WB Moves On After Mess With the Tresses

Memo to the beautiful people of the WB--no one can cut their hair.

Calling e-mail response to “Felicity” star Keri Russell’s new, short hairstyle “overwhelmingly negative,” Susanne Daniels, the WB’s entertainment president, half-jokingly told a semiannual gathering of television reporters in Pasadena on Monday that “nobody is cutting their hair again” on a network whose young, attractive stars have helped the WB carve a niche among 18- to 34-year-old viewers, a demographic attractive to advertisers.

Daniels and Jamie Kellner, the WB’s chief executive officer, countered the network’s reputation as teen eye-candy by focusing on the comedy and drama development for fall 2000, which includes projects from “Drew Carey Show” executive producer Bruce Helford and Harold Ramis, the director of “Ghostbusters” and “Groundhog Day.” In addition, executive producer John Wells (“ER”) will create a series for the WB for fall 2001.

Shows slated to debut midseason include “D.C.,” about post-college friends in the nation’s capital; “Young Americans,” set at a New England boarding school; and “Brutally Normal,” which debuts Monday at 9 p.m. and concerns a not-so-popular gang of high school kids.

Kellner, meanwhile, expressed support for a federal program offering financial credit for anti-drug story lines in network shows. The program, started by the White House Office of National Drug Control Policy two years ago, came to light last week, but Kellner backed the government’s program and the WB’s participation in it.

“We don’t want government involving themselves in story lines, but in this case you have a common enemy,” he said. “I look at this as the government being very clever in getting these [anti-drug] messages out.”

The WB, which launched in 1995, saw its steady growth as a fledgling network halted last year, but Daniels and Kellner said it was because the network stopped airing shows on national cable giant WGN, due to programming duplication between WGN and local WB affiliates.