WUCW (channel 23) is a television station licensed to Minneapolis, Minnesota, United States, serving the Twin Cities area as an affiliate of The CW. Owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group, the station maintains studios in the Pence Building on 8th Street and Hennepin Avenue in downtown Minneapolis, and its transmitter is located at the Telefarm site in Shoreview. The station signed on as KTMA in 1982 with a mix of commercial and subscription programming. It transitioned to a full‑time independent outlet in 1985. During this period, it became famous for originating the cult cable television series Mystery Science Theater 3000, which began as a locally produced program. After going into bankruptcy in 1989, channel 23 was bought and repositioned as a family-oriented station, KLGT, which affiliated with The WB upon its 1995 launch. Sinclair purchased channel 23 in 1998 and changed the call letters to KMWB; it became WUCW upon the merger of The WB and UPN in 2006.
History
The subscription television years
On April 16, 1966, Viking Television, Inc., a company organized by South St. Paul attorney and judge Irving W. Beaudoin, filed an application with the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) to build a new television station on channel 23 in Minneapolis. It was designated for hearing alongside a competing application from the Calvary Temple Evangelistic Association in late 1968; the church pulled out of the proceedings, and the Viking application was granted on November 24, 1969. Little progress was made toward the construction of the station, which took the call letters KTMA-TV. In 1972, Viking presented a proposal for a studio and transmitter complex in Shoreview. However, residents feared the erection of a fourth mast in town after the collapse of a tower under construction killed seven workers the year before, and Ramsey County acquired the land for a park and nature center, creating a potential conflict of land uses. The loss of the site would further set back construction. The prospect of subscription television had been thought of as early as the 1969 grant, when Viking held the local franchise to use the Phonevision system. However, a new generation of STV interests emerged in the mid-1970s. Viking signed a contract with American Subscription Television (SelecTV) and filed for subscription television authorization in October 1975. Viking was still mired in tower site problems in 1976, when a second group filed to propose a subscription television station in the Twin Cities: Buford Television of Tyler, Texas, which applied for channel 29, only for a second application from Faith Broadcasting Network to compete against it. Meanwhile, Viking filed in March 1978 to sell the construction permit to Metropolitan Broadcasting Corporation; Metropolitan was in turn 20 percent owned by Universal Subscription Television, a subsidiary of Canadian media company CanWest Capital Corporation. This application was dismissed on June 22, 1979. Viking had objected to Buford's channel 29 application when it was filed, but in February 1980, Beaudoin sold 80 percent of the KTMA construction permit to Buford for $475,000 in construction costs, which in turn cleared the way for Faith Broadcasting Network to build channel 29. However, tower siting woes continued to snarl channel 23's attempts to get on air. The FCC in the late 1960s had required that the VHF television stations give room to new UHF stations that wished to broadcast from Shoreview, and KMSP-TV's mast was supposed to accommodate channel 23 and channel 29. However, when KSTP-TV obtained permission for a 274-foot (84 m) height extension to its tower (which also held WCCO-TV), only the KMSP Tower was left out because it could not be extended with the UHF stations on it. This prompted KMSP-TV to rescind the agreement, resulting in legal action. It was only the resolution of the tower site issue that got the ball rolling for KTMA. More than 16 years after the permit was granted, channel 23 began broadcasting on September 22, 1982. In addition to advertiser-supported programs, KTMA carried Spectrum, the subscription service owned by Buford's Home Entertainment Network (HEN) division. The new service quickly secured valuable programming when it struck a deal to televise Minnesota Twins baseball and Minnesota North Stars hockey home games: the entire North Stars home slate and 50 Twins home games, packaged as "Spectrum Sports"—available for $19.95 a month or $29.90 along with the Spectrum movie service. The same year Buford launched KTMA, it sold a majority stake in HEN to United Cable. At its peak, in May 1983, the service attracted 27,000 Twin Cities subscribers, making it the most successful of United Cable's three STV operations. Even then, United Cable was laying off 55 staff, cutting costs, and considering outsourcing its movie programming to Oak Industries (owners of ON TV). That summer, United agreed to buy Buford's 80 percent ownership of KTMA for $7.5 million while also writing down the Home Entertainment Network division and putting the three STV systems on the market. As a sports service, Spectrum in the Twin Cities never reached the intended subscriber figures, prompting profits to fall far short of expectations for the Twins. Further, a federal judge had ruled against the Twins and North Stars pooling their broadcast rights in the Spectrum deal after WCCO-TV sued on antitrust charges. (Sports telecasts continued while the case was being appealed; after Spectrum's demise, the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit found in the teams' favor.) In August 1985, the Twins and North Stars opted not to renew their Spectrum rights deal, a decision that sounded the death knell for the service, already down to just 13,000 subscribers. The movie service ended September 29, 1985, while Spectrum Sports concluded with the final game of the Twins season on October 6.
Independent KTMA
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