Decades Network to end, rebrand as “Catchy Comedy”

Weigel moves to comedy network, featuring sitcoms from 1950s to 1980s

[This post was updated March 27.]

Weigel Broadcasting announced Monday it was rebranding diginet Decades after eight years and is launching a new channel devoted to comedies from the 1950s to the 1980s branded as Catchy Comedy. The transition takes place March 27 with most stations currently with Decades (Weigel and Fox-owned stations) on board, including WCIU-Ch.26.6 here and streaming on Philo and Frndly TV services.  

“Catchy Comedy is a celebration of the very best in classic television comedy and will showcase and celebrate a who’s who of funny women and TV legends,” Weigel vice chairman Neal Sabin said. “We are excited to bring an all-comedy approach with this exciting rebrand of Decades evolving into Catchy Comedy. Weekdays we will showcase hilarious series with a strong appeal to women, or with female characters that redefined and expanded the role of women in television. Then in primetime we will feature groundbreaking comedy and characters from the legendary Norman Lear, and in late nights we will present some of the smartest and best written comedy series on television. Viewers really will be able to ‘catch all the laughs’ on Catchy Comedy.”

Weigel recently acquired several library series from the Sony library including Good Times, All In The Family (which recently began airing Sunday nights on sister network MeTV) and Sanford and Son. A key centerpiece of Catchy is the original 1984-92 sitcom Night Court from Warner Bros. Discovery airing at 8 p.m. (CT) every weeknight, not a surprise given the recent reboot featuring Melissa Rauch has been a big hit for NBC and was just renewed for a second season. Night Court reruns were previously on Scripps’ Laff diginet. 

Catchy’s daytime programming will feature sitcoms with strong leads including I Love Lucy and Mary Tyler Moore, who already air on Decades’ lineup and adding Rhoda and Laverne & Shirley with the weekend binge marathons remaining. You can click here to see the full weekday schedule. 

Dramas on Decades had been phased out over the years, and their once-signature Through The Decades series produced by CBS News has been out of production for the last few years. Also out in the format change are reruns of Dick Cavett and Ed Sullivan shows [Editor’s Note: Sullivan’s show remains on the schedule in overnights.]

Another motivation is the newly re-branded network is now being rated by Nielsen, as Decades previously wasn’t. “[Allowing the network to be rated] takes it into a different sphere, in terms of advertiser availability and access,” said Sabin. “There are many advertisers that won’t look at these networks unless they’re rated, and we’re pretty confident that we have something here that will rate well.”

Decades was originally launched by Weigel and CBS Television Stations in 2015 as a channel dedicated to looking at the historic context of pop culture and news stories, such as the Kennedy Assassination and when the first man landed on the moon, and at the start ran movies and documentary series in addition to classic comedies and dramas repeated in six-hour blocks, repeated four times daily. But two years later, Decades shifted away from such fare and added more sitcom reruns to the schedule. In 2018, CBS transferred its partnership with Weigel from Decades to the new female-drama focused Start TV, leaving Weigel as sole owner and programmer. As a result, the CBS-owned stations dropped Decades with the channel moving from WBBM-TV’s digital space to WCIU’s 26.6 here and to Fox-owned stations in other big markets. 

With the change, Catchy Comedy now competes with other diginet sitcom networks including Nexstar’s Antenna TV and Rewind TV, and the aforementioned Laff, among others.