PASADENA, Calf. — The CW leadership took the stage at the TCA Winter Press Tour here, defining the network’s brand for the reporters in the crowd. Entertainment president Brad Schwartz said he wants the press to “stop writing Big Four networks and start writing Big Five networks,” but acknowledged it will take some work. “We’re the underdog competing against titans,” he added. 

Schwartz called The CW “a big-tent brand,” with scripted and unscripted programming, and a growing batch of sports in the network portfolio, including LIV Golf, ACC football and basketball, NASCAR and sports shows such as 100 Days to Indy and Inside the NFL. 

Also Read: More Coverage of the TCA Winter Press Tour

On the scripted front, Schwartz talked up Sullivan’s Crossing and Wild Cards, both which have roots in Canada. He said he dislikes it when The CW’s shows from Canada, including Son of a Critch and Children Ruin Everything, are referred to as imports, as they are typically coproductions. 

In terms of homegrown fare, All American returns April 1 and Walker is back April 3. All American: Homecoming will start when All American concludes, likely this summer. 

The final season of Superman & Lois, Schwartz said, “is going to blow your mind” when it debuts this year. 

Original Sherlock & Daughter is scheduled for a 2025 premiere. Schwartz called it a “reimagining of the classic franchise.”

Schwartz said other networks, including USA Network, had abandoned the “blue-sky” drama motif and CW shows such as Sullivan’s Crossing and Wild Cards fit that bill. 

On the unscripted front, he mentioned Crime Nation, from James Goldston, former ABC News president. “A different ripped-from-the-headlines true crime story” each week, Schwartz said. “Gripping, can’t-turn-the-channel kind of stuff.” Crime Nation debuts February 20. 

New unscripted stuff includes the FBoy Island spinoff Lovers and Liars, which prompted Schwartz to note, “Women play the dating game much better than men.” That premieres April 11. 

Sally Ann Salsano is behind Police 24/7, which Schwartz said “feels like a Dick Wolf procedural, with “more story and emotion” than a typical unscripted show. Showing police both on the job and at home with family, it begins April 30. 

Game shows Trivial Pursuit and Scrabble are spun from “incredibly well-known IP,” said Schwartz. Production on them begins in the spring. 

Dennis Miller, The CW president, said Schwartz “was my only and first choice to come join me in this adventure we were in to turn a network around.”

Asked about LIV Golf, Miller said the partnership was “really opportunistic for both sides” and led to other sports opportunities coming to The CW. 

Said Schwartz, “I think you’ll see more sports, not less sports, in the future.”

TV One president Brad Siegel is leaving the African-American targeted network, TV One officials said Tuesday.

Michelle Rice, the network’s executive vice president of content distribution and marketing, will serve as interim general manager with full management oversight of the 13-year old network effective immediately.

READ MORE:Upfronts 2016 -- TV One's Siegel Calls 'Empire' Acquisition a Game Changer

Siegel, who joined TV One as its president in 2014, announced his resignation to TV One’s leadership earlier in the day. “Brad has made many valuable contributions to the network during his tenure and we’re grateful for his work ethic, creativity, professionalism and support of our mission to inform, inspire and entertain the black community,” said TV One parent company Urban One CEO Alfred Liggins in a statement. "He’s also an all-around good guy and we wish him well in his future endeavors.”

Rice has been with the network since its launch and has held numerous executive positions within the company. She was a MCN Wonder Woman in 2016. “Michelle is business savvy, understands our demographic and has the energy, vision and discipline to position TV One for the future," Liggins said. "She has the respect of our industry and I believe in her ability to provide leadership for our network during this time of intense competition, increased platform availability and growing content targeting the black viewer."

Multicultural entertainment networks are prepping for the biggest entertainment event of the summer: the Democratic and Republican conventions, and their respective presumptive presidential nominees, Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump.

This month, networks such as Fuse, Revolt, BET and TV One will provide both TV and digital coverage of the Republican National Convention in Cleveland (July 18-21) and the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia (July 25-28).

Providing news coverage through a multicultural lens — especially during an important and unpredictable campaign season — should appeal to the networks’ target viewers despite the channels’ entertainment-programming pedigrees, network executives said.

“I think the landscape for this particular election season is uncharted territory,” Fuse Media CEO Michael Schwimmer said. “We have candidates on both sides that are controversial, and particularly on the Republican side, with regard to the Hispanic community. I don’t think we’ve seen this kind of change and acrimony in a way that so directly effects our audience.”

Fuse will air segments from the convention both on its air and online. They will be reported by correspondents Arlene Santana and James Villalobos, who were chosen by Fuse viewers last month as part of the network’s “Crash the Parties” initiative with nonprofit political organization Voto Latino, Schwimmer said.

Having covered the 2008 and 2012 conventions, Schwimmer added that there is far more interest among young viewers this year than in the previous elections.

“The interest in both candidates, along with the explosion of social media over the past eight years, makes this a better experience for us as an organization and for viewers who will get that content multiple ways,” Schwimmer said.

TV One president and CEO Brad Siegel said the network’s live daily coverage from the convention floors, via morning news program News One Now with Roland Martin, will provide its African-American audience with a more in-depth look at the issues important to them.

The show’s website, newsone.com, will also offer live reports from the conventions.

“Viewers expect us to be covering the most important news of the day, and be able to interpret and ask the questions of the newsmakers regarding how their politics affects African-Americans,” he said. “That’s our job — to ask the questions from a perspective that no one else is asking, and our viewers expect us to represent their point of view, their situations and how their policies affect their lives.”

Coverage of the conventions won’t be limited to what’s happening in the arenas. Revolt TV chief political correspondent Amrit Singh said he plans to complement the network’s convention coverage with reports from outside the proceedings, where major protests are expected.

“The story there is not only what’s happening in the convention halls but very much what’s happening in the streets,” he said.

As part of Revolt’s “Revolt 2 Vote” initiative, the network will feature live segments from the convention floor that will air on the network’s daily Revolt Live show as well as on network website revolt.tv, Singh said. The network will also break into regularly scheduled programming during the conventions to offer live updates and interviews from the convention floors, he added.

“These conventions are really four-day reality shows,” Singh said. “This is really an opportunity to galvanize the attention of our audience.”

Myx Tv general manager Miguel Santos added that a diverse offering of voices and images on television helps to assure that all voters have a chance to have their issues and concerns heard. 

“It’s important for multicultural networks to ensure that their viewers feel like they have a voice and their needs are being addressed,” said Santos, whose network is in process of planning its on-air and online election coverage.

“You’ll hear presidential candidates say ‘We have the African-American, Latino and event the LGBTQ+ vote’ but rarely is there a mention of Asian Americans," he added. "Our viewers need to know that  they can and should demand more attention because their votes matter too.”

Cable networks and streaming services are turning up the volume on music, cueing up scripted shows designed to hit the right notes with audiences.

From Million Dollar Quartet, CMT’s historical look at the birth of rock ‘n’ roll, to Roadies, Showtime’s series about a concert setup crew, to BET’s biographical miniseries New Edition Story, cable networks are mixing pop music with drama in an effort to strike a chord with a broader young audience.

“Music is the great unifier,” Cherie Saunders, TV editor for black entertainment-news website EurWeb.com, said. “If you can tap into a fan base and just feed them a constant diet of that genre of music through whatever drama vehicle you’re presenting, I think that combination can generate a hit series.”

The music component also allows programmers to extend the marketing mix for a series beyond television, into digital album and single sales for original music tied to the show — another way to reach younger viewers.

“Music is an element that brings in younger audiences to drama that might otherwise skew typically older,” TV One president Brad Siegel said. “It’s a way to bring 18-34 and 18-49 viewers into drama.”

Scripted series that play off popular music trends aren’t new to television. Sitcoms like The Monkees (1966-68) and The Partridge Family (1970- 74) had a long shelf life in reruns. More recently, Fox’s Glee and ABC’s recently canceled Nashville took music-themed TV into new terrain.

And on the cable side, music-themed biopics like last year’s Whitney, Lifetime’s take on the life of pop diva Whitney Houston, and HBO’s Bessie, which starred Queen Latifah as blues icon Bessie Smith, have generated big ratings and garnered critical acclaim.

But it’s the success of Fox’s hip-hop themed Empire that’s helped the genre hit a high note with viewers. Music serves as a strong backup player to the dramatic series’ soap opera-like storyline.

Empire, which depicts the triumphs and struggles of a family-run music enterprise, was the top freshman show on both broadcast and cable during the 2015-16 television season and remained among the most-watched shows by adults 18-49 during its sophomore campaign.

“The music is important, but I think the other elements of storytelling, production value and amazing characters are just as big a contributor to the show’s success as having music and music performers,” Siegel said of Empire, for which TV One in April secured rare in-season distribution rights.

Last month, the network scored the biggest Memorial Day weekend ratings in its history by running an Empire marathon.

While just about everyone has an emotional relationship with music, not everyone likes the same types of music, Showtime president and CEO David Nevins said.

Ultimately, music serves as a way to draw viewers to the drama, with the characters and the storyline providing the glue that keeps them coming back each week, said Nevins, whose Showtime will launch Roadies on June 26.

Produced by Cameron Crowe (Almost Famous) and J.J. Abrams (Star Wars: The Force Awakens), Roadies follows the backstage workers who build and break down the stage for a touring rock band.

STORY MATTERS, TOO

Other distributors have been successful in melding music themes with strong storylines. Amazon scored a hit with its sophomore dramedy series Mozart in the Jungle. The classical music-based series won two 2016 Golden Globe awards for best comedy series and best actor in a comedy or musical series for star Gael Garcia Bernal.

FX’s Sex&Drugs&Rock&Roll, which follows Denis Leary (also a producer) as an aging rock star trying to resurrect his career with the help of his musically inclined estranged daughter, returns for a second season in July, while HBO’s 1970s rock music-themed series Vinyl — despite so-so reviews and less than stellar audience numbers — returns for a second season in 2017.

Netflix will also revisit the 1970s in The Get Down, a series that will focus on the rise of hiphop music late in that decade.

CMT is hoping viewers will make hits of two music-based scripted series: Million Dollar Quartet and Still the King, which stars countrymusic veteran Billy Ray Cyrus as a one-hit-wonder-turned-Elvis impersonator who hits rock bottom before discovering he has a 15-year-old daughter.

CMT’s first scripted-series foray would naturally be rooted in music, given the channel’s country-music pedigree, CMT executive vice president of development Jayson Dinsmore said. But both shows will offer music that extends beyond the traditional Nashville sound, he said.“We didn’t just put the expected songs in Still the King — you’ll hear everything from the Rolling Stones to Modest Mouse, in addition to current country artists,” he said.

With Million Dollar Quartet, the network will look to extend the show’s brand to the Billboard charts by selling the show’s performances in music stores and on digital platforms, Dinsmore said.

All of the performances from Million Dollar Quartet will be available for purchase on iTunes after each episode airs. CMT is exploring the idea of a music tour involving the series’ stars once filming of the first season has ended.

Indeed, Saunders said Empire and Nashville effectively incorporated popular music both as part of the storyline as well as promotional tool to help expose the series to new audiences by selling songs from the series as part of digital single downloads and full albums.

Empire’s season-one soundtrack, released in March 2015, debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 albums chart — the first TV soundtrack to launch at the top of the charts since Glee in 2010. By the time Empire launched its second season last October, the album had sold more than 431,000 copies and had been streamed online, either in part or in full, more than 122 million times, according to Nielsen.

SPINOFFS ARE KEY

“We have to look at all kinds of different benchmarks in order to determine what is a successful television series today, and a big part of that is fan engagement,” Dinsmore said. “The more we can offer up experiential things like a tour, the more goodwill we have around the channel.”

BET will also look to generate music sales from New Edition Story, the documentary miniseries based on the 1980s R&B boy band that spawned the careers of Bobby Brown and Bell Biv DeVoe.

BET president of programming Stephen Hill said the industry is just now striking up the band for even more music-based shows to serenade viewers. “There are some stories that can be told,” he said, adding that the network is exploring several music-based series of its own, although he would not disclose specifics.

Added EurWeb.com’s Saunders: “As long as the ratings continue to soar for these types of shows you’ll see more of them. It won’t be too long before we get a polka show or a bluegrass series.”

TV One’s acquisition of the cable rights to Fox broadcasting’s hit series Empire is a “game changer” for the 12-year old network, TV One president Brad Siegel said during the network’s Thursday morning upfront breakfast event.

As part of the network’s major deal with 20th Century Fox Television, the African-American targeted network in May will air every episode from the current season of Empire leading up to the sophomore series’ May 18 finale on Fox.

In addition, TV One will run episodes from the first and second seasons of the music-themed drama starring Terrence Howard and Taraji P. Henson throughout the summer, according to Siegel.

The deal, terms of which were not disclosed, is the biggest acquisition for the 12-year old network, which is known mostly for its original docu-series such as Unsung as well as classic sitcoms such as Sanford & Son. Siegel told Multichannel News that the network had been negotiating with series producer 20th Century Fox Television for two months before landing the deal.

“For TV One, to be the home for the number one drama on television that coincidently happens to be centered around an African-American family and has the largest African American audience, is a game changer,” said Siegel. “There’s no more perfect show for TV One.”

The Empire deal was one of several programming announcements made during TV One’s upfront presentation. On the original movie front, the network will air 26 tele-films in 2016, including 14 straight weeks of original films from Memorial Day to Labor Day, according to D’Angela Proctor, TV One senior vice president of original programming and production. 

The network will also launch several new reality series including Sneaker Pawn, which follows 17-year old entrepreneur Chase Reed’s New York-based sneaker business; and Family Bond, a docu-series that follows a family-owned bail bonding company.

TV One will also jump into the game show genre with The Dating Games, in which groups of families and friends compete against each other to correctly answer questions about the actions of two people on a date, Proctor said.

Newly minted TV One president Brad Siegel wants to better define the network’s brand in an effort to be more competitive.

Siegel, just tapped to head up operations for the 10-year-old channel, said consumers know it as an entertainment service targeting African-American viewers, but he said it needs to narrow its focus to be more successful.

“The network gets watched and they clearly know it’s targeted to African-Americans, but if you press people beyond the demographic, its gets harder to define the brand,” he said. “We need to do the work that goes into brand-building to better understand the audience.”

Siegel, formerly vice chairman for UP TV, inherits a 56.5 million-subscriber network that averaged 178,000 primetime viewers in November — down 11% compared to the same period last year — but has had success with such series franchises as Unsung, R&B Divas and, more recently, Hollywood Divas.

Though African-American viewers watch more television than any other group, TV One is competing with targeted services BET, Centric, Aspire and broadcast multicast service Bounce TV, as well as such general-entertainment networks as WE tv, Oxygen and Lifetime who are reaching out to African-American women through original reality shows.

“In order to compete in that increasingly competitive landscape, TV One’s brand has to be much better defined and articulated so that people really know what TV One is about, beyond it just being an entertainment network with a collection of programming that targets African-Americans,” Siegel said. “Once we define that brand it will direct our original programming development efforts in a more focused way.”

Siegel hopes to have a more defined brand for TV One by the upfront season next spring. “Hopefully by then, we’ll be able to shape the conversation about where TV One is going and where it needs to go in order to grow to the next level.”

As UP network — formerly the Gospel Music Channel — celebrated its 10th anniversary last week, network’s vice chairman Brad Siegel announced his plans to depart from the channel by year-end. Siegel spoke to Multichannel News programming editor R. Thomas Umstead about his decade-long run with the network and his future plans as well as his thoughts on an evolving cable industry. An edited transcript follows.

MCN: What was behind your decision to leave the network?

Brad Siegel: When I left Turner at the end of 2003, what I wanted to do was to build a network again. I’ve always liked startups and I wanted to build something from scratch and that’s what I did with Gospel Music Channel with 1,700 homes in Johnson, Tenn., 10 years ago. Now we’re in close to 70 million homes so it was a great ride.

From Gospel Music Channel to GMC: Uplifting Entertainment and now to UP, the mission has remained the same: to offer positive, family friendly entertainment. For me, we’ve done so much, so after 10 years I wanted to do something different. With my contract up at the end of the year, I approached Charley [Humbard, UP president and CEO] and said I’m really ready to move on and look for a new challenge. I have a few things in the works that I’ll announce in the near future.

MCN: What do you consider your legacy at UP?

BS: I’m proud of the fact that given our limited resources, we are in the middle of the pack out of 150 rated networks, even with our small marketing budgets and small original programming budgets, and I’m proud of building a place where people like to come to work to every day. There are a lot of networks and a lot of programming out there that people are not proud of, so I think that we built a place that’s a great place to work.

I’m also proud of the development of Aspire — it was a passion project for me along with Mr. [Earvin “Magic”] Johnson and then successfully [pitching] it to Comcast and being the first minority-owned network that Comcast launched as part of their commitment after they merged with NBC Universal. That was two years ago, and now the network is in 21 million homes and growing. It’s a brand that’s unique in the television landscape.

MCN: Your success with Gospel Music Channel/UP as an independently-owned network is rare in cable. How do you see today’s cable environment for launching a new independent channel?

BS: The environment of independent networks has only gotten worse. For independents and linear networks in general, you’re hard pressed to find a genre that’s really not represented on television. I think that the cost of competing in this environment today is so extraordinary, both for getting distribution and then getting ratings. Also, I don’t think we’ve ever seen the rate of change within the industry evolve as quickly as it’s moving now. The way people are consuming television has never changed at a rate faster than we are currently experiencing.

MCN: What would it take to launch a successful independent network today?

BS: You have to have a vision, a mission and a brand proposition that is clearly defined, and have a large and passionate target audience that understands and demands that brand. That to me is absolutely critical to succeed always, but more so in today’s cable environment.

MCN: Having said that would you entertain launching an independent television network in the future?

BS: No, not a startup. I definitely feel like I have another network or two in me and I’m looking at several other things and opportunities.

After a decade at the network, Brad Siegel has stepped down from his role as vice chairman of UP TV.

Siegel, along with Charley Humbard, launched the independent music-oriented service then known as Gospel Music Channel in 2004 to a handful of small distributors. Siegel joined Humbard, a Discovery Communications executive and son of TV preacher Rex Humbard, following his 2003 departure from Turner Broadcasting, where he ultimately served as president of Turner Entertainment Networks.

News of Siegel’s exit was first reported by Variety.

Siegel and UP, which was rebranded from GMC in 2013, also work closely with Magic Johnson’s Aspire cable network, handling programming, advertising and affiliate sales.

Humbard informed the staffs of both networks about Siegel today, noting that “we will move quickly to bring in a senior executive to assume Brad's responsibilities and expect to have an announcement in the very near future. In the meantime I will oversee programming and marketing, as we continue our development and production of original movies and series.”

Humbard levied praise on Siegel in his role is launching the service and spreading its growth to some 70 million subscribers today.

“Building a cable brand into the second-largest independent network in this challenging environment required a person with enormous energy, talent and relational strength," Humbard said is a statement.  "Having Brad as my partner for the last 10 years to develop UP TV into a leading destination for uplifting family entertainment has been enormously rewarding. Brad’s experience and relationships with advertisers and program distributors were invaluable in jump starting our business.  He spearheaded our successful push into original programming, an initiative that we will continue to expand as we move into 2015, and was instrumental in the launch of Aspire.  All of us at UP and Aspire wish Brad great success in his next endeavor.”