WGN America

WGN America is an American subscription television network that is owned by the Nexstar Media Group, and is the company's only wholly owned, national cable-originated television channel. (Nexstar also holds a 31% interest in TV Food Network, LLC, the Discovery, Inc.-controlled parent of Food Network and Cooking Channel.) WGN America runs a mixture of recent and older comedy and drama series (including some first-run programs licensed for broadcast on the channel), and theatrical feature films.

WGN America was originally established on November 9, 1978, when United Video Inc. began redistributing the signal of WGN-TV (channel 9) in Chicago, Illinois—which, alongside WGN America, Chicago-based local cable news channel Chicagoland Television (CLTV) and news/talk/sports radio station WGN (720 AM), was among the flagship broadcasting properties of Tribune Media (formerly known as the Tribune Company prior to the August 2014 spin-off of its publishing division) until the closure of Nexstar's acquisition of Tribune in September 2019—to cable and satellite subscribers throughout the United States. This expanded the prominent independent station into America's second satellite-distributed national "superstation," after the concept's progenitor, Atlanta, Georgia-based WTBS (now separately operating as WPCH-TV in the Atlanta market and as conventional subscription channel TBS nationwide).