Fox Broadcast Network, the WB architect was 77

Jamie Waiter

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Jamie Kellner, the charismatic and shrewd executive who expanded the television landscape by founding the Fox and WB networks in 1987 and 1995 respectively, has died. He was 77 years old.

Kellner died Friday at his home in Montecito, California, after a battle with cancer. The Hollywood Reporter have learned.

While still riding high on The WB, Kellner was given additional responsibility for TBS, TNT and CNN in March 2001 as chairman and CEO of Time Warner sister company Turner Broadcasting System. However, he only stayed in that role for two years and was fired in March 2003 with more than a year left on his contract.

Meanwhile, Kellner served as chairman of the station ownership group ACME Communications – named after the company from the Road Runner cartoons at Warner Bros. – from its founding in 1997 until its liquidation in 2016. He was one of the few network TV executives who also had a hand in the station business; ACME’s first nine stations were actually affiliated with WB.

The boyish waiter was president of Orion Entertainment Group when he was among the first people hired by Rupert Murdoch and Barry Diller in February 1986 to build a network at Fox that would compete with CBS, NBC and ABC.

As founding president and COO of Fox Broadcasting Co., he set about building the affiliate network, selling programs to advertisers and developing relationships with producers.

“One of the first tests we do (on a show) is: Would any of the three networks do this? And quite often, if the answer is yes, then we disqualify them,” Kellner said. The New York Times in March 1987. “There is no reason for our existence if we do what they have already done.”

Married, with children began on Sunday, April 5, 1987, the first official Fox prime time and The simpsons, Beverly Hills, 90210, Melrose Square And In vibrant color would arrive later. He was also instrumental in the founding of the Fox Children’s Network.

Kellner resigned in January 1993—Diller had already quit 11 months earlier—and was given a seat on the board of Fox Inc. But after already founding a fourth broadcast network, he moved to Warner Bros. in November 1993, eager to start a fifth.

Kellner received an 11 percent stake in The WB, Warner Bros. 64 percent and the Tribune Co. 25 percent. (The network was built around six independent stations owned by Tribune, including WPIX in New York and KTLA in Los Angeles.)

After Kellner had fought a bitter battle for affiliates with his competitors from the up-and-coming broadcaster UPN, he celebrated the launch of The WB when The Wayans brothers. aired on January 11, 1995, five days before the launch of UPN.

The family-friendly drama 7th Heaven was The WB’s first big hit, followed by other popular shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Gilmore Girls, Dawson’s Creek, bliss And Charmed.

“Sometimes he had a distant manner like Mr. Spock,” former WB executive Suzanne Daniels wrote about Kellner in her 2007 book Season finaleco-authored with diversityCynthia Littleton. “He was not easily discouraged, but he demonstrated such obvious passion and dedication that he inspired a team of young leaders, myself first and foremost.”

James Kellner was born in Brooklyn in 1948 and grew up on Long Island. His father, also James, was a commodities broker on Wall Street; his mother, Jean, was a volunteer at the North Shore Hospital Auxiliary for more than three decades. He was an avid sailor and competed in yacht races as a youth.

Kellner graduated from Long Island University’s CW Post-Campus with a degree in marketing and then, with the help of his father, was accepted into CBS’s leadership training program in 1969.

Under the tutelage of Hank Gillespie, he landed a job in the network’s program sales department and stayed with the unit when it was spun off as Viacom Enterprises, rising to vice president of original broadcast, development and sales.

In 1978, Kellner moved to the producer and distributor Filmways, where he had the idea to make the 90-minute Saturday Night Live episodes into a half-hour format ideal for syndication. After Orion Pictures acquired Filmways in 1982, he was responsible for programming, home video, pay TV and syndication and oversaw the launch of Cagney and Lacey and a restart of Hollywood seats.

At Fox, it was his innovative idea to broadcast a live episode of In vibrant color compared to the 1992 Super Bowl halftime show that aired on CBS. These halftime shows used to be boring, but that was about to change: Michael Jackson performed in 1993.

As number two behind Diller at Fox Broadcasting, he received a one percent stake in the network. When he left the company after seven years, he received a severance package of $10 to $15 million, “a fraction of what he had hoped to get from his involvement with The WB,” according to Season finale.

At his next stop, Kellner worked again with Garth Ancier – he had hired him as entertainment president at Fox – and they programmed an evening of “urban” sitcoms, including The Wayans brothers, The Steve Harvey Show And The Jamie Foxx ShowThe new channel would appeal to a younger audience that the maturing Fox had abandoned.

“Jamie Kellner was the perfect model of a CEO. Always smart, sometimes combative, always thoughtful and often smiling, Jamie gave plenty of freedom to the executives who were lucky enough to work for him. He ended conversations by asking, ‘Do we know what we’re doing?’ When things didn’t go as planned (and sometimes they did), there was no fear, just a ‘next time we’ll do it differently,'” wrote John D. Maatta, former EVP and COO of The WB Television Network, in a statement. “The atmosphere Jamie Kellner and Garth Ancier created at The WB was a once-in-a-lifetime moment in my career, and one for which I will always be grateful.”

After a public and lengthy bidding war, Kellner allowed 20th Century Fox Television’s supernatural drama Buffy the Vampire Slayercreated by Josh Whedon and starring Sarah Michelle Gellar, was scheduled to move to UPN after the end of the fifth season (and the contract with WB) in May 2001.

WB had paid one million dollars in licensing fees per episode. UPN ultimately had to shell out over 2.3 million dollars per episode for 44 episodes in the series’ final two seasons.

Kellner owned a 5.3 percent stake in ACME when he founded the company with former Fox Broadcasting CFO Tom Allen and station executive Doug Gealy. The company acquired underperforming stations in markets such as St. Louis, Salt Lake City, Albuquerque, Portland, Oregon, Green Bay, Wisconsin, Dayton, Ohio, and Knoxville, Tennessee. One report called the relationship between ACME and The WB “mildly incestuous.”

ACME had nine stations when it raised about $105 million in an initial public offering in September 1999. That number grew to 12 stations before the company began exiting the business in 2003.

Kellner did not endear himself to wrestling fans when, in one of his first programming decisions at Turner, he canceled the World Championship Wrestling shows on TBS and TNT. He also tried unsuccessfully to put CNN in the spotlight in its battle with upstart Fox News Channel and pushed for the network’s merger with ABC News.

After being replaced by Phil Kent, Kellner stayed with The WB until his contract ended in June 2004, when Ancier – who had left The WB to take a top position at NBC before returning – took over from Jordan Levin and Jed Petrick. It would be his last major job.

“It seems like just yesterday that the Warner Bros. and Jamie partnership began, when he and Bruce (Rosenblum) were traveling the country in all sizes of airplanes and in all types of weather to recruit partners,” Warner Bros. Entertainment Chairman and CEO Barry Meyer said at the time. “Jamie and his team have executed the vision beyond the expectations of all those naysayers who loudly proclaimed there was no room for more than four broadcast networks. Boy, were they wrong.”

Kellner witnessed the demise of The WB in September 2006, when Warner Bros. and CBS Corp. replaced The WB and UPN with a single network, The CW.

He is survived by his second wife, former entertainment banker Julie Smith, his daughter Melissa Kellner Berman, who worked as a development executive with television producer Greg Berlanti, his son Christopher, and siblings Thomas, Ronald and Nancy. His sister Karen died in 2005 at the age of 44.

“I don’t think there is another person in the history of television who can say he helped build two new major networks (Fox and The WB),” Berlanti wrote in a tribute. “Jamie Kellner was a titan and visionary of our industry, and yet he will be remembered by everyone who was fortunate enough to work for him as an executive or showrunner as a warm, funny, charismatic, creative and kind mentor, friend, husband and father.”

He continued, “He dedicated his life in television to nurturing and developing generations of talent in front of and behind the camera. I know I speak for so many others when I say my life was changed by the Camelot-like home he created for all of us who worked at The WB. He will be greatly missed.”