What’s not to love about DC’s Stargirl? It’s a cute lil’ show on The CW about a teenage girl (Brec Bassinger) who inherits a “cosmic staff” and has to go fight crime with her pals. It’s a classic formula, and gives strong Steven Universe and Sailor Moon vibes. Hell, this show even showed us Green Lantern’s daughter. Pretty sweet, right? It made it through the first season without the specter of cancellation putting its head through the writer’s room wall and saying “you’re next,” and even went on to have a successful second season. In this era of endless infinities of content, it’s quite an achievement when a new show isn’t immediately buried under the weight of the gazillions of other shows out there. So what happened?
Here’s the thing, Stargirl was on The CW channel. Its target audience was teens all the way to thirty-year-olds who still want to feel that there is a little magic left in the world But the average CW viewer is 58 years old (this seems strange, but it’s true), and has long learned that the world is a cruel, dead place with no magic whatsoever. Needless to say, it seems that they don’t want to watch a series about a youthful teen who believes in herself. They left their youth and their self-confidence in the backseat of their dad’s Buick on prom night, and it’s all been going downhill since then.
The CW knows that too, which is why (after being bought out by Nexstar Media Group) they are planning to pivot their programming and feature content, ostensibly to more content that appeals to an older audience. According to Nexstar Media Group CEO Lee Ann Gliha, the goal is to make the CW a profitable network by 2025. I don’t exactly know what their idea of “profitable” shows for older people looks like, but we imagine that CW’s programming will start to look like whatever it is they’re doing at CBS. Two and a Half Men meets NCIS, maybe? You can have that idea for free.
We’re sorry to see you go, Stargirl. You deserved the heavens above, but instead you got done in by people intent on turning the focus of an entire network everyone associates with young people into, it would appear, its exact opposite. Good luck with that.
(Featured image: Warner Bros)
