Some Background on WOR-TV:
If you had cable television in the 70's and 80's in the USA, there is probably a fair chance WOR-TV was the second station from New York City found on your cable dial. While WPIX was the more popular choice of system operators, a large segment of Americans living east of the Mississippi had both to choose from.
WOR-TV was an RKO station, and competed heavily for viewers with WPIX and WNEW. WOR's schedule was heavy with tons of sports, movies, news, and even some talk shows. While WPIX spent a lot of time running sci-fi reruns and otherwise appealing for a younger audience, WOR's programming definitely slanted to an older audience, especially with a lot of their movies. Those of us with shiny new VCR's in the early and mid-1980s would definitely favor WPIX over WOR, especially overnight when you could record several hours of Star Trek, The Outer Limits, Space:1999, and other syndicated shows.
NY'ers generally saw WNEW as the best choice for light-hearted sitcoms, children's programs, and 30-minute shows -- WPIX as sci-fi off-network series and movie-heavy, and WOR big on hour long TV dramas, movies, British imports (especially from Thames TV) and loads of sports.
On WOR late night, you'd find two staples: Mr. Joe Franklin and movies, movies, movies.
The story of Joe Franklin is uniquely New York. Here was a man who could have been the Larry King of his day, only Franklin did more. Well known among the locals (and the diaspora of tri-staters who moved elsewhere and were pushed to sign up for cable in part just to watch this man), Franklin was part talk show, part variety show, part throwback to the earliest days of television.
Franklin's show ran for more than 40 years, mostly on the fuel provided by desperate-for-exposure washed-up talent that couldn't get on anywhere else. He was like the "Love Boat" of talk shows, and was an excellent barometer to know whether that star of a show you watched 20 years earlier was still alive, because if he or she was, they'd be on Franklin's couch soon enough.
Some of his shows were simply bizarre - with punk rockers sitting on the couch hobnobbing with Broadway types, classical musicians, and perhaps some Vaudeville kitsch-act he found usually doing Bar Mitzvahs. They'd do their five minutes of fame performing whatever, and then they'd sit and chat with Franklin and each other. It often was surreal, but Franklin had an incredibly loyal following (along with a lot of non-fans who could never figure out what the hell was so appealing about this guy.)
WOR went though turmoil from the 1970's into the 1980's. WOR's owner, RKO, was in trouble with the FCC and managed to get its license renewed only if it relocated its city of license to Secaucus, New Jersey (a whopping seven miles from where it was before). WOR-TV New York suddenly became WOR-TV Secaucus, but honestly in name only. Virtually everything important about the station remained in NY City, until "9 Broadcast Plaza" was built a few years later. To people in metro NY, it really made no difference. Whether in NY City, New Jersey, or Connecticut, you were still a part of metropolitan New York.
All this, along with the program philosophy of aiming old made them the least popular of the three independents, which made it surprising that WNEW didn't get more "superstation" status than it did.
RKO eventually put the station up for sale and MCA bought it and made huge changes. First, it became WWOR-TV. Second, most of the programming commonly found on WOR was gone, replaced with edgier stuff. One man would change the concept of talk TV forever, and he started on WWOR. Morton Downey, Jr. was a chain-smoking (on air as well) bully who ran a show so confrontational, it would later be ripped off by the likes of Jerry Springer. His studio audience was often filled with thugs, and occasionally furniture and fists could fly on the program. It was hardly enlightening television, but it was a spectacle and got a lot of attention nationwide.
WWOR's days as a superstation began to dwindle as syndicated exclusivity took its toll. This allowed local stations to block out the broadcast of programs that aired on stations outside of the area that they also had a contract to air. Programs often ended up replaced with a video screen saying "this show has been blocked." WWOR had a lot of shows affected, and the company that put them on satellite, Eastern Microwave, tried to keep the station running by replacing blocked shows with their own syndicated programs they bought on the cheap, such as Adam-12 and Emergency. But those shows were considered stale a decade before they showed up on the "WWOR EMI Service." When the WB and UPN networks started, the show was really over when WWOR affiliated with UPN (WPIX went with the WB). Today, with the merger of those two networks into the CW, WWOR lost again, stuck with the awful My Network TV network, which airs English language
telenovelas and other ultra-cheap shows. Throughout its history, WOR always seemed to end up in last place, and that lives on.
They might do better with Joe Franklin reruns.
Over the next day or so, a WOR retrospective begins, with some things I'm sure you'll remember!
