The CW’s Mark Pedowitz Defends BATB Renewal; Answers Other Burning Questions

Friday, July 18 featured The CW portion of the TV press tour, and the knives were not out for CW Entertainment President Mark Pedowitz, who has two buzzy pilots – Jane the Virgin and The Flash – that appear to be making critics happy.

Which is not to suggest that critics had no questions for the CW president – there were some, and here are some highlights.

On the surprise renewal of Beauty and the Beast: “Beauty and the Beast had a very engaged fan base,” Pedowitz said about the show, which has been renewed for a third season. “It had a very big international following. We brought it back because it actually ‑‑ because of what we are as a network as well as the platform for our parent company, it’s a very profitable show for everybody. So that’s the reality to it.”

Surprisingly, the writers and producers of the show did not know the show would be renewed before putting together Season 2’s last episodes. “To Brad Kern’s credit, he wrote a terrific ending, whether it had been a season ending or a series finale ending. So to his credit, he enabled it to go on to a third season based on certain things he put in there,” Pedowitz said.As for what’s coming next? “Well, they’re out in the public. They’re a couple. They had to find a life together. And the question of ‑‑ you have these very two Type A people. How do they make their life go? Because they’re not going to be very quiet. Brad Kern has a really good place to go in terms of their discovering cases, working together as they go forward. He is a medical doctor in the show. And you know what? He’ll get his license back,” he said.

Season 3 will start “a couple months later” and as previously announced, Nicole Gale Anderson will return as a series regular, playing Cat’s sister Heather.

Why put Jane the Virgin on Monday nights, where it might not be compatible with The Originals? “Well, we did not want to place the show on a Friday night, and we had built up our Tuesdays through Fridays over the course of last season,” Pedowitz admitted. “And we wanted to open up Monday night. And we knew that we had to move certainly shows around, and yet we wanted to make some sense of stability into the scheduling. So we saw an opportunity when Tuesday at 8:00 ‑‑ it’s a convoluted answer to a long question. But we saw the sensibility of putting The Flash on at 8:00 Tuesday. And we knew The Originals, which was a self‑starter from last season, we could move to Monday at 8:00. It was our second‑largest female‑skewed show right after Vampire Diaries. And though they’re not thematically the same, we thought by delivering a larger female audience to it, we would have Jane at 9:00 which would become the only 9 o’clock comedy on Monday nights.”

On broadening the audience for The CW: “We set out over the last few years to broaden out what that 18‑34‑year‑old audience was. And we also set out to ‑‑ as much as we’re proud and everything else with “Gossip Girl,” to get the perception that we were no longer a teenage-girl audience. And we knew that when we lost Smallville a number of years back, we lost men. So we tried to balance out and broaden out what that 18‑34 was. And Arrow was a first step to that. Then came Whose Line. Last year’s shows were older in skew slightly than they were before. And this year, we hope with The Flash and Jane The Virgin it fully broadens out the audience base.

What happened with The Carrie Diaries? “We were very proud of The Carrie Diaries,” Pedowitz said. “Amy Harris and Stephanie Savage did a terrific job. We brought it back for a second season because ‑‑ not necessarily because of its ratings but because of what its digital presence was. But after a certain period of time, both aspects have to work. You need both aspects. Otherwise, you cannot sustain the show as a model. So that was the rationale. I wish it came back. I was proud of the show. Again, an incredibly engaged fan base. But after a while, it just wasn’t economically feasible.”

Just because one Supernatural spin-off didn’t work out, it doesn’t mean they won’t try again. “Well, the Supernatural spin-off that came in creatively did not quite get to where we wanted to go. We have told Jeremy [Carver] and Eric [Kripke] and Bob Singer that we are very open to do another spin-off. We are waiting for them to come in with whatever the new idea or concept is. I would love to get a Supernatural spin-off done. I think it’s a great franchise that has a lot of legs to it,” he said.

On Star-Crossed fan campaigns: “I did receive 90 boxes of pasta this week,” he laughed. “Look, we appreciate the fans and everything they do, and I gather they were upset. There just weren’t enough of them to keep the show going forward, and so that’s the rationale. But we appreciate their passion for the show. We understand that that’s what makes shows work. In this case, there just weren’t enough audience members to stay with it.”

And what about The Tomorrow People? “Julie and Greg and Phil Klemmer did a great job,” Pedowitz said. “The show just did not generate the audience that we hoped to generates. It did not generate on air as much as we hoped, and it did not generate digitally as much as we hoped.”

On diversity being an important part of The CW: “Diversity, since I’ve been at this network and even in my past career, has always been a top priority. I believe our shows need to reflect what America looks like. It’s important not just in front of the camera, it’s also important in back of the camera. So we make constant strides to make sure that we have directors and writers and whatever else behind the camera, crafts people that we can find that reflect what the culture of the U.S. is. It is something I believe in. We’re an immigrant nation, and without that, you have nothing,” Pedowitz said.

Praising The 100: “We felt that with The 100, under Jason Rothenberg’s showrunning, that he had done something that we were looking to get to. He made a gritty show out of something that was maybe not unique in the first, but he made it unique to ourselves. And it had a solid following. We appreciate the critical reviews that we received. And more importantly, it had a very, very strong digital following. We believed in the storytelling of midseason. It was only 13 episodes. We ordered, to make sure that we broke a little bit from the model, only 16 for this year so Jason could do the stories he needed to do in a very quick, fast fashion to get it out there.

The CW’s new season begins [mostly] in October.