The Rise and Fall of UPN

UPN: The Rise of the 5th TV Network (pt. 1)

I was freshly fifteen when I made this, and it shows. This is video is a mess. I am not proud of it.
At the 10:30 mark, I promise a dedicated video about the history of The WB. That video obviously never happened. All I have to say about that: maybe one day...
This video focuses much more on programming and logistics than the personalities and broader narratives informing the network's inception. It's a lot of the "what" and not a lot of the "why." I don't even mention Lucie Salhany, the network's original CEO, which is an embarrassingly significant omission.

In the original version of this video, I inserted a stern, out-of-place disclaimer, which I have since removed.
I have also removed a couple of poorly phrased remarks about The Secret Diary of Desmond Pfeiffer.

My framing of the FCC's regulatory changes is flawed. I suggest that the regulations in place had been a detriment to large TV production entities; in reality, these regulations had effectively been protecting them. Their repeal allowed broadcasting companies to vertically integrate, meaning that the production companies' largest suitors would now be competing with them. UPN and The WB came into existence largely out of a need to protect their sister television production operations in the face of deregulated competition.
I mix up the words station, network, and affiliate a bunch in this video, especially in the first half.
- - To clear things up, a television network (ABC, NBC, UPN, etc.) commissions programming and provides it to stations for broadcast. Some stations are owned by the networks themselves (called Owned & Operated stations, or O&Os), others have deals with a specific network to carry that network's programming despite not being owned by the network (usually referred to as affiliate stations), while some don't carry any network programming and instead only carry local or syndicated content (called independent stations, or just "independents").
Please don't let this video inform your entire opinion of me. I believe I have so much more to offer than I did when I was 15.

I'm happier with how this one turned out. Someone should make a movie about the Viacom/CBS saga I detail here.
I know that a few people found it odd that I chose to announce that I would be referring to Dawn Ostroff by her first name. When I wrote that part of the script, many of the sources I was referring to used her full name (Dawn Tarnofsky-Ostroff), and I thought it'd be a fun little gag to put that long name on the screen and then cut it off since her full name would be comically unfamiliar to a typical English speaker. But I had trouble relocating those articles while editing, so I lazily used "Dawn Ostroff", which defeated the point of the gag. I botched the joke, no question. But some people have accused me of trying to demean or minimize a female executive by doing this. That is absolutely not the case.
After this video went out, I had one or two people reach out with concerns that the "end of UPN" clip that I feature at 50:10 may not actually be the right clip. Apparently, some WWE broadcasts were scheduled differently for Australian broadcast, which is where I got that clip from (as it was the only one I could find). I've investigated in the years since and corresponded with an individual who knows way more about WWE than I, and I'm now reasonably confident that I actually did include the right clip (although I definitely should have further verified that before upload).

I did manage to mispronounce Roswell as "Rose-well" at two separate points in this video. As I really should have known, it's "Roz-well." Of all the errors and mistakes I've made, I think this one is the most embarrassing.
Everybody Hates Chris was originally developed for Fox, not UPN.
The WB's "Thank You" montage was not the final thing shown on the network. I think I'm a sucker for sappy sign-offs and wrongly assumed I had found one. The WB went dark after the credits sequence on an episode of Dawson's Creek.
CBS's $550,000 FCC fine for the 2004 Super Bowl incident was ultimately overruled in court after an eight-year legal battle, which almost went to the Supreme Court.
The epilogue in this video became outdated the day it was released. Les Moonves was described as being slated for a 2021 retirement, but he instead resigned amid sexual harassment allegations in September 2018. Do you know when the first article outlining those allegations was published? The same day the video was published, within a few hours of it going out. Talk about timing.
- - Also, in the intervening years, Sumner Redstone has passed away (though he did hang on until age 97!) and the corporate situation surrounding Viacom and CBS has been, in generous terms, a mess. A majority stake in The CW has been acquired by Nexstar.

An alternate thumbnail I workshopped

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