WNAB

In 1987, Ruth Payne Carman was awarded a construction permit to build a new television station on channel 58 in Nashville, which took the call letters WNAB. It would be another eight years before it began broadcasting on November 29, 1995, as the WB affiliate for the Nashville market. Prior to WNAB's debut, WB programming was only available on Nashville area cable and satellite providers either through Chicago-based national superstation WGN, or by Cookeville-based WKZX (channel 28, now Ion Television owned-and-operated station WNPX-TV), which served the eastern part of the market. Three months after launching the station, Speer Communications, a company founded by Home Shopping Network co-founder Roy Speer; it was from Speer's studios in a former Sam's Club building on Dickerson Road in Nashville that the station had launched.[3]

Offering five hours of live, locally produced programming each weekday, WNAB was quickly a hit among Nashville viewers, although the station lacked cable carriage in many of the suburbs. Controversial former Nashville mayor and U.S. congressman Bill Boner hosted an hour-long interview/call-in show, Prime Talk each weeknight. Its follow-up, Sports Talk, featured Nashville Banner sportswriter Greg Pogue and popular radio personality George Plaster showing highlights and taking calls about the day's sports action. On Friday nights in the fall, Sports Talk was extended by an hour and became Nashville's first television show entirely devoted to high school football scores. Since the 1996 season, at least one of Nashville's television stations has continued this tradition. Overnight, WNAB also carried MOR Music TV, a Speer-owned home shopping/music network that had moved from St. Petersburg, Florida, to the Nashville facility.[4]

In September 1996,[5] all live programming except Sports Talk was cancelled (partly due to budget constraints, and also due to The WB expanding its prime time lineup to additional nights outside of the initial Sunday and Wednesday slots). Plaster left Sports Talk; it was rebranded as Sports Plus and featured news and weather segments in addition to its sports content before being cancelled in 1998. WNAB also aired several Nashville Predators games when the NHL team made its debut during the 1998–99 season, and split time as the television flagship alongside regional cable sports network Fox Sports South (now Bally Sports South) until the end of the 1999–2000 season.

Speer Communications had planned to use WNAB and its Dickerson Road facility as a base of operations for Tennessee Now, a 24-hour cable news channel covering the entire state. However, by 1996, plans for Tennessee Now had been shelved.[5] Speer would sell WNAB in 1998 to Tennessee Broadcasting, a subsidiary of Beverly Hills, California-based Lambert Broadcasting, LLC.[6] Four years later, citing the downturn in the advertising market of the time and continued losses at WNAB, Lambert outsourced its advertising sales and operations to the Sinclair Broadcast Group.[7]

On August 3, 2002, WNAB's transmitting facilities were relocated from its original Nolensville tower to its present transmitter near Whites Creek near the Interstate 24 interchange with Old Hickory Boulevard (State Highway 45).[8]

The station's CW-era logo from 2006 until 2021, before the move of that schedule to WZTV-DT2, where the numerical branding was de-emphasized.

On January 24, 2006, Time Warner and CBS Corporation announced that they would partner to launch The CW Television Network, as a replacement for The WB and UPN, initially featuring a mix of programs carried over from those two networks and newer series.[9][10] Sinclair later signed WNAB as the market's affiliate of the network, as part of a wider deal to affiliate its WB affiliates and independent stations with The CW. The CW launched, with WNAB as its Nashville station, on September 18, 2006.

On July 28, 2021, the FCC issued a Forfeiture Order stemming from a lawsuit against WNAB owner Tennessee Broadcasting. The lawsuit, filed by AT&T, alleged that Tennessee Broadcasting failed to negotiate for retransmission consent in good faith for WNAB. Owners of other Sinclair-managed stations, such as Deerfield Media, were also named in the lawsuit. Tennessee Broadcasting was ordered to pay a fine of $512,228.[11]

On September 14, 2021, Sinclair Broadcast Group announced that Nashville's CW affiliation would move from WNAB to WZTV's 17.2 subchannel beginning September 20 at 10 a.m.[1] On that day, Dabl moved from DT4 to WNAB's primary channel.

As a part of a deal involving several Sinclair Broadcast Group-owned stations similar to the earlier deal between Sinclair and theCoolTV, WNAB added a subchannel for The Country Network on DT2 on September 18, 2010. The Country Network changed its name and was rebranded to ZUUS Country on June 1, 2013. ZUUS Country was replaced with a full-time feed of American Sports Network on January 11, 2016. On September 6, 2017, American Sports Network changed to Stadium.

WNAB added Grit to a third subchannel on January 1, 2015, however on June 1, 2017, Grit was replaced with Charge!, a competitor network to Grit, which also focuses on action and drama, and is one of Sinclair's digital subchannels.

The station's ATSC 1.0 channels are carried on the multiplexed digital signal of CBS affiliate WTVF:

WNAB shut down its analog signal, over UHF channel 58, on February 17, 2009, which was intended to be the official date on which full-power television stations in the United States transitioned from analog to digital broadcasts under federal mandate. The deadline was moved to June 12, 2009, but the station decided to convert on the original deadline.[14] The station's digital signal remained on its pre-transition UHF channel 23.[15][16] Through the use of PSIP, digital television receivers display the station's virtual channel as its former UHF analog channel 58, which was among the high band UHF channels (52-69) that were removed from broadcasting use as a result of the transition.