Dawn Ostroff and Mark Pedowitz Recall the CW's Chaotic Birth and 20-Year Run

The CW marks its 20th anniversary this year — a lifespan twice as long as either of its predecessors, the WB and UPN, which Warner Bros. and CBS merged on the morning of Jan. 24, 2006, in a deal so secret the industry never saw it coming.

"Even then there weren't many surprises that you could really pull off," says Dawn Ostroff, who was president of UPN and became the CW's entertainment president after the merger. "Nobody expected it. Those two networks had been competitors for 10 years, going after the same audience and had really been at each other's throat. People were astonished!"

For most of its first two decades, the CW built its identity on young adult series: "Supernatural," "Gossip Girl," "The Vampire Diaries," "Arrow," "The Flash," "One Tree Hill," "Riverdale," "Jane the Virgin," "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" and "All American" — which just wrapped as the final drama of that era.

"The CW was always a place where you knew that the people loved the stories they were telling, and loved the shows that they were putting up there," says Greg Berlanti, who at one point had as many as nine series running simultaneously on the network, including "Arrow" and "The Flash." "I think we'll talk about those years at the CW as being a bit of a magical time in this art form."

Ostroff oversaw the launch, deciding which WB and UPN shows survived and which were canceled. The first year was brutal. Nobody understood what "CW" meant — the initials of CBS and Warner Bros. — and many viewers assumed it stood for "Country/Western." In some markets the WB affiliate became the CW; elsewhere the UPN station made the switch, leaving audiences hunting for their favorite shows.

"People say, 'You started at ground zero,' but I always say, 'We started about 100 feet below ground zero!'" Ostroff says. "Because between everyone not knowing what CW was and everyone trying to find their favorite shows on different channels, it was just mass chaos."

The noise came with "Gossip Girl," marketed on billboards with the phrase "OMFG," and "The Vampire Diaries," whose Season 4 premiere poster suggested a ménage à trois between its leads. "We just made a lot of noise and finally figured out like how we were going to let people know what the CW was," Ostroff says.

She left in 2011, and Mark Pedowitz took over as president. He watched every episode, read every script and flew across North America to visit producers and talent on sets in Albuquerque, Toronto, New Orleans and Atlanta. "We were small enough to do that, and other platforms weren't really doing that," he says. "It created a connection."

A year into his tenure, the CW launched "Arrow," which grew into a franchise spanning "The Flash," "Supergirl," "DC's Legends of Tomorrow," "Black Lightning" and "Batwoman," all from Berlanti and Warner Bros. TV. "It allowed us to broaden out from a demographic point of view," Pedowitz says. "It was huge because it said that our programming, despite whatever limitations we might had had, was as good as anybody else's."

Emmy recognition never came — still a sore subject for Pedowitz — but "Jane the Virgin" and "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend," both from CBS Studios, won major Golden Globes. Neither was a ratings hit. "I said, 'I really like them and I can keep them on the air.' And we did," Pedowitz recalls, noting that "Jane the Virgin" performed strongly on streaming for the CW and Netflix. "No one's really accomplished what [co-creator and star] Rachel Bloom did since then."

The misses still sting: "The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina" went to Netflix, Pedowitz regrets not ordering the pilot "Haunted" to series, and he now believes "there was much more life left in 'The Vampire Diaries' universe." The Netflix output deal that began in 2011 kept the network profitable until it ended in 2019, when CBS and Warner Bros. launched their own streamers and sold the CW to affiliate partner Nexstar in 2022.

"It was the people," Pedowitz says of his nearly 12 years running the network. "They create the culture."