It’s been nearly seven years since The WB and UPN came together to form The CW, and like a lot of 7-year-olds, the network is just starting to show its first flashes of independence. To whit: With its early renewals and series pickups for the 2014-15 TV season, The CW demonstrates that it LOVES SUPERHEROES AND MONSTERS, wheeeeeeeee! Meanwhile, it has increasingly little patience for what one of its parent networks liked to program: Teenagers who are too busy making mushy kissy faces with their icky feelings to be either superheroes or monsters (even when they kind of are superheroes or monsters).
And so WB hand-me-down The Carrie Diaries has been cleared off the bookshelf in The CW’s bedroom, making way for comic-book fare like The Flash and iZombie, leaving just enough space for pre-apocalyptic drama The Messengers—you know, so it can look cool to the older kids who still like The Hunger Games. Bumped to Fridays, where its 0.4 rating among TV’s most-desirable demographic was low even by The CW’s qualified standards, The Carrie Diaries appeared to be a lock for cancellation when its second season ended in January; it joins The Tomorrow People and Star-Crossed in the network’s bin of future Goodwill donations.
Of course, the spirit of The WB lives on in Hart Of Dixie’s renewal, and The CW hasn’t abandoned teenagers entirely. It merely prefers for those teens to be dealing with cataclysmic circumstances, like the abandoned Earth inhabited by The 100 (returning for a second season) or the accidental artificial insemination that kicks off new series Jane The Virgin. Oh, the young ones grow up so fast: One day they’re inventing increasingly elaborate TV universes for the heroes of DC Comics, the next they’re learning about the in vitro birds and the frozen bees from a telenovela adaptation.