Comic-Con ended on Sunday, but now the next event for San Diego is on the horizon, and it happens this Friday.
For the first time in 31 years, an affiliation switch is set to take place, with founding Fox affiliate XETV heading to CW and Tribune's KSWB-TV moving over to Fox. The deal was struck last March.
Both stations are both gearing up for the big day and looking forward to what their new network partners have to offer.
KSWB is looking forward to higher-rated Fox programming, including American Idol, The Simpsons, Family Guy, and of course, NASCAR races (Daytona 500 among them) and NFL Football. In addition, they get new buzzed-shows Fringe and Joss Whedon's Dollhouse (I thought I mention Joss Whedon's name again.)
Meanwhile, XETV is looking forward to reinventing itself as a CW affiliate, heavily promoting the net's new fall lineup, which features the new 90210 (The original aired on XETV when it was a Fox station) and teen magnet Gossip Girl.
Outside of news, no other changes for XETV and KSWB are expected for the rest of the stations' lineup outside of prime-time (except for KSWB and Fox Saturday Baseball) until September at the earliest, when new syndicated schedules go into effect. XETV and KSWB are also swapping Saturday morning children's lineups, but both are being programmed by the same company: 4KidsTV, so there's no noticeable difference come fall.
While XETV has already revamped its website to showcase its new ties to CW, it's interesting to note at the time of this writing, KSWB hasn't updated theirs - in fact, it still promimently features CW shows with just one day to go before the switch to Fox and has a link to 90210 - a program that'll never air on KSWB. Even their anchor bio site still features Anne State, who's now co-anchoring the news on CBS-owned WBBM-TV here in Chicago.
3 comments:
This may be another reason to "never say never", but it's possible that "90210" could actually succeed in having enough episodes for syndicated reruns on stations such as KSWB. If the CW Television Network doesn't survive long enough, first-run syndication or another network (Fox) might become options.
Believe it or not, the original "Beverly Hills, 90210" did air in syndication as an off-network strip for four years (1994-98) and was a success for a few stations, notably WPIX in New York.
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