Brad Schwartz, President of Entertainment at The CW, has “ambitious” goals.
As The CW moves away from only serving young adult audiences towards rivaling the Big Four broadcast networks – ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC – Schwartz knows he needs to find a hit to do that.
This, after all, is the man credited with helping Schitt’s Creek become an Emmy winning smash.
“We recognize where we’re coming from. We’re the underdogs competing against Titans. But ultimately what we’re striving for is to have everyone stop writing big four networks and start writing big five network. We know it’s going to take some time, but that’s the goal,” he said at the top of his TCA press tour presentation.
Sitting down with Deadline, former Pop TV boss Schwartz, and his boss, The CW President Dennis Miller, talked about exactly how they’re trying to do that in the face of a tumultuous time in the entertainment business, just over a year after Nexstar acquired the network.
Whereas his broadcast rivals can largely fully finance their slate of scripted dramas and comedies, he, however, needs a different way to do that.
“When it comes to scripted projects, we have to be a little scrappier, we have to look at new economic models,” Schwartz told Deadline. “I believe the future, except for the big guys, is everyone’s going to start thinking more like us as opposed to us thinking more like them.”
He highlighted the fact that Fox recently ordered Murder In A Small Town, its first scripted international co-production. “You’re starting to see, for better or worse, others doing something I’ve been doing for years,” he added.
The CW’s biggest hit All American returns for its sixth season on April 1. Thanks to the strikes, it will be joined midseason by Jared Padalecki’s Walker on April 3, while All American: Homecoming will likely debut its third season in the summer, followed by the fall launch of the final season of Superman & Lois.
Unlike his predecessors, Schwartz will not be just calling up Warner Bros. Television and CBS Studios to deliver it a list of projects for next season.
He said that his team, including Liz Wise Lyall, who is head of scripted programming, currently have 20 scripted projects in development. “If there are any of those that we think we love, we’re going to have to go the extra step. We can’t just say it’s a $4M episode show, let’s go do it, we’re going to have to find partners.”
As such, it has leaned hard on its neighbors to the north.
Wild Cards, a Canadian police procedural about a demoted water-cop and a con woman solving crimes starring Vanessa Morgan, Giacomo Gianniotti and Jason Priestley, launched in January and has performed well for the network. Schwartz has already begun conversations around a renewal.
The show’s most recent episode launched with around 550,000, which Schwartz says will likely consolidate to around 1M over seven days on linear. “That’s a nice success for us. If we can do seven nights a week with a million viewers, that would be goal number one, then two million,” he said.
Wild Cards is one of a number of Canadian shows on the schedule including Sullivan’s Crossing and it has Sight Unseen, a procedural about a cop who goes blind but can still help solve crimes, premiering in April.
Schwartz said Wild Cards and Sullivan’s Crossing are a new generation of “blue sky” originals, borrowing from USA Network’s brand that housed shows such as Monk, Burn Notice and Suits.
The CW also has the Sophie Turner-fronted crime drama Joan, which is a coproduction with the UK’s ITV, a show that Schwartz compared to an HBO Sunday night show.
Perception, Schwartz says, is the difficult hurdle to get over when it comes to shows with patchwork financing.
On the comedy side, it launched a two-hour comedy block featuring shows including Son of a Critch, Children Ruin Everything and Run The Burbs.
It also picked up hot British comedy Everyone Else Burns, which launched in October but was pulled from the schedule after a couple of episodes. Schwartz said that this was a problem with marketing rather than the quality of the show.
It now has around four comedies in development. “We were probably too ambitious, trying to do a whole two-hour Must See TV [block] with four comedies in a row,” he told Deadline. “Comedy is difficult but we have off-net rights to The Conners, that’s doing well so if we can use the audience to push them into Son of a Critch or Children Ruin Everything, those shows can grow and Thursday can be a comedy night.”
However, Schwartz doesn’t expect to go down the pilot route. “I don’t think we’re going to pilot; when you put these models together, sometimes it’s too expensive to pilot, you might as well make ten episodes and have the whole first season be the pilot,” he said.
He also knows what the rest of 2024 already looks like. “We have this entire calendar year scheduled. It is done. We have no more shelf space for anything,” he said. “When everybody else says [development] is year-round, it’s not really year around. Maybe just because of my background coming from cable, we are certainly year-round. I don’t even think of what time of the year we’re in if a good pitch comes in the door and we like it, we start developing it and then when that shows fully developed, we start making it. There is no cycle to our development.”
For instance, The CW’s latest scripted original, Sherlock and Daughter, a mystery thriller starring David Thewlis, will launch in 2025.
All of this is part of a strategy to become a broader network than The CW used to be with its phalanx of superhero shows such as The Flash and Arrow and YA fare such as Riverdale, while also keeping some “legacy” shows such as All American, its Homecoming spinoff and Walker on the air.
“Those shows still exist and shows like The Librarians are going lean into that audience. But to be a big broadcast brand, we had to expand and do more than just that. We couldn’t operate just as a kind of niche cable brand anymore and specifically only target an audience that maybe isn’t watching as much broadcast TV as they used to,” he said.
“In the past you knew what The CW was, it was [for] young adults and that’s what differentiated it. But what is NBC’s brand? What is CBS’ brand? What is ABC’s brand? What is Fox’s brand?,” he added. “If you’re in the broadcast business, you’re going after the widest audience possible.”
Sports is one of the ways that it is trying to achieve this. The network has around 500 hours of live sports a year including the somewhat controversial Liv Golf, ACC Football and Basketball and it has taken over the NASCAR Xfinity Series from 2025 as well as WWE NXT, from USA Network.
The latter, which is launching in October, could potentially see a boost after Netflix struck a major deal for WWE rights.
You can imagine The CW marketing team drawing up some promotional materials with wrestlers and the word ‘free’ to take advantage of Netflix’s deal.
Miller told Deadline, “We feel really good about having grabbed that before the big folks stepped up and wrote monster checks. It was some validation of the value of the franchise there. The ratings on NXT have continued to grow as we watch them before they come to the network. So, I think on that level, great.” He added that given Netflix is so “ubiquitous” in the U.S., the streamer’s promotion could help The CW.
Distribution is also part of the conversation. Last summer, The CW’s parent Nexstar hired former Fox exec Mike Biard as President and COO and he’s been in charge of this push.
Miller said that The CW reaches the exact same number of homes as ABC, CBS, Fox and NBC, but just with a different distribution “architecture”
“But part of our job and the distribution team’s is how do we continue to improve that distribution lineup,” he said. “We could put on the same show that a CBS or ABC does, but until our distribution lineup is parallel or at least commensurate with what the other four are doing, it still makes it hard to get the kind of big ratings that those folks do.”
