA.
If Nexstar seals a deal for a majority stake in the WarnerMedia and ViacomCBS broadcaster, insiders speculate the programming strategy may shift toward politics and reruns.
A tentative “For Sale” sign is up at The CW, and Nexstar Media Group is leading the pack of potential buyers to acquire a majority stake in the broadcaster jointly owned by ViacomCBS and WarnerMedia. Why is the nation’s largest TV station owner interested in the youngest-skewing linear broadcast network — and why now?
The CW Network’s Chairman and CEO Mark Pedowitz assured the staff at the younger-skewing network Thursday that it’s “too early to speculate what might happen” as joint-parent companies ViacomCBS and WarnerMedia explore a sale of the broadcast network to Nexstar Media Group.
AT&T Inc.’s WarnerMedia and ViacomCBS are exploring a possible sale of a significant stake or all of the CW Network, which they jointly own, according to people familiar with the matter. Among the suitors is Nexstar Media Group, the nation’s biggest TV station group and a large owner of affiliates of the network, the people close to the talks said. The CW caters primarily to teens and young adults.
After much speculation Monday in which a number of early January awards events such as AFI, Palm Springs, the BAFTA tea and more have either postponed or canceled plans to hold their events due to COVID complications, the Critics Choice Awards on Jan. 9 (televised on The CW and TBS) plans to go ahead with its show at the Fairmont Century Plaza in Los Angeles as originally planned.
The new eight-part docuseries series March following the Prairie View A&M University Marching Band premieres Monday, Jan. 24.
When The CW was announced in January 2006, the idea was to take the two smallest broadcast networks (UPN and The WB) and combine them into one less-small network with the backing of two media titans, UPN owner CBS and WB namesake Warner Bros. Entertainment.Fifteen years and several sea changes in the television landscape later, The CW is still a broadcast network, though its stewards would prefer it to be called a “multiplatform network.”
The CW will have an all-DC footprint on Tuesday nights in early 2022, with the second season of Superman & Lois helping to launch new series Naomi. Both shows will premiere in January, taking over the night from The Flash and Riverdale after their brief fall runs. The network has also a February premiere All American: Homecoming and dates for Dynasty, Kung Fu, Charmed and Two Sentence Horror Stories as part of its midseason slate. The Flash and Riverdale, meanwhile, will both move to new nights when they return in March.
Original series creator J. Michael Straczynski is on board to write the project. He will also executive producer under his Studio JMS banner. Warner Bros. Television, which produced the original series, will produce the reboot.
The Outpost will conclude after Season 4 on The CW. An individual with knowledge of the decision said the network and the producers mutually agreed to end the show with its currently airing Season 4 after production had begun. The fourth season — and now series — finale of the summer drama will air Thursday, Oct. 7, at 9 p.m. ET.
The CW has acquired the U.S. rights to the action series Professionals starring Tom Welling, Brendan Fraser and Elena Anaya. The premiere date for the show’s U.S. broadcast debut will be announced at a later date. Professionals follows Vincent Corbo (Welling), a top-tier security operative, who is paid to protect the interests of rich and powerful clients by any means necessary — legal or not.
The CW has canceled its first-year drama The Republic of Sarah. Series creator Jeffrey Paul King broke the news in an Instagram post Thursday afternoon. The series was at the lower end of The CW’s Nielsen rankings for the summer. It averaged just under 450,000 viewers including a week of delayed viewing.
A TV series inspired by a chapter in Amy Chozick’s Chasing Hillary bestseller has taken a detour to The CW, after Netflix dropped out of the politically themed project.
The broadcast network has handed out a straight-to-series order for the show, which centers on a Black, gay billionaire inventor. The team behind Nancy Drew, including showrunner Melinda Hsu Taylor and series creators Noga Landau, Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage, are all involved in the spinoff.
The CW will simulcast the Sept. 12 Video Music Awards that originate on MTV, a ViacomCBS sibling of The CW. The event happens at the Barclays Center in New York. With the 2021 event occurring a day after the 20th anniversary of 9/11, MTV is collaborating with 9/11 Day for a series of service-oriented activities during the week leading up to the VMAs, promoting awareness and positive action in observance of the 20th anniversary of the tragedy.
Announced on the 56th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, Freedom to Vote expands on the network’s 2020 voting campaign Vote Actually, which helped encourage young people to cast their votes in local and national elections.
Wellington Paranormal, a comedy about police chasing down supernatural interlopers in the New Zealand capital, starts on The CW July 11. It is a spinoff of vampire comedy film What We Do in the Shadows.
The CW CEO Mark Pedowitz will be the first to tell you that Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki were the secret to the success of former network juggernaut Supernatural. Now, he’s hoping that one of them — Ackles — will help reinvigorate the recently concluded franchise with The Winchesters, a prequel series as The CW makes its third attempt to launch an offshoot from the 15-season hit.
The lineup includes new seasons of Walker, The Flash, Riverdale, Batwoman and All American (which has quietly become the network’s top-rated show in the young adult demo after its previous seasons debuted on Netflix and Supernatural concluded). The Flash will launch with a five-episode crossover event featuring heroes from the other DC universe shows. There are also new series: The reimagined game show Legends of the Hidden Temple, a new U.S. version of the British reality show Killer Camp and a reboot of the sci-fi mystery drama series 4400.
A new lineup of Saturday programming and a surge of post-pandemic spending by Madison Avenue helped the CW boost its volume of advertising commitments in TV’s annual “upfront” market, a sign that advertisers continue to make the medium a central part of their plans even as they are showing new interest in chasing viewers to new streaming venues. The network, jointly owned by ViacomCBS and AT&T’s WarnerMedia, has wrapped its upfront negotiations, according to a person familiar with the matter, and believes it has obtained a greater volume of advertising for its next programming cycle than it did in 2020.
The youth-skewing network will program the entire week for the first time and is going for a bumper unscripted slate across the weekend as it has originals on Saturday nights for the first time. The broadcaster is moving a slew of shows to new nights for the upcoming season including new spots for Riverdale, which is being paired with The Flash, Batwoman and Nancy Drew, with DC’s Legends of Tomorrow moving back to the fall after a midseason experiment.
