WNAB

As a WB affiliate[edit]

In 1987, Ruth Payne Carman was awarded a construction permit to build a new television station on channel 58 in Nashville, which took the call letters WNAB. It would be another eight years before it began broadcasting on November 29, 1995, as the WB affiliate for the Nashville market. Prior to WNAB's debut, WB programming was only available on Nashville area cable and satellite providers either through Chicago-based national superstation WGN, or by Cookeville-based WKZX (channel 28, now Ion Television owned-and-operated station WNPX-TV), which served the eastern part of the market. Three months after launching the station, Speer Communications, a company founded by Home Shopping Network co-founder Roy Speer; it was from Speer's studios in a former Sam's Club building on Dickerson Road in Nashville that the station had launched.^[2]


Offering five hours of live, locally produced programming each weekday, WNAB was quickly a hit among Nashville viewers, although the station lacked cable carriage in many of the suburbs. Controversial former Nashville mayor and U.S. congressman Bill Boner hosted an hour-long interview/call-in show, Prime Talk each weeknight. Its follow-up, Sports Talk, featured Nashville Banner sportswriter Greg Pogue and popular radio personality George Plaster showing highlights and taking calls about the day's sports action. On Friday nights in the fall, Sports Talk was extended by an hour and became Nashville's first television show entirely devoted to high school football scores. Since the 1996 season, at least one of Nashville's television stations has continued this tradition. Overnight, WNAB also carried MOR Music TV, a Speer-owned home shopping/music network that had moved from St. Petersburg, Florida, to the Nashville facility.^[3]


In September 1996,^[4] all live programming except Sports Talk was cancelled (partly due to budget constraints, and also due to The WB expanding its prime time lineup to additional nights outside of the initial Sunday and Wednesday slots). Plaster left Sports Talk; it was rebranded as Sports Plus and featured news and weather segments in addition to its sports content before being cancelled in 1998. WNAB also aired several Nashville Predators games when the NHL team made its debut during the 1998–99 season, and split time as the television flagship alongside regional cable sports network Fox Sports South (now Bally Sports South) until the end of the 1999–2000 season.


Speer Communications had planned to use WNAB and its Dickerson Road facility as a base of operations for Tennessee Now, a 24-hour cable news channel covering the entire state. However, by 1996, plans for Tennessee Now had been shelved.^[4] Speer would sell WNAB in 1998 to Tennessee Broadcasting, a subsidiary of Beverly Hills, California-based Lambert Broadcasting, LLC.^[5] Four years later, citing the downturn in the advertising market of the time and continued losses at WNAB, Lambert outsourced its advertising sales and operations to the Sinclair Broadcast Group.^[6]


On August 3, 2002, WNAB's transmitting facilities were relocated from its original Nolensville tower to its present transmitter near Whites Creek near the Interstate 24 interchange with Old Hickory Boulevard (State Highway 45).^[7]