The WB’s “Oh, What a Night” Promo Was the Avengers of Turn-of-the-Millennium Teen TV

Buffy, Dawson, Felicity, and the Halliwells all end up at the same club, and nobody ever explains why. Oh, what a night!

The WB’s “Oh, What a Night” promo puts me back in 2000 faster than low-rise jeans or an AIM away message that revealed way too much.

If you know it, you don’t just remember it. You feel it.

The Coolest Party You Weren’t Invited To

Officially, the campaign was called “The Night Is Young,” and it ran for The WB’s 2000-2001 season. The full promo is about two and a half minutes long and set in a dark, glamorous club where nobody sweats, nobody spills anything, and nobody stands against a wall wondering if it’s too early to leave.

And everyone is there. Sarah Michelle Gellar and Nicholas Brendon (Buffy the Vampire Slayer) and David Boreanaz (Angel). James Van Der Beek, Katie Holmes, Meredith Monroe, Joshua Jackson, Kerr Smith, and Michelle Williams (Dawson’s Creek). Keri Russell, Amy Jo Johnson, and Scott Foley (Felicity). Alyssa Milano, Holly Marie Combs, and Shannen Doherty (Charmed). Jason Behr, Katherine Heigl, Shiri Appleby, Majandra Delfino, and Brendan Fehr (Roswell). Melissa Joan Hart (Sabrina the Teenage Witch). Jamie Foxx and Garcelle Beauvais (The Jamie Foxx Show). Leslie Bibb, Carly Pope, Bryce Johnson, Christopher Gorham, Tammy Lynn Michaels, Leslie Grossman, and Tamara Mello (Popular). Ivan Sergei (Jack & Jill). Rodney Scott, Mark Famiglietti, Katherine Moenning, Ian Somerhalder, and Kate Bosworth (Young Americans). David Gallagher and Beverly Mitchell (7th Heaven).

That’s a lot of star power.

Doherty and Boreanaz end up together for reasons that make no narrative sense. Behr lurks handsomely, which was roughly 70 percent of Max Evans’s job description.

The Song

The promo is set to Vitamin C’s remix of the Four Seasons’ 1975 hit “December, 1963 (Oh, What a Night).” The lyric gets updated to “December 1993,” which is the kind of thing you do when your audience is in the middle of its own youth.

Here’s one of my favorite details. The cast was reportedly dancing to Steppenwolf’s “Magic Carpet Ride” while they filmed, and the Vitamin C track went on afterward. All those perfectly timed glances were cut to a song nobody was dancing to.

A Party Already in Progress

The WB launched on January 11, 1995, with The Wayans Bros. After Buffy arrived in 1997 and Dawson’s Creek in 1998, the network went after teen viewers on purpose. By 2000 it had a clear identity: young, romantic, a little supernatural, and full of very good-looking people feeling things at full volume.

Media scholar Miranda Banks, writing about the promo in 2008, says the spot makes The WB feel like a destination, a party already in progress every night in primetime. Nothing in it tells you to watch a particular show. It just wants you to like The WB.

It also works because it throws these people together. Why is Buffy here? Has anyone warned Dawson about vampires? Could Prue Halliwell solve every problem in Capeside before the first commercial break? The WB was doing crossover events before the rest of television made them a business model.

Who Got Invited

The WB’s earliest hits were Black sitcoms. The Wayans Bros. was the first show on the air, and The Parent ‘Hood and The Jamie Foxx Show followed. By 2000 the network’s image was built around teen drama, and Banks notices it in the promo.

She points out that Foxx sits alone, and reads that as him being too old, and maybe “too black?”, for what she calls an “under-age, virtually all-white party.” She also notes that the adult actors are kept apart from the teens, and that “no parents are allowed.”

It tells you who The WB thought its audience was.

What Happened Next

Michelle Williams has since earned five Oscar nominations, and Foxx won an Oscar for Ray. Not everyone’s career went that way. Young Americans, a Dawson’s Creek spinoff that aired as a summer replacement (also with Matt Czuchry before Gilmore), got eight episodes between July and August 2000 before it was canceled. Sabrina had just moved over from ABC. Gilmore Girls premiered that October, just after the promo started airing.

Imagine Lorelai Gilmore (Lauren Graham) at that party.

The WB itself had six years left. It aired its final night on September 17, 2006, and the CW, a combination of The WB and UPN, launched the next day. By then, DVRs, cable, and streaming had been chipping away at the idea of a network lineup you showed up for every night. You can love Stranger Things and feel nothing in particular about Netflix.

The WB made you a WB person.

Why Nobody Could Make This Now

Could someone recreate it? Sure. Give Netflix a nightclub and a licensing budget and Wednesday Addams could be sharing appetizers with the Bridgertons by Friday.

But it wouldn’t mean the same thing. In 2000, a handful of broadcast networks shared a huge audience, and you watched on their schedule. While you waited for Buffy, you saw a promo for Dawson’s Creek. While you watched Dawson’s Creek, you saw one for Felicity. Eventually the shows felt like neighbors. Streaming libraries are too big and viewers too segmented for that to happen.

Then there’s the cost. Gathering that many actors from that many productions just to make a branding film costs a lot. Today someone in accounting would ask if we could cut vertical videos from existing footage.

Somewhere, Michigan J. Frog is weeping.

The fashions are dated, some of the dancing is magnificently awkward, and half the pairings make no sense.

I love every second of it.