Massacre. Bloodbath. Slaughter. These are the words that Screenwriting Twitter used to describe the wave of cancellations on The CW. It was an unprecedented move for the network, which has a sixteen-year history of renewing shows without regard to relevance or ratings—sustaining series even after they were forgotten by viewers.
Speculation has already begun about what will replace The CW’s original, scripted shows, but there can be no doubt that the raft of cancellations effectively marks the end of an era for network television’s ugly stepsibling. As critics and commentators peer forward into the future of CW programming, however, it is also worth taking a look back—to reflect upon what made The CW, for a brief, glorious period, the belle of the ball.
The CW is a network built on teens. Seven shows migrated to The CW when it was rebranded from The WB in 2006; of the six scripted shows, four focused on teenaged protagonists—Gilmore Girls, One Tree Hill, Smallville, and Supernatural. These four shows may not have wholly predicted the future of The CW, but they certainly sketched the trajectory of its tentpole programming: supernatural premises, young characters.
Even when adults appeared in CW shows, they usually had a certain look—if the characters did not always skew young, the audiences did, and the network catered to teen fantasies with parental figures who looked less like viewers’ own moms and more like ‘Stacy’s Mom’. The emergence of Gossip Girl as a pop culture phenomenon inverted the formula that had dictated The WB’s programming: instead of a grownup show that parents could watch with their teens, it was a teen show that also appealed to grownups. This new formula would set the tone for later shows like Riverdale, but not before another series emerged to cement The CW as a niche for supernatural fantasy melodramas.
The Vampire Diaries premiered in 2009, but it did not gain the attention of critics and mainstream audiences until its third season. The series (and showrunner Julie Plec) ultimately garnered critical respect by staking its future on storylines with escalating consequences—for every Big Bad the series established, there was a Bigger Bad who tied into the same story, who presented a bigger problem for the show’s heroes.
It was a new mode of framing the melodrama that had long sustained daytime soap operas: characters’ personal and interpersonal conflicts were subordinated to the myriad twists of an evolving conflict with increasingly-formidable supernatural antagonists. Instead of continually breaking up over the contrivances of outlandishly villainous humans, characters could break up over the insurmountable pressures of supernatural circumstances. The plot is still contrived and melodramatic, but the individual scenes carry greater emotional weight, as they are no longer being compared in the viewer’s mind to real world circumstances.
The Vampire Diaries brought more to The CW than critical recognition and mainstream legitimacy (and two fabulous spinoffs): it begot the Arrowverse. TVD proved that complex plotting and multi-season storylines were viable; Arrow built an entire show around those elements. Like TVD, Arrow also brought a secondary fandom into the ranks of CW viewership—the DC Comics fans who had waited a long time to see their lesser-known heroes onscreen, in adaptations that did the comics justice.
By the time Arrow premiered, Marvel was charging full speed toward its next phase, having already formed a studio to develop its upcoming television series. DC, on the other hand, was teetering on the verge of irrelevance, after a decade of scattered productions had failed to establish a consistent DC brand. Arrow filled a void for viewers, as well—its gritty tone and lack of moral clarity was a stark contrast to the shiny, unambiguous stories that Marvel was telling at the time. If Arrow was a last-ditch effort to propel DC into the digital age, it smashed that target magnificently, creating a pop culture mainstay that would keep fans engaged while the publisher worked out its brand.
The CW is a network built on fandom. In fact, The CW played a significant role in defining what fandom was for a decade. Stelena (or Delena), Olicity, Destiel—even viewers who did not participate will recognize the portmanteaus by which members of the various CW fandoms identify their subcultures.
As The CW took off, two key spaces emerged as the primary venues to indulge and promote fandom. The first was the Internet; social media was beginning to permeate across demographic boundaries, and online forums provided viewers with ways to engage with CW shows—and thereby to promote those shows, attracting new viewers.
The second space was San Diego Comic-Con, which was concurrently morphing into a promotional venue for TV shows of all kinds. Internet trends compounded SDCC’s growing impact on pop culture, as fans who could not attend could still stream clips of official events. For the extremely active fanbases who fueled The CW, however, Comic-Con offered an additional benefit: the opportunity to engage directly with creators—to influence, and even inform, the creative choices that were being made.
The fandom giveth, and the fandom taketh away; to what extent fan input shaped the stories that were being told on The CW remains a subject for debate. What eventually became clear, however, was that angering the fandom came with a price. The 100 paid that price. Unlike The CW’s other tentpoles, The 100 was a wholly original property, mixing the sci-fi flair of a space drama with the weighty themes of a dystopian thriller. It had something for everyone, including Grey’s Anatomy’s Isaiah Washington, who seemed poised to reinvent his career after his fall from (Seattle) Grace. But in its third season, The 100 killed off a main character’s queer love interest—just as audiences were reckoning with the prevalence of seemingly-disposable queer characters across television. #BuryYourGays effectively buried The 100: though the show would continue for four more seasons, none of those seasons would break one million in average viewership.
The CW is a network built on risks. Whereas the other main networks (ABC, CBS, NBC, Fox) compete directly for primetime slots, The CW has always been largely immune to that level of competition—freed by the dedication of its fans and fed by revenue that was not tied directly to ratings. Its strongest franchises brought viewers into the network; once there, viewers often latched on to other shows targeted to that same, younger, demographic (which had been largely ignored by the primetime programming of the other networks).
A riskier show like Reign or Beauty and the Beastcould survive for four or five seasons on modest viewership numbers, and the network could rely on the homogeneity of its offerings to keep those viewers loyal to The CW. And as the shows themselves got better, the risks began to pay off more, generating a momentum that pushed The CW towards the mainstream.
In early 2015—as The Flash was concluding its first season, setting the course for the network to expand its franchise fare—Jane the Virgin won a Golden Globe. Not only was it The CW’s first, but it was a Golden Globe in an acting category, for the show’s lead, Gina Rodriguez. The high-concept take on the telenovela had been generating mainstream buzz throughout its freshman run, raising the bar for what mainstream viewers (and the unavoidable Hollywood press) could expect from a CW show.
In truth, that bar had been inching up for years: just as The Vampire Diaries had proved that melodrama could incorporate twisty plotting, The Originals proved that supernatural premises need not be melodramas at all—that vampires could also be rich characters. Just as Arrow had proved that superhero stories could be gritty and thoughtful, The Flash proved that the genre could center themes in its narrative (and do so without sacrificing fidelity to the comics). And just as Jane the Virgin proved that The CW could appeal to critics, another show was about to prove that the network could capture mainstream popularity.
By the numbers, Riverdale’s viewership is on par with the rest of The CW’s programming. Yet the show debuted to an outsized response; if the popularity of CW shows has always been confined to their various fandoms, the fandom of Riverdale seemed suddenly to be everywhere. This does not point to The CW’s potential, but to its limits: a pop culture zeitgeist was no more effective than a Golden Globe at bringing in new viewers. Of course, the factors that led the network to slash its Fall schedule had nothing to do with viewership or popularity. But The CW has nonetheless been declining for years—or, at least, doomed to eventually decline—because it simply cannot compete.
Thankfully, the incredible creative talents the network has fostered will live on elsewhere, as showrunners like Julie Plec and Greg Berlanti can take their CW capital to bigger projects—can even continue to make essentially ‘CW’ shows (as Riverdale showrunner Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa has already demonstrated, with The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina). But the network’s time incubating novel projects without the pressures of competition has likely come to an end. It is remarkable that it lasted as long as it did.