Before "the" CW, there was "the" WB, America's first pretentiously named TV network aimed exclusively and unapologetically at viewers under the age of 35.
And now it's back. Next Wednesday TheWB.com will launch as a Web-based network, with a menu of old shows and new ones.
Just to give you some idea of what the new/old WB has in store, here are some of the series it owns the rights to stream over the web: "Angel," "Babylon 5," "Buffy the Vampire Slayer," "Everwood," "Firefly," "Friends," "Gilmore Girls," "The O.C.," "One Tree Hill," "Roswell," "Smallville" and "Veronica Mars."
To augment those youth-culture classics, TheWB.com will throw a bunch of ideas against the wall and see what ones stick.
They include "Sorority Forever" (above), a sexy mystery described as "Prom Queen" meets "The O.C." in college; "A Boy Wearing Makeup," starring newcomer Mathieu Francis (they're all newcomers) as "a boy who wears makeup and looks fabulous"; "Whatever Hollywood," which looks like the girl version of the old Web favorite "Nobody's Watching."
There will be a musical from the creator of "Chuck" and "Gossip Girl"; "Rich Girl, Poor Girl," from the creator of "Laguna Beach"; a drama about female frenemies; a high school musical type show; and an import that Brent Poer, the general manager of TheWB.com, calls "the 90210 of Australia."
Poer says the site will have widgets and apps galore for kids to take WB shows and place them on their Facebook and MySpace pages.
Bloggers will not only be free to embed full episodes or clips from favorite shows onto their blogs, they'll be able to slice and dice scenes and dialogue and other elements and make their own mashups. TheWB.com will even give them editing tools to work with.
"We want to give the stories over to this generation and see what they can do with it," says Poer.
Sounds big of him, but in fact, as I reported not long ago on TV Barn, a blue-ribbon panel at American University's Center for Social Media has declared that such digital manipulation is perfectly legal and requires no prior permission from the original show's rights-holder.
Anyway, the editing tools (from a Web version of the high-end Adobe Premiere) are a cool feature. Another reason to visit TheWB.com is to set up "online viewing parties," where invitees watch the same video, streamed in sync to everyone's computers, with a chat window on the side.
For people who like watching TV shows on good old TV, WB shows will be available on networked TiVos and Comcast video-on-demand systems.
But all of the neato ways of distributing these shows won't do TheWB.com any good if nobody wants to watch its content. Poer tells me, though, that all the new series were tested at what he calls a "creative lab" -- basically a feedback loop created by bringing in lots of teenagers (especially girls, the WB's target audience).
Their advice was to keep it short and sweet. So most of these new showson TheWB.com will actually be webisodes, some as short as three minutes and none currently longer than 10 minutes in length. "Gilmore Girls" repeats, of course, will be their usual 42 minutes.
"It used to be that seven minutes was the magic number," Poer says, "but our (lab) viewers are saying, 'We don't care how long the video is, just as long as it's something we want to watch.'"
No word if Michigan J. Frog, the former mascot of the old WB TV network (and whose shadow was the last image the network broadcast in 2006, below), will be resurrected. I would bet money that he is. For whatever reason, you just can't kill the Frog.
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