The 15 best WB shows of all time, ranked by their WB-ness

This ranking has less to do with Supernatural’s longevity (a record 15 seasons, making it the longest-running American live-action fantasy TV series) and more to do with logistics. The 327-episode saga of monster-hunting brothers Sam and Dean Winchester (Jared Padalecki and Jensen Ackles, respectively) only aired on The WB for one season in ’05 before moving over to The CW. Therefore, it identifies more in the latter camp. But there are still hallmarks of the former evident throughout that debut season, which weaved paranormal activity (episodes adopted a monster-of-the-week structure à la Buffy and Angel) with personal stakes (desire to find their missing father, grief over their mother’s death) in the rural Midwest.

Before The WB traded largely in teen TV, it was a sitcom machine, cranking out half-hour comedies like The Wayans Bros., The Parent ’Hood, and Sister, Sister. The Amanda Bynes-led vehicle What I Like About You, which ran on the network for four seasons from 2002 to 2006, combined both disciplines, headlining The WB’s Friday-night comedy block with the hijinks of free-spirited teenager Holly Tyler (Bynes) and her more straight-laced older sister Val (Jennie Garth) in New York City. Soundtracked with the bickering and banter you’d expect from siblings—not to mention the Romantics’ song that served as its theme—What I Like About You navigated all of the family dynamics, love triangles, and career mishaps you’d expect from young adulthood.

Expanding the Buffyverse, this five-season spin-off fixated on the slayer’s sometimes boyfriend/sometimes Big Bad, Angel (David Boreanaz), a 240-year-old vampire with a soul who moves from the cursed California town of Sunnydale to the even more cursed city of Los Angeles. Despite overlap between the casts (Charisma Carpenter’s Cordelia, Alexis Denisof’s Wesley), the supernatural neo-noir wasn’t at all concerned with tapping into the teenage experience. (And no, we don’t count Connor and never will.) Instead, in following the reformed vamp and friends as they fight demons and help the helpless, Angel was significantly darker, grittier, and more mature than the Scooby Gang shenanigans of its predecessor.

Give any nostalgia-drunk millennial a mic at late-night karaoke and they can no doubt croon the theme tune for this six-season comedy starring country-music legend Reba McEntire. (Airing from 2001 to 2006, Reba moved to The CW for its sixth and final season.) A live-audience sitcom about a “single mom who works too hard, who loves her kids and never stops” might not initially seem like natural fodder for The WB set, but its brand of broad laughs—most often courtesy of Barbra Jean (Melissa Peterman), the ditzy blonde Reba’s husband left her for, and Van Montgomery (Steve Howey), the himbo quarterback who impregnated her teenage daughter—and big heart was a hit with viewers and critics alike. (McEntire scored a Golden Globe nomination for the role.)

Long before there was Arrow and Supergirl and The Flash, there was Smallville, a coming-of-age retelling of the Superman myth starring Tom Welling as a wide-eyed teenage Clark Kent, who spends his time in small-town Kansas dealing with high-school bullies, learning to harness his alien powers, and crushing on girls who look like Kristen Kreuk. It’s seemingly humdrum stuff for the fella who would one day be known as the Man of Steel, but the “no flights, no tights” rule from creators Alfred Gough and Miles Millar—who ran the show for five seasons on The WB before it moved over to The CW for another five—infused a traditional superhero origin story with formative-years relatability. Smallville’s Clark Kent was just another all-American kid, albeit one with a weakness to kryptonite and damsels in distress.

Let’s get it out of the way: 7th Heaven was a shitshow, both when it aired (comedian Rob Anderson’s TikTok recaps of the family drama’s wide array of unhinged storylines are reason enough to download the app) and in the years since. (In 2014, Stephen Collins, who played the show’s pastor patriarch Eric Camden, admitted to committing sexual abuse against multiple minors.) Both that outdated moralism and criminal misconduct have no doubt tarnished the legacy of the squeaky-clean series, which aired on the Frog Network from 1996 to 2006 and moved over to The CW for its 11th and final season. The most overtly family friendly of The WB’s primetime dramas, 7th Heaven followed the Camden clan, led by Reverend Eric and his wife Annie (Catherine Hicks). Among their big ol’ brood of seven children were teens Matt (Barry Watson), Mary (Jessica Biel), and Lucy (Beverly Mitchell), through whom the show earnestly homilized on every major adolescent issue, from peer pressure to premarital sex to pot. (Please, please go watch that insane pot episode immediately.)

Well before Edward and Bella were star-crossed—and crossed species—young lovers, Max and Liz were our supernatural answer to Romeo and Juliet. The Jason Katims sci-fi series was set in the titular New Mexico town famously believed to be the site of a 1947 UFO crash, so you already know that one half of our pretty pair is secretly an alien. (That would be the mysterious Max Evans, played by Jason Behr.) In falling for Max, bookish Liz Parker (Shiri Appleby) got folded into all of the extraterrestrial capers and craziness you could expect from a bunch of teenage “Czechoslovakians” (the code word she and BFF Maria used to discuss Max and his space siblings, Katherine Heigl’s Isabel and Brendan Fehr’s Michael). Roswell only ran for three seasons total—two on the WB in ’99 and ’00, one on UPN a year later—but its mix of relationship-driven drama and science-fiction mystery made it beloved among fans, so much so that a reboot, Roswell, New Mexico, ran for four seasons on The CW two decades later.

The cult of Popular has grown far wider than the viewership of the show during its two-season run from 1999 to 2001. That’s largely thanks to the subsequent success of its co-creator Ryan Murphy, who became a veritable TV titan with Nip/Tuck, Glee, Pose, and the American Horror Story franchise, among others. But the legacy of the satirical dramedy, which is centered on two polar-opposite Kennedy High students—head cheerleader Brooke McQueen (Leslie Bibb) and school-paper editor Sam McPherson (Carly Pope)—who are forced to live together after their single parents fall in love, more than stands on its own bonafides. The series boasts pointed critiques of high school hierarchies and has some hilariously absurdist yet emotionally honest depictions of the cruelties of adolescence.

Sisterly dynamics, supernatural elements, soapy plotlines, and sensational bob haircuts: Charmed had all of the makings of a WB hit when it premiered back in 1998. And a hit it was. The story of three spellbinding sisters—Prue (Shannen Doherty), Piper (Holly Marie Combs), and Phoebe Halliwell (Alyssa Milano)—who use their powers against mystical evils in San Francisco aired for eight seasons on the network, even surviving a major cast shake-up halfway through its run. (Doherty departed after the show’s third season and was replaced by Rose McGowan, who portrayed secret half-sister Paige.) Though far frothier and less critically acclaimed than its fellow pleather-packed supernatural drama, Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Charmed does hold the distinction of being the first primetime show about a coven of witches, inspiring future projects like The Secret Circle, Witches Of East End, and even a 2018 reboot of the original WB series, which ran for four seasons on The CW.

More humble than The WB’s higher-concept shows but far less preachy than 7th Heaven, this four-season, early-aughts family drama from Greg Berlanti—who was a showrunner on Dawson’s Creek and created fellow WB drama Jack & Bobby—hinged on the relationship between a father and son. The uprooting of Dr. Andrew Brown (the late, great Treat Williams) and his two children from New York City to a close-knit Colorado town after the sudden loss of his wife unleashed an avalanche of angst from his 15-year-old son Ephram (Gregory Smith). But the teen’s initial fish-out-of-water discomfort gave way to a connection not only to the townspeople—particularly siblings Amy and Bright Abbott, played by future Revenge lead Emily VanCamp and a pre-action superstar Chris Pratt, respectively—but, movingly, to his formerly distant dad.

There were several permutations of One Tree Hill throughout its nine-season, two-network stretch, which jumped forward in time more than once—it completely skipped past the Tree Hill High gang’s college years after the fourth season and leapt another 14 months following season six—and weathered heartbreaking personnel changes. (Lead actors Chad Michael Murray and Hilary Burton, who played Luca Scott and Peyton Sawyer and made up the fan-favorite “Leyton” ship, exited after season seven.) But the drama was at its WB-est during those youthful first three seasons, where the characters’ problems were more relatable—brotherly rivalries, deadbeat dads, school crushes, and the like—and way less histrionic than the webcam stalkers, villainous nannies, European kidnappings, and heart-meets-dog hospital snafus to come.

Yes, that season-two haircut was the biggest follicular phenomenon since The Rachel. But Felicity was so much more than that hotly debated ’do. It’s one of TV’s finest depictions of the magic and mundanity of college life. And it served as J.J. Abrams’ first foray in TV, as well as the world’s sweet, soulful introduction to actress Keri Russell, who earned a Golden Globe for her role as our titular University of New York coed, Felicity Porter. And it gifted us one of television’s greatest love triangles, between Felicity, her resident advisor Noel Crane (Scott Foley), and her high school crush Ben Covington (Scott Speedman), whom she skipped out on Stanford for and instead followed to the Big Apple off the basis of one conversation. (Teenage hormones, eh?) “Can you become a new version of you?” the show’s theme crooned, and few shows since have captured that youthful experience of finding yourself for the first time.

“So it’s a show?” “It’s a lifestyle.” “It’s a religion.” Consider it the ultimate meta moment from the Amy Sherman-Palladino mother-daughter dramedy, a sentiment clearly shared by the devoted fanbase that followed the namesake gals through six seasons on The WB, one on The CW, and that four-episode A Year In The Life revival on Netflix. In the 23 years since Lorelai (Lauren Graham) and Rory Gilmore (Alexis Bledel) first swept into our lives in all of their heavily caffeinated, breakneck-bantering glory, Gilmore Girls has nearly become a genre in and of itself. Thanks to its comforting vibes and copious New England foliage, it’s now a millennial tradition to take a televisual visit to Stars Hollow to mark the beginning of fall each year. And its signature quaintness (think Friday night dinners, themed dance marathons, and grumpy diner owners) helped define not only the channel but a whole TV era.

No show has ever tackled the hellishness of adolescence quite like Buffy. The Sarah Michelle Gellar-fronted series was a risk in every sense, adapted from a schlocky 1992 horror flick that WB viewers probably hadn’t heard of let alone seen and based on a genuinely ridiculous premise—that is, a Cali-girl cheerleader being the Chosen One, a prophesied figure destined to battle against vampires, demons, and other dark forces. But its smart fusing of genre tropes with teen-soap sensibilities nabbed The WB its first bonafide hit when it premiered in 1997 and ushered the network into its golden age of teen programming. Across seven seasons (two of which were on UPN), the show saw Buffy, Willow, Xander, and the rest of the Sunnydale crew rage against monsters of all types, gruesome metaphors for the real-life horrors of growing into who you will become (see: losing one’s virginity, getting your heart broken, facing the mortality of a parent, etc.). And its indelible impact, not just on The WB but on pop culture ever since, proves that Buffy didn’t just save the world—she created one.

It wasn’t the best show that came out of The WB—that distinction would inarguably go to our second-place holder—but it was by far the most WB show to come out of the network. (Honestly, the sweater selection alone proves this point.) Chronicling the desires, ambitions, insecurities, and blunders of four teens in the fictional seaside town of Capeside, Massachusetts, Dawson’s Creek wasn’t just the match that lit the network’s enduring legacy and a star-making sensation for the show’s lead quartet (James Van Der Beek, Katie Holmes, Joshua Jackson and five-time Academy Award nominee Michelle Williams). Its groundbreaking, frank depiction of young people—verbose yet self-conscious, sardonic yet naive, gangly yet unabashedly horny—would also go on to color every bit of teen-focused television to come after it.

Not a lot actually happened across six seasons in the world of Dawson Leery & Co. from 1998 to 2003—unlike later shows such as The O.C., there were no car explosions or cage fighting or throwing patio furniture into pools. But so much felt like it was happening, a spot-on representation of the emotional whirlwind that is the adolescent experience. “Edge is fleeting. Heart lasts forever,” Dawson declares in the show’s third season, and it’s as much the ethos for the network’s signature series as it is for The WB itself.