POST Posts: Whatever Happened to Local TV?, 2023
The following article was originally published on POST as "The Ghosts of Independent TV Networks Past" on December 15, 2022. - jh
I was watching Weird
Al Yankovic’s 1989 cult classic UHF and thinking about how a guy
like George Newman, played by Yankovic, radically transformed a
low-tier independent UHF channel and made it must-see-TV. For a
while, creating a network was a dream of mine. But television
changed, and not for the better. And it all began with the death of
independent television.
I grew up in the 1980s. The younger half of Generation X, the MTV Generation, the Pepsi Generation, or as demographic analysts call us, nonexistent. Apparently, there are Boomers and Millennials and there were no humans born between them from 1965 to 1984 (by the way, that’s Harvard’s recent definition of the makeup of my generation), but I digress.
The 1980s was the first TV decade fully in color on the local level in the United States. Cable was still largely in its infancy, but local television still held its own. If you were a kid with a decent antenna or a cable box in your house, television was pretty dang awesome. Cartoons in the morning and the afternoons. Random specials in primetime, even outside of holidays. Saturday mornings belonged to us. Saturday evenings did too, especially in my market.
While the major broadcast networks were doing their thing (believe me, there were tons of shows aimed toward younger audiences in primetime), nothing compared to independent networks in the 1980s. I was lucky enough to have two in my mid-sized market, WYAH-TV 27 and WTVZ TV-33. Even with an indoor antenna, I got a pretty good signal from both stations since their main studios weren’t too far from my house.
WYAH was a weird channel that was run by Pat Robertson at the time. WYAH was the original flagship for CBN, which he called the Continental Broadcasting Network publicly before changing it to Christian Broadcasting Network. It had The 700 Club in various dayparts, but the lineup was mostly secular and quite diverse. Classics like I Love Lucy and The Dick Van Dyke Show aired in the early afternoons, cartoons like Bugs Bunny, Scooby-Doo, Tom and Jerry, Fat Albert, and Woody Woodpecker aired in the mid-afternoons, a few recently-produced kids shows and cartoons aired in the throughout the day like The Great Space Coaster, G.I. Joe, Dennis the Menace, Beverly Hill Teens, The Funtastic World of Hanna-Barbera, The Jetsons, and repeats of shows like Diff’rent Strokes, The Jeffersons (which had profanity muted), Wonder Woman, The Incredible Hulk, and Benson aired in the early evening, and a big movie aired in primetime before the evening closed off with The 700 Club and a late-night movie.
Imagine seeing a channel air something like 2001: A Space Odyssey in primetime while the announcer, nonchalantly, plugs the late-night movie being Planet of the Apes in this day and age. Sundays had Blonde and Dagwood and Shirley Temple movies every afternoon.
On the flipside, WTVZ was more independent. Not beholden to a religious nutter, the station was more revolutionary, picking up more recent shows at the time on weekdays and weekends, classic shows like Batman and The Andy Griffin Show, tons of cartoons including a package of Pink Panther shorts, The Flintstones, Superfriends, He-Man and the Masters of the Universe, ThunderCats, The Comic Strip, Inspector Gadget, Ghostbusters, Silverhawks, M.A.S.K., The Real Ghostbusters, Heathcliff, Voltron, Robotech, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and DuckTales, and a lot of music shows including Soul Train and Solid Gold. They too had movies in prime-time and late nights. Sure, the movies were edited for sensitive souls and antiquated broadcast standards, but they could air things that would never fly on WYAH.
And it stayed like
this up until 1990. WYAH was no longer WYAH nor owned by Pat
Robertson. WYAH’s new owners changed the call letters to WGNT,
Greater Norfolk Television, not “God’s Not There” as some
critics of the new ownership derided it. WGNT had begun to phase out
much of what WYAH had created and became more secularized and stopped
muting broadcast-friendly profanity They became to add more recent
shows and films to the lineup, becoming a member of the Warner
Bros-Chris Craft syndication partnership Prime Time Television
Network and airing Universal’s Action Pack block, and, by 1995,
became an affiliate of the new United Paramount Channel. A lot of
what made up the old WYAH was gone, even The 700 Club by the 2000s.
Meanwhile, by 1986, WTVZ was no longer an independent channel but rather an inaugural Fox Broadcasting Channel affiliate. It was a slow burn, but they too got rid of everything that made WTVZ the radical channel it used to be, eventually becoming FOX 33 until 1998, when the channel switched network affiliations with WVBT, the WB affiliate in my market. WVBT became FOX 43 and WTVZ became WB 33. Two years before that, Sinclair Broadcasting purchased the affiliate, which continued to lose its edge and uniqueness.
I realized something lately.
I rarely watch
either of these channels today. It’s not that I don’t watch
broadcast television. Heck, I probably look at MORE local TV these
days compared to just a few years ago. I watch diginets like Antenna
TV on WGNT, but I rarely watch WGNT itself. I might catch a show on
The CW while it still exists every now and then, but I don’t watch
the channel much. As for WTVZ, I never watch it. There’s nothing
that interests me at all. No longer the haven for off-network
sitcoms, classic shows, and cartoons from 2 to 6 PM as it was in my
childhood, WTVZ, like WGNT, is basically full of courtroom shows
every morning and afternoon, and weekends are unwatchable.
I know that other markets are not immune from this troublesome phenomenon either. Broadcast television groups don’t experiment with programming and tend to create a monolithic ad-driven channel even though the audiences who would rather watch anything else rather than the pablum these groups keep ordering and putting on the air.
A channel like WYAH/WGNT or WTVZ couldn’t exist in the 21st century, not because it can’t be done, but because local channels aren’t free enough to experiment with programming anymore. Sure, there are folks who will dare to create something great (looking at you, Weigel), but it’s very rare.
We need fewer Sinclairs and Nexstars and more George Newmans.
Comments