Weigel Broadcasting’s multicast network MeTV will air a special presentation of MGM’s “The Wizard of Oz” in October, marking the first time that the movie has been available on broadcast TV since the late 1990s.
On Thursday, Weigel said the move will be presented as part of a Halloween programming initiative that will air throughout the month of October. The franchise, called “MeTV’s Halloween BOO-Nanza,” will include horror, science fiction and family-friendly movies, with the Wizard of Oz film among them.
“The Wizard of Oz is more than a movie — it is a shared American experience that was defined by the annual tradition of gathering around the television set,” Neal Sabin, the Vice Chairman of Weigel Broadcasting, said in a statement.
Sabin said the movie will air in its entirety — no editing for time or content, as some other networks do — and will feature “surprised we will announce later.”
MeTV is one of the country’s most-watched broadcast networks, with shows like “M*A*S*H” and “Svengoolie” ranking among the top 200 programs in Nielsen’s weekly charts on a regular basis. It trails behind the core four networks — ABC, CBS, NBC and Fox — but occasionally pulls ahead of the CW Network and other players like Scripps-owned Ion, Court TV and Laff.
In an interview with The Desk last year, Sabin credited MeTV’s deliberate programming strategy of choosing memorable, premium comedies and dramas that have withstood the test of time — shows that older audiences are willing to watch over and over again, and which resonate with younger audiences finding them for the first time.
“Shows like Andy Griffith and M*A*S*H, those are true classics,” Sabin said last December. “They were written amazingly well. They’re very different shows — they have characters that are timeless and memorable, and they offer a consistent escape from the world today — and that is part of what makes MeTV work really well.”
The network has managed to offer top-rated shows despite a lack of distribution on YouTube TV, the largest streaming cable-like alternative in the country. Instead, MeTV has saturated its signal on broadcast TV — it is available in every major TV market in the country — and is carried on wallet-conscious services like Frndly TV, Sling TV and Philo.
The Wizard of Oz had a long history of airing on broadcast television as a once-per-year special, with CBS having the rights to the movie until 1998. (NBC and ABC also held the rights to the film several times since the 1960s, when it first began airing as a TV special.) From 1999 onward, the filmed moved to cable, where it has aired on channels owned by Warner Bros Discovery and AMC Networks in recent years.
It isn’t clear how much Weigel paid for the rights to the film, but the broadcaster noted that it has generated a significant amount of interest thanks to “popular new film franchises” and “special cinematic screenings of the original film in unique event venues.”
Those were almost certainly nods to the spin-off prequel franchise “Wicked,” produced and distributed by NBC Universal, and to the immersive events of the original 1939 film at the Sphere in Las Vegas.
