USA Network

"Characters welcome."



The USA Network is a cable channel owned by NBC Universal. Initially debuting as the Madison Square Garden Network from 1977 to 1980 (no, not the one that shows the Knicks and Rangers), USA Network has never really pigeonholed itself into one genre or target demographic; this has essentially rendered it immune to Network Decay. Over the years, it has shown a variety of series and events, most notably WWE Raw, Monk, Psych, Burn Notice, the Wesminster Kennel Club Dog Show and U.S. Open tennis.

One of USA's notable characteristics from the early 2000s onward has been their programming choices and their focus on unique characters, which gave the network the tag line USA: Characters Welcome. They like to make new shows, with unique premises, starring talented but largely unrecognized C- or D-list actors, but with an optimistic edge to their characters who are usually Jerks with Hearts of Gold and promoted by the network under a theme known as the "Blue Skies" concept. This has worked out pretty well; how many Emmys did Monk win again? It also provides the network with a core concept that is wide-ranging enough that it can have shows with different premises while still successfully avoiding accusations of Network Decay (especially since the shows they've been airing since the "Characters Welcome" tagline came in have all been critically and popularly acclaimed). Often, they guest-star Hey, It's That Guy! actors from cancelled shows on sister NBC Universal networks Syfy and NBC.

Some other notable USA Network programs and blocks:


 * The final season of Airwolf was made for this channel, though it was known as the season with No Budget.
 * "Back-to-Back-to-Back NCIS" (a three-hour block of, well, guess what)
 * Bumper Stumpers
 * Calliope, a response to Nickelodeon's Pinwheel
 * Campus Cops, a mid 90s sitcom
 * Commander USA's Groovy Movies
 * Common Law
 * Covert Affairs
 * Dance Party USA
 * The Dead Zone
 * Duckman
 * Fairly Legal
 * The $40,000 Chain Reaction
 * In Plain Sight
 * Jackpot 1985
 * La Femme Nikita
 * Law and Order: Criminal Intent - in this case, actual new episodes instead of just reruns, until the series ended in 2011.
 * Lots of reruns of various Law and Order shows (except for the original, to which TNT owns the rights)
 * Modern Family
 * Necessary Roughness
 * Night Flight (which introduced Super Sentai to the Continental United States with a Dynaman parody dub)
 * Pacific Blue
 * Radio 1990, a music video show
 * Royal Pains
 * Sailor Moon reruns of the DiC dub until Cartoon Network picked it up
 * Saturday Nightmares, a horror-movie block that ran on Saturday nights in The Eighties and eventually merged with USA Up All Night
 * Saved by the Bell: The New Class
 * Silk Stalkings
 * Smush
 * Strip Poker
 * Suits
 * Tattooed Teenage Alien Fighters From Beverly Hills
 * USA Cartoon Express, a block of classic and new cartoons which ran from the 1980's until it was canceled in 1996 in favor of infomercials and more endless repeats of Wings, which defined the network's image in the mid-to-late 1990's.
 * USA High
 * USAM - A comedy block consisting America's Funniest Home Videos (The Sagat years), Wings and some of NBC's few 90's "Must See TV" failures getting a second life as morning Filler.
 * USA Up All Night
 * The War Next Door
 * Weird Science: The Series
 * White Collar
 * Wings (we know...)

Also, USA Network tends to have a weekend marathon almost every weekend, picking one show from their popular lineup, which means (at the moment) all their current original series (with the exception of Fairly Legal, which doesn't have enough episodes quite yet), plus NCIS (ridiculously common) and Law & Order: SVU (less so).