Fox Broadcast Network, The WB Architect Was 77

Jamie Kellner, the charismatic and artful government who expanded the published tv panorama by serving to hatch the Fox and WB networks in 1987 and 1995, respectively, had died. He was 77.

Kellner died Friday at his Montecito, California, house after a battle with most cancers, The Hollywood Reporter has discovered.

Whereas nonetheless using excessive atop The WB, Kellner in March 2001 was given extra tasks overseeing TBS, TNT and CNN as chairman and CEO of Time Warner sister firm Turner Broadcasting System. However he was at that for simply two years, earlier than he retired and served out the rest of his contract again in Burbank.

In the meantime, Kellner was chairman of the station possession group ACME Communications — named after the corporate within the Highway Runner cartoons at Warner Bros. — from its launch in 1997 till it was liquidated in 2016. He was the uncommon community TV exec who additionally had a hand within the station enterprise; ACME’s first 9 stations, in truth, have been WB associates.

The boyish Kellner was president of Orion Leisure Group when he was among the many first folks employed by Rupert Murdoch and Barry Diller in February 1986 to develop a community at Fox to compete with CBS, NBC and ABC.

As founding president and COO of Fox Broadcasting Co., he set about constructing the affiliate community, promoting programming to advertisers and establishing relations with producers.

“One of many first checks we apply [with a show] is: Would one of many three networks do that? And very often, if the reply is sure, then we disqualify it,” Kellner instructed The New York Instances in March 1987. “There isn’t a motive for us to exist if we’re going to do what they’ve already finished.”

Married … With Youngsters kicked off the primary official evening of Fox primetime on Sunday, April 5, 1987, and The Simpsons, Beverly Hills, 90210, Melrose Place and In Dwelling Shade would arrive later. He additionally spearheaded the creation of the Fox Youngsters’s Community.

Kellner resigned in January 1993 — Diller had stop 11 months earlier — and was given a berth on Fox Inc.’s board of administrators. However having launched a fourth broadcast community, he joined Warner Bros. in November 1993 itching to begin a fifth.

Kellner obtained an 11 % stake in The WB, with Warner Bros. taking 64 % and the Tribune Co. 25 %. (The community was constructed round six unbiased stations owned by Tribune, together with WPIX in New York and KTLA in Los Angeles.)

After beating the bushes in a fierce battle for associates with rivals from fellow community upstart UPN, Kellner celebrated the kickoff of The WB when The Wayans Bros. aired on Jan. 11, 1995, 5 days earlier than UPN acquired going.

The family-friendly drama seventh Heaven was The WB’s first massive hit, adopted by such different common reveals as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Gilmore Women, Dawson’s Creek, Felicity and Charmed.

“He had a Mr. Spock-like indifferent high quality at instances,” onetime WB exec Suzanne Daniels wrote of Kellner in her 2007 ebook Season Finale, co-authored with Selection‘s Cynthia Littleton. “He wasn’t simply excitable, but he demonstrated such apparent ardour and dedication that he impressed a group of younger executives, none extra so than I.”

One in all 5 children, James Kellner was born in Brooklyn in 1948 and raised on Lengthy Island. His father, additionally James, was a Wall Avenue commodities dealer; his mom, Jean, was a volunteer with the North Shore Hospital Auxiliary for greater than three many years. He was an avid sailor who competed in yacht races as a teenager.

Kellner graduated with a level in advertising and marketing from Lengthy Island College’s C.W. Submit campus, then acquired into the CBS government coaching program in 1969 with assist from his dad.

Mentored by Hank Gillespie, he landed a job within the community’s program gross sales division and went with that unit when it was spun off as Viacom Enterprises, rising to turn out to be vp first-run programming, growth and gross sales.

In 1978, Kellner jumped to producer-distributor Filmways, the place he had the concept to boil down the 90-minute Saturday Night time Reside episodes right into a half-hour format preferrred for syndication. After Orion Photos acquired Filmways in 1982, he oversaw programming, house video, pay TV and syndication there and presided over the launch of Cagney & Lacey and a reboot of Hollywood Squares.

At Fox, it was his revolutionary concept to counterprogram a stay episode of In Dwelling Shade reverse the halftime present of the 1992 Tremendous Bowl, airing on CBS. These halftime reveals was once boring, however that may rapidly change: Michael Jackson carried out in ’93.

Because the No. 2 exec at Fox Broadcasting behind Diller, he had been given one % stake within the community. When he left after seven years, he obtained a payout of $10 million-$15 million, a “sliver of what [he] hoped to achieve from his involvement with The WB,” in keeping with Season Finale.

At his subsequent cease, Kellner reteamed with Garth Ancier — he had employed him as leisure president at Fox — they usually programmed an evening of “city” sitcoms, together with The Wayans Bros., The Steve Harvey Present and The Jamie Foxx Present. The brand new community would goal a youthful viewers, one which the maturing Fox had deserted.

“Jamie Kellner was the right mannequin of a CEO. Good all the time, pugnacious generally, all the time considering and infrequently smiling, Jamie gave the executives fortunate sufficient to work for him a lot of runway. He would finish conversations with, ‘Do we all know what we’re doing?’ When issues didn’t work out as deliberate (they usually generally didn’t) there was no angst, only a ‘subsequent time we’ll do it otherwise,’” John D. Maatta, former EVP and COO of The WB Tv Community, wrote in a press release. “The ambiance that Jamie Kellner and Garth Ancier created at The WB was a once-in-a-career second for which I’ll all the time be grateful.”

After a public and protracted bidding conflict, Kellner allowed twentieth Century Fox Tv’s supernatural drama Buffy the Vampire Slayer, created by Josh Whedon and starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, to go to UPN after its fifth season (and its WB contract) resulted in Might 2001.

The WB had been paying $1 million an episode in licensing charges. UPN wound up forking over $2.3 million an episode for 44 episodes over the present’s closing two seasons.

Kellner had a 5.3 % stake in ACME when he based it with Tom Allen, former CFO of Fox Broadcasting, and station exec Doug Gealy. The corporate acquired underperforming stations in such markets as St. Louis; Salt Lake Metropolis; Albuquerque; Portland, Oregon; Inexperienced Bay, Wisconsin; Dayton, Ohio; and Knoxville, Tennessee. One report referred to as the connection between ACME and The WB “vaguely incestuous.”

ACME had 9 stations when it raised about $105 million with an IPO in September 1999. It grew to 12 stations earlier than starting the method of exiting the enterprise in 2003.

Kellner didn’t endear himself to professional wrestling followers when he canceled World Championship Wrestling reveals on TBS and TNT in certainly one of his first programming choices at Turner. He additionally tried and didn’t carry buzz to CNN in its battle with the upstart Fox Information Channel and pushed to merge the community with ABC Information.

After he was changed by Phil Kent, Kellner remained with The WB by the top of his contract in June 2004, when Ancier — who had exited The WB for a prime NBC put up earlier than coming again — Jordan Levin and Jed Petrick took over. It might be his final massive job.

“It looks as if solely yesterday when the partnership between Warner Bros. and Jamie started, as he and Bruce [Rosenblum] traversed the nation in all sizes of planes and all forms of climate signing up associates,” Warner Bros. Leisure chairman and CEO Barry Meyer mentioned then. “Jamie and his group have executed on the imaginative and prescient past the expectations of all these naysayers that loudly proclaimed that there was no room for greater than 4 broadcast networks. Boy, have been they fallacious.”

Kellner noticed The WB vanish in September 2006 when Warner Bros. and CBS Corp. changed it and UPN with one community, The CW.

Survivors embrace his second spouse, former leisure banker Julie Smith; his daughter, Melissa Kellner Berman, who labored with TV producer Greg Berlanti as a growth exec; son Christopher; and siblings Thomas, Ronald and Nancy. His sister Karen died in 2005 at age 44.

“I don’t suppose there’s one other particular person within the historical past of TV that may say they helped begin two new main broadcast networks (Fox and The WB),” Berlanti wrote in a tribute. “Jamie Kellner was a titan and a visionary in our business and but he will likely be remembered by anybody fortunate sufficient to work for him as an government or as a showrunner as a heat, humorous, charismatic, artistic and sort mentor, buddy, husband and Dad.”

He continued, “He devoted his life in TV to fostering and betting on generations of expertise each in entrance of and behind the digital camera. I do know I communicate for thus many others after I say my life was modified by the Camelot-esque house he created for all of us who labored at The WB. He will likely be drastically missed.”