The old WB as a path to the online future

Last week, Warner Bros. brought back the defunct WB channel in a new form: an online-only network, the first one with a name inherited from Hollywood. You can watch august old WB shows on TheWB.com, along with raggedy new Web-only video series, and the effect, so far, is something like those professional dog walkers who have a Great Dane, two chihuahuas and a bulldog on the same leash. You know they're all the same species but -- wow, did the Creator really intend for them to be out strolling together?

But that's a little bit like Warner Bros. television. There's the studio itself, which is massive and traditional, defined by shows like "ER" and "The West Wing." Then there was, for a decade, the WB network, which, through independent-minded shows like "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Dawson's Creek," created iconic teen worlds in which beautiful people also suffered, and outsiders' obsession with social status could somehow look like social justice.

TheWB.com blends those two corporate identities into what they're calling a "curated experience" -- much in the spirt of an old-school TV network, in fact. With its attempt to be something unified in spirit, it goes a few sprightly steps further than sites like NBC and News Corp.'s more catch-all Hulu.com toward fusing the old TV model with the new one that's emerging on the Web.

Above all, it's a way for Warner Bros. to wring some small change, at least, out of its library, in this case popular shows like "Gilmore Girls" and "Everwood" that ran on the WB, which merged with UPN to form the CW in 2006. Be warned: The network is not putting everything online -- right now there are only around 200 selected episodes, with "fresh" ones substituted each week so viewers keep coming back. Not every WB show is there, either: No "Dawson's Creek" or "Felicity," at this point. (But you do get "Veronica Mars," a Warners show than ran on UPN.)

So if it's merely a small step toward the dream of every TV show or movie you want, available any time at the click of your mouse, TheWB.com is still a tentative peek into a future of convergence, in which your TV and your computer will be the same animal. As Hollywood brands go, the frisky WB seems like a natural test case for a Web/TV hybrid. The Web network too wants to come across as a force of liberation: "The WB isn't about putting a limitation in front of our viewer," Brent Poer, the site's general manager, told me over the phone. "It's about saying, here's the content -- enjoy it when you want to."