The truth about Jamie Kellner canceling WCW
Because now is as good a time as any to write about this...
On Saturday, veteran television industry executive Jamie Kellner passed away at the age of 77. To most of the world, he was the trailblazing executive who launched the Fox and later WB broadcast networks, changing the face of over the air television forever. To a certain generation, he was the guy who canceled the Kid WB programming. And to wrestling fans? He’s the guy who killed WCW by canceling all of its TBS and TNT programming in March 2001. This led to WCW’s theoretical soon to be new owners, Brian Bedol’s Fusient Media Ventures, pulling out of their deal to buy WCW’s assets from Time Warner.
Of course, in the grand scheme of things, that last one is a tiny blip in an incredible career that completely reshaped TV as we know it. But it’s what we’re here to talk about, both in light of his death and the fact that he died three days before the finale of VICE TV’s Who Killed WCW? limited documentary series.
For roughly two decades, the narrative was that Kellner hated and looked down on pro wrestling, stemming from a conversation where Jim Barnett told Dave Meltzer as much when Kellner took over Turner Broadcasting in March 2001. That, and the resulting narrative that the cancellation of WCW programming killed the market for pro wrestling programming, summed up the entire perception of Kellner in the wrestling world. Under scrutiny, that falls apart, though. For starters, if you go back through the archives of the Wrestling Observer Newsletter, Pro Wrestling Torch, and Figure Four Weekly in late 2000 and early 2001, it’s clearly reported as part of ECW’s struggles that the TV industry was already souring on pro wrestling before Kellner made his move. As for Kellner canceling WCW solely out of hatred for pro wrestling? That’s where things get really interesting.
“I grew up a fan of wrestling, and once tried to make a deal with Vince McMahon at a different network,” explained Kellner in Guy Evans’ NITRO: The Incredible Rise and Inevitable Collapse of Ted Turner's WCW. In the same chapter where Kellner is quoted, Fusient’s Brian Bedol concedes that Kellner was in a much different position than the public knew. In the WCW/Fusient sale agreement, Evans writes, “Fusient retained the right to ‘program’ a Turner time slot (believed to be on the TBS network)” for a set number of years regardless of if WCW still existed by that point.
“We structured a deal that was great for us, but Jamie might have decided it wasn’t so good for Turner,” Bedol told Evans. “We had negotiated into the deal certain rights to the time slot, in case WCW was canceled. We retained the right — for a period of time — to continue to ‘program’ the time slot. We looked at [the time slot] as a valuable asset, because if we were going to pay all this money for the property, “we didn’t want to take on the risk of it being canceled. Of course, Turner couldn’t be in the position where they had a valuable time slot with a guarantee [essentially] never to cancel the show in it. So my recollection is that when Jamie came in, he looked as that as being something that they weren’t willing to give.”
Though this was largely new information, it did get obliquely referenced in an article by Steve Donohue in the August 13, 2001 issue of Multichannel News, which nobody in wrestling media spotted at the time. That article discussed new details of the WCW sale that had emerged in WWE’s SEC filings covering its acquisition of those assets and supplemented them with additional information that Donohue had gathered. Specifically, a source told him that the Fusient deal “included a guarantee that it would be allotted 5 percent of the primetime schedule on Turner Network Television and TBS Superstation for WCW programming.” The same source also laid out how an embarrassed Time Warner leaked inflated figures for what Fusient intended to pay to save face and make a very conditional deal with relatively little money changing hands seem more palatable.
Of course, we’re not just here to rehash Guy Evans’ Nitro book. There’s another wrinkle to this that he missed, one that, with hindsight, it’s kind of baffling that he didn’t try to explore further: Who the hell allowed the poison pill about the time slot guarantees to get written into the Fusient deal and why would they do such a thing?
In the early part of March 2001, both the Torch and Observer both reported in passing that Turner President Steve Meyer was in charge of that side of the Fusient deal but abandoned that post when he resigned. On its face, it didn’t seem that significant at the time; at least retroactively, it answered the “who” question about the poison pill. As for the why? The best answer we have comes from a March 12 Electronic Media (now TV Week) article about Kellner’s new role atop Turner that Kris Zellner found when we were recording The Sale of WCW Part 2 for our Between The Sheets Patreon page.
“Simultaneous with the announcement of Mr. Kellner’s ascension was the exit of Steven Heyer, the Turner lieutenant who had, in the words of one insider, ‘been trying to kill Jamie’ at every turn after the merger of Time Warner and Turner’s empire,” reported Michele Greppi. “Mr. Heyer landed the next day at Coca-Cola, where he’s in charge of developing new products.”
When Kris found that article and read those lines about Heyer, suddenly, everything made sense, and a convincing narrative emerged. Why did Turner Broadcasting insert a poison pill into the Fusient contract that would inevitably lead to Jamie Kellner canceling WCW programming and thus indirectly killing the deal? Maybe killing the deal wasn’t the point. Maybe “trying to kill Jamie” was. Maybe, just maybe, in one of Heyer’s last acts at Turner, he tried to sneak a provision into the Fusient deal that, if the deal was executed, would make Jamie Kellner look like a complete schmuck for authorizing it. What else would even make sense? We know who was negotiating the deal for Turner. We know his motives that were driving him during his last days in the company. The closest route between two points is a straight line.
And even in the event that the “poison pill” wasn’t designed to try to submarine Kellner at the start of his reign atop Turner? Bedol openly admitted to Evans that it was in the deal and an inherently ridiculous thing for the Turner side to agree to. You can’t blame Kellner for metaphorically throwing his hands up and saying “fuck it.” Knowing that his political rival who had been looking for ways to damage him had been the one negotiating the deal just makes it more clear that he can’t be blamed here. Jamie Kellner was just doing his job. In March 2001, he was put in a position where doing his job properly included washing his hands of WCW and Fusient.