books | "season finale: the unexpected rise & fall of the wb and upn"

by susanne daniels & cynthia littleton. (hardcover, 2007)

A caveat: as someone who grew up drinking The WB's Kool-Ade, I was going to like this book. Between the network's marketing genius, propensity for lightning-in-a-bottle shows, and that damn frog, I was hooked. I did enjoy the book, but as so often happens that doesn't necessarily make it good.

At first I assumed this book's obscurity (it's now out of print) was due to the inside-baseball subject matter. After 350 pages, my biggest issues were with tone and lopsidedness. Daniels was a charter WB executive, and is therefore in a unique position to tell this story. Due in part to its tumultuous history, there was no one on the UPN side to provide a similar perspective, so I'm guessing journalist Littleton was on board to flesh things out and fill in some blanks.

However, the whole thing is written in (presumably) Daniels' first-person. Certain WB execs are endlessly deified, and the tone is unsurprisingly anti-UPN. It gets a little "Dear Diary" in parts, sort of like a WB series about angsty network executives. UPN's inability to defend itself turns out to be a byproduct of its own messy business model; nonetheless, it bugs.

The excitement and enthusiasm for many of The WB's signature properties is at least telegraphed in linear recaps of development seasons, upfront presentations, and nail-biting revelations of ratings results. The early years of The WB do come across as a fun place to work, and confirming that suspicion might be the book's greatest accomplishment outside of being a compiled oral history of the era.

Since Hollywood is such a small town, it's understandable why this book likely avoided pissing people off more than it probably could have. But in that case, why not focus more on insider scoop about the networks' signature shows?

I'm not sure if it's a coincidence that the narrative falls apart around the time the network does (which also conveniently coincides with Daniels' exit). The last few chapters (as promised in the "& fall" part of the subtitle) drag, culminating in the WB-UPN merger resulting in the CW. A recap of the network's final night party was a fun note to go out on. Let's just leave it that I'm not sad it took me until now to read this one.