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Formerly | Carsey Productions (1981) |
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Company type | Private |
Industry | Film production Television production |
Founded | March 15, 1981[1] |
Founders | Marcy Carsey Tom Werner[2] |
Headquarters | Encino, California, United States |
Website | www.carseywerner.com |
The Carsey-Werner Company (previously known as Carsey-Werner Productions and Carsey-Werner-Mandabach Productions, before that, Carsey Productions and also known as Carsey-Werner Television) is an independent production company founded in 1981 by former ABC writer/producer duo Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner (now co-owner of the Boston Red Sox baseball franchise and Liverpool F.C.).[3] Caryn Mandabach was made a partner in the firm in 2001 (she joined in 1984), but left in 2004 to embark on her own production deal.[4]
The company first started when Marcy Carsey left ABC in 1980 to form out Carsey Productions to develop TV shows.[5] Tom Werner succeeded Carsey, but she persuaded him to join her to form an independent production company.[6]
Carsey-Werner has had its own production and, since the early 1990s, distribution arms. Prior to controlling their own distribution, Viacom, and later Paramount Domestic Television, syndicated their programming for them. Carsey-Werner announced that they would buy back the rights to the three shows previously held by Viacom in 1994.[7][8] In 2002 they announced a deal with Paramount Pictures to develop feature films through the studio.[citation needed] The group was also an original partner in Oxygen before Oxygen Media's sale in 2007 to NBCUniversal.
In 2004, Carsey and Werner mulled over the prospect of selling the studio, including its profitable catalog of shows, with UBS as their underwriter. Companies, most notably Viacom and Time Warner, expressed interest in buying the firm to exhibit their content on their cable networks.[citation needed] But the deal did not materialize and Carsey-Werner remained independent.[9] In 2005, Carsey and Werner broke their ties, and Carsey sold off its interest in the production division to Mosaic Media Group, which became an affiliated production company of Warner Bros. Television under the moniker Werner/Gold/Miller.[10] Werner took full control in 2007 by rebranding it to Werner Entertainment,[11] which then merged in 2019 with Sara Gilbert's Gilbert TV to form Sara+Tom, following the success of The Conners.[12] The distribution arm continued to use the Carsey-Werner name.[13]
Since then, they have mostly focused on distributing their existing shows, with the 2018 revival of Roseanne and its spin-off The Conners being among the first shows they have produced in more than 10 years. Werner also launched a revival of You Bet Your Life (of which Carsey-Werner had produced a short-lived revival of in the early 1990s) in conjunction with Fox Corporation in 2021.