“O Tempora! O Mores!” is a weekly column on the perlious state of current televison and film.

Launching Wednesday, September 20th is the new TV network The CW. It is the result of the failure of UPN and the WB, who are merging into The CW in an effort to cut their respective losses. The name “The CW” is an amalgam of the first initials of CBS, owner of UPN, and Warner Bros., owners of WB. This is the biggest shakeup in the TV lineup since WB and UPN both launched in 1995. The entire fiasco resulting in the creation of the CW proves what I’ve been saying all along; the execs running UPN and WB fundamentally don’t know what they were doing.

In the eleven years that UPN and WB were running, they never reached the level of the Big Three (ABC, CBS, NBC) or even FOX. They did have some good series earlier in their runs, but I think that it can be best said that these series succeeded in spite of WB and UPN, not because of them. On the whole, WB handled itself better than UPN and consistently had better shows, and is guilty of fewer of the faults that led to their mutual demise-although it’s not blameless.

In the beginning, these two channels had good programming, but a series of perennial frak-ups by studio executives turned mildly nice channels into simple mush. We’re a long way from the good ol’ days of WB’s Felicity, Angel, Buffy, or Dawson’s Creek (I personally only watched Angel; Joss Whedon is one heck of a writer). Even worse, calling UPN’s final years an actual “television network” would have been a compliment.

Essentially, neither WB or UPN was strong enough anymore to stand on their own-hence the combination of the few good shows from each network might transform into one tolerable channel. From the WB, the CW will continue showing Gilmore Girls, 7th Heaven, and Smallville. Gilmore Girls is an excellent show and I’m glad it will be continuing; it’s an injustice that it hasn’t broken into the Emmys yet. Meanwhile, Smallville has been shaky a few times but I think is a great show as well and will make for fine viewing. However, it was a moment of head-exploding absurdity when I heard that 7th Heaven would continue on the CW. They thought the series was ending with its 10th season this past year and the renewal came as a surprise to all. How this show had lurched on this long I will never know. Tufts almost-graduate Jessica Biel left 5 years ago and the eldest son left because the actor had Hodgkin’s disease, so the mom on the show had twins to keep the number of kids at the titular seven. The show stinks. The writing is terrible and the characters find themselves in absurd situations. Yet instead of having so-bad-its-good teen dramedy situations, it’s all guided by unstated Christian morality (they strive for a “nice show” image which verges on the edge of ludicrousness and often jumps off) and alas, the whole thing is sappy in the extreme. Because they thought the show was ending, in the season 10 finale, three major cast members revealed they were pregnant (including Jessica Biel’s character, in a surprise return appearance). Each pregnant with a set of twins. Right. Well, that made for a good “ending the show with a bang” thing but now they’ve got to deal with the repercussions of that in the 11th-hour eleventh season. Frankly, the executives running the CW don’t know when to stop beating a dead horse.

UPN, on the other hand, is the source of literally only two shows of any redeeming value that will run on the CW: Veronica Mars and Everybody Hates Chris. Veronica Mars is a well written teen neo-noir hit (it’s as complicated as Twin Peaks, but with teen angst replacing that backwards talking dwarf guy). I’m surprised a show this good even landed its way on UPN; it fell in their lap through no “fault” of their own. Plus, in the season 3 premiere Veronica’s new favorite word was introduced to her: “frak”-winning brownie points with me. Everybody Hates Chris, Chris Rock’s sitcom about his childhood, is the only other good show to come of UPN. Chris Rock made the smart move of not using a laugh track in his show, which many shows rely on as a crutch; he doesn’t need to tell me when I need to laugh and the show makes me do that on its own.

The other stuff coming out of the former UPN is just crap: Even if you liked the vapid America’s Next Top Model originally, even by its own standards its not as good as it used to be. One of UPN’s dime-a-dozen sitcoms, Girlfriends, will be returning along with a new spinoff, All of Us (I have no idea why they’d do this; reruns of older good shows would have been more entertaining). One Tree Hill is a generic teen angst drama, and I’m no fan of Supernatural. The only new series to debut on the CW this week is Runaway, which actually looks like an exciting story about a family on the run from a serial killer.

Midseason prospects for the CW don’t look very promising: headlining the midseason replacements is a knockoff of Josie and the Pussycats. Seriously. The Search for the Next Pussycat Doll will be a reality series trying to cast a new female song troupe modeled after Josie and the Pussycats (and even that cartoon series was only truly inspired when the Pussycats went into Space). Reba was surprisingly saved from cancellation at the last minute, but held for the midseason replacements: it doesn’t fit the CW’s target audience of “young females with disposable income,” but had high enough ratings that they couldn’t just brush it aside.

The WB was just running into a spate of bad luck and a few decisions which, while stupid, were more or less forgivable, but UPN is simply a horrible and abusive network. I see its demise as a bit of gallows humor, given that for years UPN would cancel any actually good quality series that it had. Everything a TV network shouldn’t be doing, they did. UPN started out with Star Trek: Voyager as its flagship series, but quickly ruined the Star Trek franchise by insisting that the series be turned into an action sequence-filled, SFX-laden shell of what Trek used to be, and then inserting Big Boobed Borg Girl Seven of Nine into the series (remember when Star Trek used to win Emmys and be a serious commentary on the human condition using the existential devise of science fiction? Well, luckily today’s Battlestar Galactica writers do...). Subsequently UPN would turn down good series for renewal. Gradually, it shifted away from its origin and a new pattern emerged; they started making half hour sitcoms targeting “women and African-Americans.” By which they meant, vapid, incredibly unfunny and totally interchangeable sitcoms that only lasted for one season each, but cost so little to make that they would still turn a profit on them. It was insulting; they didn’t care what people wanted (not even the “women and African-Americans” they were targeting), they were telling us what we wanted, and it wasn’t working. Then came the disaster of Star Trek: Enterprise, in which UPN ordered the producers to dumb the show down to make it more accessible to a wider audience, have every episode finish with a happy ending instead of actual drama, remove all longrunning story-arcs, and insert a lot of sex. UPN seriously thought this would make a good show. Then, instead of fixing the problem when they realized it wasn’t working, they abandoned the series and killed it off by putting it in the Friday night death slot. For Gods sake they ran it opposite national-sensation American Idol for years, and then didn’t know why the ratings were low! They replaced it with wrestling (commentary on the human condition, indeed) which sadly will cross over to the CW. UPN tried to manipulate viewers by canceling high-brow shows, and running trashy, low-brow and no-brow lowest-common denominator shows and clearly showing the viewers how much the network sucks.

You may be curious as to what happened to the other channel: there are physically two channels (16 and 20, in Boston) that were occupied by UPN and the WB, and CW is airing on 20. So what’s going to be on channel 16? Well, details are up in the air at the moment about what happens in what local affiliate, but in many areas FOX’s new “sister network,” My Network TV, will be filling the void. And what’s foreboding is that programming on MNTV consists of things even FOX was unwilling to air.

Be afraid, be very afraid.