CW will abandon Sunday lineup

The CW network said Thursday that it was dumping its flailing Sunday night lineup -- outsourced this year to independent studio Media Rights Capital in a gambit to boost the struggling network’s ratings -- and that it would reassert control over the night’s programming.

Starting Nov. 30, CW will give the night over to theatrical movies, plus repeats of CBS’ apocalyptic drama “Jericho” and the sitcom “The Drew Carey Show.”

In a letter to affiliates, CW Chief Operating Officer John Maatta said the MRC shows -- including the sitcom “Surviving Suburbia” and the drama “Easy Money” -- “are simply not working.”

“We have made a business and programming decision to protect our network,” he wrote.

The MRC shows often attracted audiences in the key 18-to-49-year-old category that were too small in some cases to be measured by ratings service Nielsen Media Research.

The deal with MRC was unusual because networks rarely cede such valuable real estate as prime time to an outside supplier.

A spokeswoman for MRC said no final decision about MRC’s shows had been made. “The CW and MRC are continuing to negotiate the Sunday night deal, all parts of the deal: programming, timing, everything,” she said.

A CW spokesman declined to comment on MRC’s assertion that negotiations to salvage the deal were ongoing. CW is a joint venture between CBS Corp. and Warner Bros. and carried on stations owned by Tribune Co., which also publishes the Los Angeles Times.

The move would seem to end an experiment in fixing CW’s Sunday nights, long a trouble spot for the network. Under terms of the deal announced in May, MRC purchased the Sunday night time periods on CW and was largely responsible for marketing and promotion of the shows.

The MRC programs were supposed to appeal to an older and broader audience than that of CW’s youth-oriented series such as “Gossip Girl” and “90210” to attract a wider mix of advertisers.

But the new Sunday shows were plagued by anemic marketing efforts and soon sank below the radar on one of the most competitive nights of the week. At the same time, MRC has had its own internal problems, including the exit last month of the company’s TV president, Keith Samples.

Maatta said the network would work with stations to promote the new Sunday schedule, which will initially include repeats of “Everybody Hates Chris” and “The Game.”

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scott.collins@latimes.com