WTVZ-TV

WTVZ-TV (channel 33) is a television station licensed to Norfolk, Virginia, United States, serving the Hampton Roads area as an affiliate of MyNetworkTV. Owned by Sinclair Broadcast Group, the station maintains studios on Clearfield Avenue in Virginia Beach, and its transmitter is located in Suffolk, Virginia.

WTVZ signed on September 24, 1979, as the second independent station in the Hampton Roads area. It was owned by a consortium of local investors known as the Television Corporation of Virginia. The investors soon formed a station group: Television Corporation Stations, later TVX Broadcast Group, which was headquartered in Norfolk. WTVZ was immediately competitive in local ratings and battled with the more religiously oriented WYAH-TV throughout the 1980s. As with other TVX stations, it joined Fox at its launch in 1986.

TVX sold WTVZ to its general manager, Charles A. McFadden, in 1989; at the time, the company was selling smaller stations to reduce debt. McFadden's group, later known as Max Television, dallied with the possibility of producing a local newscast for the station throughout the early 1990s but never followed through. Sinclair acquired WTVZ in 1995; that year, Fox announced it would move its affiliation to WVBT (channel 43) in 1998 due to a business dispute with Sinclair. The station then joined The WB in 1998 and MyNetworkTV in 2006.

In 1976, the Television Corporation of Virginia was formed in response to what its backers perceived as the need for another television station in the Norfolk area. After reaching an agreement to share the tower of public television station WHRO-TV, the group applied to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) and received a construction permit for WTVZ-TV in June 1978. Two FCC commissioners dissented from the award because some of the investors in TVX—including Martha Davis, wife of future Virginia lieutenant governor Dick Davis—had holdings in Norfolk AM and FM radio stations; Television Corporation successfully argued that the addition of a new UHF station, first minority ownership of a local TV station, and integration of ownership and management outweighed these concerns. It also pointed to the fact that other attempts at commercial UHF television in Hampton Roads had failed economically. The investors secured the services of John A. Trinder, general sales manager at CBS affiliate WTAR-TV, and Tim McDonald, who had last been programming Washington independent WTTG, to help run the new WTVZ; McDonald required six months of coaxing to be lured away from Washington. The station aimed to offer counterprogramming to the existing network affiliates, reach the children's market (which Trinder and McDonald felt underserved), and provide facilities for local commercial production.

WTVZ-TV began broadcasting on September 24, 1979, featuring a general-entertainment mix including movies, sitcoms, cartoons, and sports. The new station quickly made an impact in the market, claiming nine percent total-day share within a year of going on the air and buoyed by the market's large young male population. Where the general manager of a local network affiliate had once declared to Trinder, "We will bury you", sitcom reruns helped the station rise to number two in the valuable early fringe hours opposite the network affiliates. It took seven months for WTVZ to turn a profit, quickly leaving behind the early days when, Trinder recalled, "we made payroll by going to the bank and trading auto titles for cash".

The investors sought to replicate WTVZ's success in other markets. The first expansion of what became TVX Broadcast Group came with the 1980 purchase of WGNN-TV, a small Christian station in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, which went on the air as WJTM-TV. WRLH-TV in Richmond launched in 1982, followed by two Tennessee stations: WMKW-TV in Memphis in 1983 and WCAY-TV in Nashville in 1984.

In 1986, as with the other stations TVX owned at the time, WTVZ joined the new Fox network. By this time, the other independent in the market—WYAH-TV (channel 27), owned by the Portsmouth-based Christian Broadcasting Network—had become more competitive, with total-day audiences slightly eclipsing WTVZ. Even though the Fox affiliation lifted WTVZ's ratings above WYAH and made it the company's only profitable TV station, TVX began to face financial problems after its large purchase of five major-market independents from Taft Broadcasting in 1986. It was forced to recapitalize and began selling its smaller stations.

TVX announced in April 1989 that it would sell WTVZ-TV to Charles A. "Chuck" McFadden, its general manager, for $10.75 million (equivalent to $27.27 million in 2024). McFadden had been the general manager of the station since 1987 and prior to that was the vice president of station operations at TVX. Loving told the Daily Press, "Emotionally, it was difficult selling our flagship station, but as a public company, we were forced to listen to offers." McFadden expanded his television holdings by acquiring WSYT-TV, the Fox affiliate in Syracuse, New York, in 1990; the stations were put under the corporate name of Encore Communications.