With yesterday’s announcement that the WB and UPN television networks are merging came this oddity for Seattle:

Tribune Co., a Chicago-based media company and the owner of KTWB and KCPQ/13 in Seattle, will relinquish its 22.5 percent stake in The WB in exchange for a 10-year affiliation deal to carry the new network on 16 of its stations…. The CW also will be carried on 11 stations owned by UPN, a unit of CBS Corp., including KSTW, guaranteeing the network carriage in about 47 percent of the country and 20 of the top 25 TV markets.

So, both media companies with an interest in The CW (which sounds like “The Conventional Wisdom Network” to me, evoking images of Gilmore Girls on the McLaughlin Group) own a station in town. So, who gets the network? Channel 11, of course.

KSTW will be switching affiliations for the FIFTH time in its 53 years on the air. It began as a CBS affiliate (signing on as KTNT) before a legal battle with KIRO eventually had it become an independent in 1961. It remained independent until 1995, when, thanks to an ownership swap, it became a CBS affiliate again. (During that era they had billboards all over town with the slogan “Make the switch, CBS did.”) Just two years later, though, another set of ownership swaps involving KING, KIRO, and KSTW saw CBS moving back to KIRO and UPN taking over KSTW. Viacom would later take over UPN and later buy CBS, effectively making KSTW CBS-owned, breaking irony meters all across Seattle. And now comes this week’s announcement that they switching to CW (breaking even more irony meters because of KSTW’s flirtation with the WB in 1993, right before the CBS affiliation fell in their lap). Whew.

To summarize for those of you scoring at home, that’s CBS-Ind.-CBS-UPN-CW, along with one call letter change.

As for KTWB-22, they now find themselves as an independent channel again after 11 years of The WB. Since they’re in a duopoly with Q13, you can expect to see a lot more Fox stuff on there, similar to the way KING rebroadcasts some of its syndicated programming and its Sunday morning lineup on KONG. It also means that you’ll see more prime-time movies and syndicated shows on channel 22. All in all, if you like your rabbit ears on your television, things are about to get better, while those of you who hate TV… well, nothing here really to tempt you to buy one now.