USA Network

• 1. A Satellite Upstart

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  On the 22nd of September 1977, the channel that would become USA Network went live as the Madison Square Garden Sports Network. Its founders chose satellite delivery over the era's standard microwave relay technology. That choice made it one of the first genuinely national cable television channels in the country.

  Kay Koplovitz, its chairwoman and CEO, ran the operation through the channel's first two decades. Under her watch, the network became the first basic cable channel to rely greatly on advertising revenue rather than subscriber fees alone. Those two departures from industry convention, satellite delivery and an advertising-funded model, were early signs of an organization comfortable moving before its peers.

  In October 1989, USA spent an estimated $50 million to $60 million on 26 films from Disney's Touchstone Pictures. The package included Dead Poets Society and Three Men and a Baby. That purchase made USA the first basic cable channel to bypass the syndicated market and buy directly from a studio's film library.

• 2. A Sports Foundation

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  Major League Baseball games aired on USA Network on Thursday nights from 1979 to 1983. The NHL also ran on the channel from 1979 to 1985. The NBA on USA aired from 1979 to 1984, making USA the first cable television partner the NBA had ever had.

  College football ran on USA from 1980 to 1986. USA's telecast of the 1981 Liberty Bowl was the first college bowl game broadcast exclusively on cable television. For 17 years from 1981 to 1998, the network also aired USA Tuesday Night Fights, a weekly boxing program focused on rising talent.

  Tennis on USA covered professional tournaments in the United States from 1984 to 2008. For much of that time, USA was the cable home of the US Open; the tournament's cable rights moved to ESPN2 and the Tennis Channel in 2009. The PGA Tour on USA covered the opening two rounds of the Masters Tournament from 1982 to 2007 and Ryder Cup matches from 1989 to 2010.

  The Westminster Kennel Club Dog Show aired on USA from 1984 to 2016. When USA broadcast most World League of American Football games in 1991 and 1992, it introduced the in-helmet camera for those telecasts.

• 3. Decades with WWE

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  WWF All American Wrestling debuted on USA Network on the 4th of September 1983, as the channel's first weekly professional wrestling show. That program established a relationship between USA and the World Wrestling Federation that would shape the channel's identity for decades. WWF Prime Time Wrestling followed and ran on USA from 1985 to 1993.

  In January 1993, the promotion launched WWF Monday Night Raw on USA. It was the first weekly WWF program to air in front of a live audience. Raw remained on USA for more than seven years. In September 2000, after Viacom acquired the broadcasting rights, Raw moved to TNN. The departure ended a continuous USA-WWE relationship that had stretched back to 1983.

  The show returned in October 2005, after Viacom chose not to renew its wrestling agreement. SmackDown, the promotion's second flagship program, moved to USA from sister channel Syfy on the 7th of January 2016. In 2018, USA renewed its rights to Raw for five additional years. SmackDown departed for Fox beginning in October 2019 under a separate deal.

  In August 2019, WWE announced that NXT would return to USA on the 18th of September 2019, airing Wednesday nights in a two-hour live format. In September 2023, it was announced that SmackDown would come back to USA in 2024 under a five-year deal. The agreement included four annual primetime specials on NBC, later revealed to be Saturday Night's Main Event. Raw moved to Netflix in 2025, while NXT shifted to The CW, leaving SmackDown as USA's principal wrestling property.

• 4. Game Shows and Late Nights

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  In October 1984, USA Network began its game-show tradition with reruns of The Gong Show and Make Me Laugh. By September 1985, the channel debuted its first original game show, a revival of the mid-1970s program Jackpot. Two more originals, Love Me Love Me Not and a revival of Chain Reaction, were added in September 1986.

  By 1989, the game-show block ran Monday through Friday from noon to 5:00 p.m. Eastern. The lineup included acquired programs such as Press Your Luck, Hollywood Squares hosted by John Davidson, Tic-Tac-Dough, and Name That Tune. All four USA-original game shows of this era were taped in Canada. The block shrank to three hours in September 1991, grew by an hour in March 1993, and dropped to two hours in November 1994.

  In January 1989, USA debuted USA Up All Night, a late-weekend showcase for low-budget films. The program found a devoted following through comedic wraparound segments hosted by comedian Gilbert Gottfried and model and actress Rhonda Shear. Shear had replaced original co-host Caroline Schlitt in 1991. USA Up All Night was discontinued on the 7th of March 1998, though the "Up All Night" branding on late-night movie telecasts persisted until 2002.

  In October 1995, USA dropped the game-show block entirely. It was replaced by a programming block called USA Live, featuring reruns of Love Connection and The People's Court. From 1989 to 2000, USA also broadcast short news segments called USA Updates, first produced out of KYW-TV in Philadelphia. Steve Bell, a former newsreader on Good Morning America, was a primary anchor for those segments. USA has carried no news programming since those updates ended.

• 5. Characters Welcome

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  Monk debuted on USA in July 2002, starring Tony Shalhoub as Adrian Monk, a former San Francisco police inspector turned private consultant. Monk's obsessive-compulsive behaviors included a remarkable capacity to notice detail when solving crimes. The show ran for eight seasons and ended on the 4th of December 2009.

  In 2005, USA launched a marketing campaign built around the slogan "Characters Welcome." The campaign was designed to establish USA more prominently as a brand and to emphasize the breadth of its programming. The associated programming strategy focused on comedic, optimistic action and drama series, referred to as the "blue sky" approach. Under that banner, USA produced Psych in 2006, Burn Notice in 2007, and Royal Pains in 2009.

  The premiere of In Plain Sight on the 1st of June 2008, starring Mary McCormack, drew 5.3 million viewers. That made it USA's highest-rated series premiere since Psych had launched two years earlier. In early 2009, USA acquired network television rights to 24 upcoming and recent Universal Pictures films, including Frost/Nixon, Funny People, and Milk.

  In April 2016, USA unveiled a new brand campaign, "We the Bold," associated with darker and more intense programming. The shift was led by the premieres of Mr. Robot and Colony. Variety reported that the new direction was designed to appeal to themes of authenticity, resiliency, bravery, and innovation. NBCUniversal marketing executive Alexandra Shapiro described the earlier era as reflecting what she called the "weirdly optimistic" mood of USA's key demographic.

• 6. A Corporate Maze

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  On the 9th of April 1980, the channel changed its name from the Madison Square Garden Sports Network to USA Network. The renamed channel immediately added a children's program called Calliope and talk shows aimed at a broader audience. In 1981, ownership restructured when Time Inc. agreed to buy UA-Columbia's founding stake.

  Gulf and Western, owner of the Madison Square Garden Corp., transferred its share to its Paramount Pictures division. MCA Inc. also bought in. The three companies each held an equal share, bound by a non-compete clause prohibiting any of them from independently owning another basic cable network. That clause forced Time Inc. out in 1987, when the company tried but failed to acquire CNN from Ted Turner.

  MCA and Paramount held the channel as a 50/50 joint venture until 1994, when Paramount Communications was sold to Viacom. The following year, Seagram acquired MCA. In April 1996, Viacom launched TV Land, a new classic television network. MCA sued, arguing the launch violated the non-compete clause. A judge sided with MCA. Viacom sold its stake in USA and the Sci-Fi Channel to Seagram for $1.7 billion.

  Seagram then sold a controlling interest to Barry Diller in February 1998, creating USA Networks, Inc. Diller had previously headed Paramount Pictures during its period of USA ownership in the early 1980s. In May 2002, USA Networks sold its non-shopping television and film assets to Vivendi Universal for $10.3 billion.

  General Electric agreed in 2003 to merge NBC with Vivendi Universal's North American entertainment assets. GE retained an 80% ownership stake in the resulting company, NBC Universal. Comcast acquired majority control of NBCUniversal in 2011 and bought out GE's remaining stake two years later. Wunderlich Securities analyst Matthew Harrigan projected that USA contributed $9.5 billion to NBCUniversal's $44.8 billion value. Observers considered USA the key piece of the Comcast merger. In November 2024, Comcast announced plans to spin off most of NBCUniversal's cable properties, including USA Network, under a new company named Versant.

• 7. Into the Streaming Era

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  In August 2016, NBCUniversal acquired television rights to the Harry Potter film franchise from 2018 through 2025. The Wall Street Journal valued the agreement at around $250 million, making it one of the highest-valued film franchise deals in cable. To launch those rights, Syfy and USA aired all eight Harry Potter films over the weekend of July 13-15, 2018. That run included directors' cuts of the first six films.

  When NBC Sports Network shut down on the 31st of December 2021, USA Network assumed most of its remaining sports schedule in 2022. The Premier League, NASCAR, and select Olympic events moved to USA that year. Early rounds of the US Open, the US Women's Open, and The Open Championship also shifted from Golf Channel to USA beginning in 2022.

  In 2020, USA cancelled four scripted series: Dare Me, The Purge, The Sinner, and Treadstone. In December 2023, Deadline Hollywood reported that USA was reconsidering scripted originals. The news cited the Netflix resurgence of Suits, which had concluded on USA in 2019. The channel was reportedly targeting budgets of $2-3 million per episode. USA ordered The Rainmaker in June 2024 as the first series under that plan.

  USA Network reaches approximately 70 million pay television households in the United States, down from the 2011 peak of 100 million. USA Sports, launched in November 2025, encompasses the NBC Sports properties that transferred under existing commitments. The division also holds sports properties that USA acquired independently under Versant.