Jamie Kellner, Fox and WB TV President, Dies at 77

Jamie Kellner, a media executive who helped build Fox Broadcasting into a thriving television network with shows like “Beverly Hills, 90210” and “The Simpsons” — and who went on to found the WB network, known for the terrifying “Dawson’s Creek” and “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” — died June 21 at his home in Montecito, Calif., near Santa Barbara. He was 77.

The cause was cancer, said Brad Turell, a family spokesman.

Mr. Kellner was one of the most successful television executives of his generation, whose talent for attracting young viewers — first men at Fox, then women at WB — lured viewers away from the Big Three networks that had ruled television for nearly four decades.

Mr. Kellner believed that ABC, NBC and CBS were ignoring viewers under 35 and were being paralyzed by average tastes. Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Fox Inc., and Barry Diller, its chairman, recruited Mr. Kellner from the television syndication business in 1986 and installed him as president of the Fox Broadcasting Company.

The effort to be the first new TV network since ABC in 1948 was widely derided. But from the 1987 debut of the first series, the simple family sitcom “Married… With Children,” which ran on six Murdoch-owned stations and a series of independent stations that Kellner helped merge, the new network began to steal. the audience of the Big Three.

In 1992, with shows like “Melrose Place,” about the social lives of twenty-somethings, Fox was No. 1 with viewers ages 18 to 34. “We don’t really need anyone over 50 to succeed with our business plan,” Mr. Kellner told The New York Times.

He resigned in 1993 after seven years at Fox. By then, Mr. Diller had left, and Mr. Kellner and Mr. Murdoch had clashed over Mr. Murdoch’s desire to target older viewers and more mainstream shows.

Within months, Mr. Kellner called up WB, officially the Warner Bros. Network, bringing with him former Fox colleagues, including Garth Ancier as chief programmer.

Mr. Kellner “was a visionary in the television business,” Susanne Daniels, Mr. Ancier’s lieutenant who later became president of MTV and head of original content at YouTube, said in an interview. He “felt that Rupert Murdoch made a mistake by trying to ‘grow up’ the Fox network,” she added, “and that was an opportunity for the WB network to develop a strategy to create a ​attract younger audiences who were abandoning Fox.”

Within a few years, Tuesdays in prime time on the WB, hosted by “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and “Dawson’s Creek,” had become “a cult night on television for teens and twentysomethings,” Lawrie Mifflin wrote in The Times in 1998.

Although Mr. Kellner’s primary role in the networks he built was to secure advertising to pay for shows and to rally affiliated stations to air them, he was also able to get hands-on, nurturing promising writer-producers and shaping content.

He helped launch the careers of JJ Abrams (“Felicity,” “Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker”), Kevin Williamson (“Dawson’s Creek,” “Scream”) and Joss Whedon (“Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” “The Avengers” ) to get going.

Mr. Turell, who was part of Mr. Kellner’s brain trust at WB, recalled that Mr. Kellner suggested to producer Aaron Spelling (“Beverly Hills, 90210”) that a series about a preacher and his teenage daughter would appeal to the underserved audience of religious viewers. At the time, Mr. Kellner himself was the father of a teenage daughter.

The resulting series, “7th Heaven,” starring Jessica Biel, ran for eleven seasons and was WB’s highest-rated show.

Mr. Kellner, who owned 11 percent of WB, cashed out after the network’s parent company, Time Warner, merged with America Online in 2000. He became chairman and CEO of the new giant Turner Broadcasting System, succeeding Ted Turner. In addition to continuing to lead WB, Mr. Kellner now also led CNN and other properties. He moved from California to Atlanta, where Turner Broadcasting was located.

In a profile that year, Times reporter Jim Rutenberg described Mr. Kellner as “a man with an angular jaw and a tough guy, even though he now lives in luxury.”

At CNN, which was struggling against fledgling cable news channels Fox News and MSNBC, Mr. Kellner rehired financial anchor Lou Dobbs, brought in Anderson Cooper as morning host and installed a respected journalist, Walter Isaacson of Time magazine, as CEO.

But a rapidly changing media landscape undermined some of Mr. Kellner’s ambitions. “Give us six months to a year,” he boasted in 2001, “and we’ll be way ahead of Fox.” Roger Ailes, the head of Fox News, posted Mr. Kellner’s words in large letters as a spotlight on his newsroom wall.

The changes Mr. Kellner made at CNN did not stem the onslaught from Fox, which had carved out a niche among conservative viewers. A proposed merger of CNN with ABC News that Mr. Kellner favored was called off in February 2003.

That month he announced that he would resign when his contract expired and return to California. He retired from television in 2004 at the age of 57.

James Charles Kellner was born on April 18, 1947 in Brooklyn, one of five children of James Kellner, a commodities broker, and Jean (Mahan) Kellner, a librarian.

Early on, Jamie aspired to become a teacher. However, he eventually entered the TV industry through an executive training program at CBS.

He first struck programming gold in his mid-30s, teaming up with “Saturday Night Live” creator Lorne Michaels to cut early episodes of “SNL” down to 30 minutes and then sell them in syndication to independent stations. It was that track record that led to his hiring by Fox.

Mr. Kellner’s first marriage ended in divorce.

His survivors include his wife of 38 years, Julie Smith Kellner; their son, Christopher Kellner; a daughter from his first marriage, Melissa Kellner; two brothers, Thomas and Ronald, and three grandchildren.

In retirement, Mr. Kellner left the entertainment world for personal passions. He sailed his kits, the Irishman, around the world and started a winery, Cent’Anni, in the Santa Ynez Valley.