The Rise and Fall of The CW 

Arrow was great when he still had the murder list if I remember right. Idk I never liked CW that much.

the flash

Arrow was the best cw show on the beginning

Superman & Lois

It was definitely Legends of Tommorow. They made the lower budget work, and it's sad to not be getting Booster Gold now.

I'm genuinely still convinced it is to be honest 🤣. Like, things like Gotham Knights has to be a money laundering scheme or if not some kind of elaborate psy-op designed to make us appreciate their other shitty superhero shows. I would love to be an auditor and see their taxes because I'm positive they have to be using at least some of these ridiculous shows based on batshit concepts as ways of hiding secret income or something. It's also just so bizarre how literally almost every show pitched gets greenlit for a pilot. Like you said, the viewership being sooooo low is also weird and another red flag. Can't wait for the inevitable documentary ten years from now about the inner workings of the CW and why so many shows were being made and how on God's green earth they managed to keep making so many shows for so long. By the way, love your videos mate.

@@ryanhalawani2637 Thank you!

Sounds to me like the CW is about 2-3 years away from becoming a MyNetwork/ION style programming service airing exclusively reruns

I loved more or less everything they Done, atleast they had story and took chances

They hired SJWs, feminists and pushed the agenda. People left.

I'll always remember those first 5 seasons fondly. But holly hell did it have no idea what it was doing once the original writer left.

Trash show for teenage girls.

@@Tokumastu1 yeah its best to treat the end of 5 as the series finale

@@Tokumastu1 i mean the original writer already left on season 5 i think.... but it had hardcore fanbase supernatfamily support it, thats why cw still continue it more longer...

@@Tokumastu1 thank you I have said same thing repeatedly. First 5 were awesome after it was all a cash grab.

The biggest problem is they started producing absolute dog crap and doubling or even tripling down on disasters. *cough*Batwoman*cough*

Their quantity over quality methodology really hurts them.

Daredevil was the polar opposite imo. I'm amazed how it doesn't get enough praise and remembered more today, atleast from the crowd that laud Nolan's and the new Batman. It's like everyone's forgotten. I hope MCU took the other better half from the show along with just the actor. The side characters were a big part in what made it big.

@@lancevance6346 I don't think anyone forgot about Daredevil. I've seen plenty of people talk about it, and it seems Marvel is also interested in bringing it back.

@@lancevance6346 You do know Daredevil was Netflix and part of a string of great Netflix MCU shows and nothing whatsoever to do with the CW, right? And people so didn't forget about it Disney has brought Cox back in to play the character again, even having a cameo in a recent movie.

I'm neutral. CW did a lot to kill Sat AM cartoons by using Pokemon to block anything new on a rival network.

I have so many memories as a kid watching Kids WB (which was later rebranded as the CW4Kids). I actually looked forward to going to school Monday because me and my friends would always talk about the new episodes of Batman and Yugioh and Pokemon.

@@catdogmousecheese Oh, such good memories

@@Loremastrful Are you sure Pokémon was on CW? I have a feeling you may be confused because the only US networks to ever air Pokémon were Kids WB in the 90s and early 2000s then Cartoon Network & Boomerang from the early 2000s to the mid 2010s then Disney XD from 2016 to 2020 and now it's on Netflix.

@@PeterGriffin11 You’re right. The CW never had Pokémon. They’re were two different things. They were still the WB then I think.

Dont be embarassed about what you like

Same.

@@johndurham6172 Walker is so boring. Why do people loves it so much?

I will always stand by the first two seasons of Arrow being some of the best superhero shows ever made. The Legends of Tomorrow was fun, The Flash was also decent (for two seasons atleast). The rest were forgettable as hell, other than Superman and Lois, which was great.

Same. Even though I’ve since encountered MUCH better television, I’ll always look back on those Tuesday nights in middle and high school fondly. Same with the discussions and hype with my siblings and friends.

7 yr contract is standard for network shows usually.

@@TheFourthWinchester yeah and that’s 7 years of working vs. not working, that’s nothing for an actor to sneeze at

Like how they treat the Flash's powerset sometimes he does what the Flash would do. Then he'll ignore the plan and do something dumb

The acting, just about everything about it.

True, although i feel Supergirl has gotten better, Flash has been on a downward spiral.

Oh it definitely is the effects just as much

That was the major problem with batwoman They refuse to offer a balance to the audience and the storylines Supernatural at least offer something for pretty much everyone

That's what got them in trouble. Making bad decisions and insisting on them

@@GothPaoki I bet it's doing pretty well on Netflix and will find new viewers in the years to come. Shows like CXG find their fans over time.

@@GothPaoki they did that for some. Meanwhile they completely gave up on The Secret Circle. One of my faves even tho I watched it like 5-6 yrs after it aired.

@LTNetjak I was talking about CXG, not Batwoman. I agree regarding the latter, I gave it two or three episodes, than I gave up. But I only discovered CXG when it was already in its second season and was hooked from the pilot on. And I know others discovered it far later. It possibly was too well hidden between vampires and comic heroes and marketing didn't really work. Actually, I prefer it when the network respects the creators vision and sticks to the planned run. I'm probably not the only one who wished Supernatural ended after five season, as originally planned. ;)

@LTNetjak i really liked Batwoman especially once they got rid of Ruby Rose. Ryan became a favorite of mine and i really miss her show. I also miss Legends so much, that show was a gem

My hope is that, if the next Flash season is its last, do one last mega crossover that brings back all the other shows. The recent Earth-Prime comics certainly teased that. Oh and give Legends of Tomorrow one final season on HBO Max. It deserves that much.

Well said sir, but I will say I feel like the arrow verse jumped the shark with their big crisis on infinite earths. I liked flash and some of the others but to be up to date on literally every little thing they’ve done is just asking too much

I generally agree. However, for me personally, I do think they massively overstayed their welcome by a lot 🤣. These shows have some amazing ideas and really great character moments, it's just so unbelievably easy for them to fall into the same trap of churning out mediocre cookie-cutter plots that are so generic and predictable. Like, every single show has to have an unnecessarily massive cast of characters and superheroes who end up doing mostly nothing besides standing in the background, they all have soap opera level melodramatic family drama, they all have love triangles, and they all have the entire cast watching from the headquarters as the series lead fights the villains and cheers them on. Now, in the beginning, like I said, it was easy to get past this because of all the fun and cool ideas a lot of these shows explored and the characterization of some of the characters. But, towards the end, for me at least, they just completely veered off into being daytime soap operas for superheroes in spandex. Which is perfectly fine, if that's what you like, but for me, it just didn't work and really got annoying.

@@kylelatter554 more like jumped into the shark.

Superman & Lois is amazing

At least Legacies got an ending.

@@evacody1249 not a complete ending - they actually had plans for a Season 5 and so forth.

I think that’s the thing that gets missed with the discussion of these shows - most people who watch them KNOW they’re terrible, but that’s the fun. They’re light and silly and I can 100% tell you which I’d prefer after a long day of helping people deal with actual issues I often can’t solve for them

@@sonorasgirl yes !!! They don't try to cater to a broader fanbase, their priorities are their current viewers. And that leads to good content in comparison to the flash (the first few seasons are excluded from this)

@@TaZeTheGod but it didn't end on a cliffhanger

Wait it did? Where was that announced?

@@karnielcashumphries683 That’s a lie. It’s still a CW show- budget just looks a little higher. Also Iced knows both of these Superman and Lois Lane versions began on Supergirl, right?

@@benwasserman8223 it was produced by hbo, it just aired on the cw because of a deal they had

@@simz88 The show wasn’t available to stream on HBO Max until last September. And even then it still pulls from Hoechlin’s Supergirl incarnation

@@simz88 Nope Ben is right, HBO didn't produce it, CW did. That was just a rumour that got around the webs, which isn't true at all. HBO did get to distribute thru WB deals but they had no hand in making the show.

Lmfao

Born in 87 myself and remember all those and had to use a TV antenna too lol

Ah yes, the good ol days

When upn used to play a Bay Area classic song all the “I get my grown man on “ the hood stars

Not being good from being horrible is an oceans worth of difference. The flash is not good for example. After season 1 at least. It still did ok for several seasons. Then there's shows like batwoman which was absolutely terrible and did terribly in terms of viewers. Like your point stands. But my point is there are many more bad shows in cw than shows which are not good.

I always wondered who watched those craps

Actually I'd say after season 2. I loved both of those.

@@GothPaoki Exactly. Bad shows still sell pretty well. Whether you like it or not.

@@SuperMurray2009 Yea bad shows do sell.... For a while till they lose hundreds of thousands of viewers like flash did between s1 and 8. It used to average a million at some point and now it averages less than 600.000. And that's completely ignoring that for every mediocre show in terms of ratings like flash ( which btw is supposed to be a heavy hitter for cw) there are 2-3 more completely crap which end up being a total financial loss. It's really not hard to see why cw failed. In fact a lot of people were wondering how it could keep going and well seeing the debt they have amassed i guess we know.

Yeah The 100 is still my favorite for how GoT in a body count it reached. Ik S7 was a mess but still think a comic continuation would be awesome similar to the Buffy comics.

Best show they made. If not for any other reason than the acting alone. Those characters were extremely well written, and they didnt have that many plot holes thru 7 whole seasons.. Iv rewatched it twice since it ended

Man. That ending, killed it for me.

Carlos I guess it’s a good thing I never watched the last half of the last season lol

The first two seasons of that show were pretty great but it started going off the rails fast in season 3 imo. It only really got worse from there.

Better late than never

Honestly, after 7 seasons, that's barely a cancelation. That's dying of natural causes lol.

Had no idea it was cancelled. I gave up on s3 i was forcing myself to watch it way too hard but i just couldn't deal with the cringe after some point. That plot with the board game killed half my brain cells

Agreed... CW had a lot of good and diverse shows, but after the introduction of the arrowverse things went downhill...

i know i'll appreciate that the shows were my introduction to these characters and got me into the comics. and by god i'm gonna miss seeing sara lance

I haven't seen Superman & Lois, but it looks like a show with potential.

@@Kevin_Street it has the benefit of not being a fucking 24h slog that somehow has to have enough interesting content to keep its viewers entertained. And imo its writing is leagues above most other Arrowverse shows (though that's obviously subjective).

@@megamcee They put the show on so many breaks for so reason. Season 2 started airing in January. Like let them finish airing the fucking thing.

@@0x00Fyou 'rona fucked up a lot of stuff, outside of the usual tv breaks and stuff

@@megamcee I don't know how it would fuck up the airing of a tv show, if the footage is all filmed just air the episode.

Bruh that hyperbole is crazy

Fuck me am I old. I remember riding my Triceratops back home from school to watch everybody hates Chris. Awwww, the good ol’ days.

I mean I didn’t even know everybody hates Chris was first on the CW 😂

Nah Dinosaurs ended in the mid-90s!

Yeah the show ended in 2009, I didn't see Dinasours though.

Technically it’s in the multiverse that the Arrowverse created

But wasnt diggle there? He even mentioned oliver

@@maximussaktish they retconned that this was an au Dingle

@@benwasserman8223 no

@@paulsoldner9500 i actually thought the first season of Legends of Tomorrow was terrible. I started enjoying it once the writers made it a comedy sometime in season 2.

Exactly!

I'm kinda split on long vs short shows/seasons. On one hand, a longer runtime allows for more world building and lets you know the characters better. On the other hand, I generally have a low tolerance for filler these days, and if a show you've been following for several years fizzles out or screws up landing badly it can leave a bad taste in your mouth. For example, the Walking Dead fizzled out for me after watching it for several years some time after the group spent a season looking for Beth, only for her immediately get killed off, and Game of Thrones suffered some awful decay in the final season; whereas Wonder Egg Priority consisted of 11 24-minute episodes and one double length one, that was genuinely really engaging up until the last episode, which was unfortunately a shit show. But hey, I didn't invest as much time in it and the journey was pretty damn good, and you can always course correct off of it. I guess it just comes down to liking it when seasons and shows have a clear goal or direction that it is moving towards, instead of being designed to go on until the ratings drop too low, or enough people want out.

There are ways you can stretch a special effects budget that can make it go way longer, CW used to be pretty good at it even: Arrow and Supernatural knew exactly what they could, and couldn't do with their budget. There's some fights in Arrow's first season that look genuinely impressive, and it's because all they needed was a guy who could do Batman-flips, some pyrotechnics and a warehouse. The later shows just got lazy with bad lighting (for which there's no excuse, LED stands can let you get nice lighting wherever you want, and cameras are getting cheaper all the time), awful sets, and overreliance on CGI.

Sorry everyone want quality over quantity, network tv needs to just die off it's a same all these DC characters got used up in such cheesy cheap ways, i will say i enjoyed all the lead characters Actors but that's one or 2 per show everyone else was meh.

@@RobEcu123 everyone whines about how suddenly things happen in 10 episode runs, but you can’t really do the leg work for subtle and gradual over the course of a 10 episode season the way can in a longer run. That’s not quality over quantity that’s zero patience and short attention span. Also, there should always be some tv that people don’t have to directly pay for via subscription, poor people should have tv too. The DC shows generally started off pretty alright.

@ilikebacon Do you care? Because I don't.

@ilikebacon Well, the way I see it it's a soft reboot. I'm not saying I didn't like it before, I'm saying I like the direction that show takes the overall universe and I hope they keep going in that direction. It's cool if you don't see it that way. Mine's just an opinion of some rando on the internet.

@ilikebacon Technically it takes place on an alternate Earth. The last episode seemed to imply this. General Lane talking about "League's of heroes" from alternate Earths and the fact that it also seems that Superman is the only hero on this Earth.

@ilikebacon Well, like I said, if we get something roughly at the quality of Superman and Lois I'm wiiling to look past it.

They did? Good! I'm definitely watching now.

Yes Nancy Drew is an amazing show. I was surprised to love it so much because many CW shows are bad. The show did a good job of introducing supernatural mysteries in season 2 & 3. Overall show is able to maintain some really interesting and memorable plot lines. One of my favorite “filler” episodes was when Nancy & Co couldn’t speak the name of a Norse creature, or else they would die. They had to keep erasing their memories. There was some really cool camera work that happened during that episode. I need to finish watching season 3. I’m so happy the show got renewed.

That show was utter garbage. Simple as that. I'm so happy it ended long ago. CW dying as well is a god send

@@EddieNgatia you have no idea what you're talking about. Jane the Virgin was and still is peak comedy TV and they had a great run and great formula

@@EddieNgatia Jane the Virgin was great

Nikita did it for me

It was a great show that handled comedy, drama and mystery very well

Yeah, it's sad ya can't get free action cartoons on TV like the ones aired on kids WB nowadays, now it's all about streaming services or premium cable.

I remember watching those.

@@Armorhunterash because it’s easier to make money back from premium services.

I love that show 💖

That's a low bar.

@@AwareWolfOnWheels Mate it’s CW not HBO so the bars already low. A lot of their shows start good but turn to trash, Supernatural atleast has been consistently entertaining.

thank you CW

Fun fact: Crazy Ex-Girlfriend was originally going to be a half-hour show on Showtime. That probably would've been a disaster.

So much more character development came about because the show became an hour long show on The CW.

If you want to watch CW show with actually good production, acting & writing check Superman & Lois.

The Boys is an excellent take on the superhero genre that we seldom see, that maybe the people who have superpowers let such powers go to their heads and become more of a villain than the expected hero. However, it truly brings a realistic take on human behavior with superpower abilities.

The guy that made Supernatural developed The Boys.

Agree. A lot of their original IP is actually pretty good. I am huge Supernatural fan, and while I can admit the show really started to decline around season 8, it picked up at S10-12. But for a long time, that show was solid. The 100, even iZombie had its moments.

Nah season 1 was cool

@@Antwannnn Season One had, "I'm weird. I'm a weirdo..." It was already a train wreck and it only got worse from then on.

Well, I do like it for just one single reason...it made it possible for Sabrina to be made. Loved that show even though I hated how it was cancelled.

@@jfcfanfic ….on Netflix

I have not! I'll have to track it down, though. That sounds fascinating.

That and the Disney Plus shows, where they focus on the stories or do it like Loki and Wandavision where they were mystery themed.

@@kbraven7007 yeah. The disney+ shows are basically extended movies and work really well as that, I just think that 13 episodes is a good average, with some 6 episode miniseries mixed in.

Their real home is HBOMAX. Bigger fx budgets than The Flash & Legends.

i also loved iZombie though i think once it moved away from being a zombie solving crimes, it stopped being very good.

@@Tsukiakari-qb3tk Yeah the first three seasons were the best ones.

@@jamesbounds agreed!

That can work.

Bricks are cheap thats why

@@ExeErdna 🤣🤣🤣

Oooo….sounds very interesting!

With the sale of The CW finalized to Nexstar, KTLA became the network's only flagship station; WPIX is considered a sub-key station because it is actually owned by one of Nexstar's sidecars.

Yup. MyNetwork tried to be a telenovela network. Lmfao

I think that show partially has HBOMax money funding it. Because it looks way better than a typical CW show.

I loved Nikita more than most of the CW shows…even more than the Arrowverse or SPN.

I really wish Legends of tomorrow hadn’t ended on a cliff hanger. I’m hoping they can wrap it up on the Flash or something..

@@paulsoldner9500 really? Legacies was expected by the cast, crew and network to continue for several years, Charmed was in its' 4th season and setting up to explore new aspects of their universe, LoT was extremely well loved and received greatly. Batwoman and Naomi were meh, but had their fans. The other shows like In The Dark - was the CW's highest quality show, Dynasty (say what you will about ratings), and Roswell NM was a good show

Wait until DC see their 2nd round of 33% layoffs in the last 3 years. Love corporate mergers after a parent company gambles so hard on one shitty thing that it tanks the whole lot. Matrix? Dead. Justice League movie universe? Dead. Space Jam; The Ad for Warner Properties? Dead. Fantastic Beasts and Harry Potter as a whole? D e a d. They have NOTHING left to bring in any good faith as they've bastardised all of their IPs and whored them out for nostalgia bait without making them good.

Paramount is pulling out too, and moving it’s CW resources to its doa Paramount+ service.

CW didn't do Dawson's Creek and Charmed and Supernatural (S1). That was when they were The WB .

@@TaZeTheGod the Ratings say other wise those shows barely did 500 thousand in the ratings Naomi barely did 350thousand in the ratings. when it comes to networks ratings matter and if youre not doing at least 600 thousand youre gonna get Axed.