KTTV - History

History

KTTV began operations on January 1, 1949, and was operated initially by KTTV, Incorporated, jointly owned by the Times-Mirror Company, publishers of the Los Angeles Times (51 percent), and CBS (49 percent). As such, KTTV was the original Los Angeles affiliate of the CBS television network. During their partnership, the Times turned down at least two offers CBS made to purchase KTTV outright. The joint partnership lasted exactly two years, until January 1, 1951, when CBS sold its stake in channel 11 back to Times-Mirror. CBS then moved its programming to newly-acquired KTSL (channel 2, later KNXT and now KCBS-TV). From that point, KTTV carried many of the programs from the DuMont Television Network for the next three years.

In 1954 DuMont moved its affiliation to KHJ-TV (channel 9, now KCAL-TV), and KTTV became an independent television station. During the late 1950s, the station was briefly affiliated with the NTA Film Network. In 1958, channel 11 became the television home of the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team (which had relocated from Brooklyn, New York to Los Angeles that year), and the relationship between KTTV and the Dodgers would last until 1992.

The Times-Mirror Company sold the station to Metromedia in 1963. For many years, KTTV televised the Tournament of Roses Parade, competing with rival KTLA and others, until 1995.

By the 1970s KTTV offered the traditional independent schedule, consisting of children's programs, off-network reruns, sports programming, and movies, along with a 10:00 p.m. newscast. The station, along with KTLA, KCOP, and KHJ-TV were seen on various cable television outlets in the southwestern United States during the 1970s and into the 1980s, most notably in El Paso, Texas.

Australian newspaper publisher Rupert Murdoch and his company, the News Corporation (the controlling owners of the 20th Century Fox film studio), purchased KTTV and the other Metromedia television stations in 1986, and those stations formed the basis for the new Fox television network.

It also added more first-run syndicated shows such as talk shows, court shows, and reality shows. For a while it continued with afternoon cartoons from the network, known as Fox Kids, as well as top rated off-network sitcoms in the evenings.

In Fall 2001, channel 11 dropped the weekday version of Fox Kids and moved it to its longtime rival and new sister station, KCOP (channel 13). The Fox Kids weekday block was ended altogether in January 2002. With the lineup left to air Saturday mornings under the name change to Fox Box, then 4Kids TV, KTTV brought Fox children's programming back to the lineup. After the dissolution of 4Kids in January 2009, the station now carries the network's Weekend Marketplace infomercial block and airs the bare minimum of E/I content required by Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations.

KTTV also runs reruns of another sitcom, I Love Lucy, which had premiered months after the station lost its CBS affiliation. Reruns of the sitcom, which was filmed in Hollywood, are still popular among Southern California viewers and have continued to air in the L.A. area endlessly since the series ceased production in 1957, thus making KTTV only the second station in Los Angeles (KCBS-TV was the other) to continue airing the sitcom after it ended more than 50 years ago. The station no longer airs "I Love Lucy" Monday-Friday (instead airing in a two-hour block on KCOP), but KTTV does air the landmark sitcom on weekend afternoons, usually between 4 and 6 p.m.

In 1996, the station's longtime home on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood, known as "Metromedia Square" (and later renamed the "Fox Television Center") was vacated. KTTV relocated to new studios a few miles away on South Bundy Drive in West Los Angeles, near the Fox network headquarters (the network's headquarters are on the lot of 20th Century Fox studios). The historic television studio at Metromedia Square, once home to Norman Lear's Tandem Productions and TAT Communications Company, also produced hit programs such as The Jeffersons, Mama's Family, Diff'rent Strokes, One Day at a Time, Hello, Larry, Soul Train, Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, Small Wonder and the groundbreaking sketch comedy In Living Color. Many of those programs, either in first-run or off-network syndication, aired on KTTV. It was demolished in 2003 to make way for a new high school being built by the Los Angeles Unified School District.