The CW, which has spent much of its relatively short life trying to serve young women, is now working on broadening that base, with shows such as “Arrow,” “Flash,” “Whose Line Is It Anyway” and ”Jane the Virgin,” said Mark Pedowitz, president of The CW Network, at summer press tour in Beverly Hills on Friday.

“We set out over the last few years to broaden out what that 18 34 year old audience was,” Pedowitz said, who’s faced some pressure from The CW’s main affiliate group, Tribune, to age up its audience to line up more closely with Tribune’s local viewers.

“[W]e also set out to as much as we’re proud [of shows such as] ‘Gossip Girl’—to get the perception that we were no longer a teenage-girl audience. [W]e knew that when we lost ‘Smallville’ a number of years back, we lost men. So we tried to balance out and broaden out what that 18 34 was. ‘Arrow’ was a first step to that. Then came ‘Whose Line.’ Last year’s shows were older in skew slightly than they were before. And this year, we hope with ‘The Flash’ and ‘Jane The Virgin’ it fully broadens out the audience base.”

Along those lines, The CW announced that it ordered 24 more episodes of the revived “Whose Line Is It Anyway” for 2015. The network would like to use that platform to launch new comedies, although it didn’t have much luck this summer with “Backpackers” and “Seed.”

“We’re planning to use ‘Whose Line’ as time goes on to see if we can launch other comedy, whether it be in the summer or in spring or alternative shows behind it,” he said. “We believe our niche now for alternative is much more comedic reality. We feel that we’ll be far more successful with that than anything else.”

The CW, with its many comic-book based and supernatural shows, is a natural fit for Comic-Con being held in San Diego next week. To that end, The CW is bringing many of its shows to the conference.

“For us, it’s a great first vehicle and a sustaining vehicle to get our shows and the buzz and the noise out,” Pedowitz said. “So in conjunction with both Warners and CBS, who are down there in full force as we are, with our shows, it acts as the first push in a way, for the fall launch campaign. [A] lot of it now, beyond paid media, it’s word of mouth. And the Comic Con audience is very tech-savvy and they manage to get the word of mouth out.”

Later in the day, Showtime President David Nevins took his turn on stage.

Showtime has three pilots in the works: Drama “Billions,” from Andrew Ross Sorkin, Brian Koppelman and David Levien; comedy “Roadies,” from Cameron Crowe, Winnie Holzman and J.J. Abrams and “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” from Aline Brosh McKenna and Rachel Bloom.

Showtime also will premiere the fourth season of “Homeland” on Oct. 5, and its new show, “The Affair,” starring Dominic West and Joshua Jackson, on Oct. 19.

Nevins also touted the network’s Emmy nominations—with eight of its nine eligible series winning nominations—albeit with a little heartbreak in the mix that “Homeland” was not nominated for its third season.

Nevins also said two shows that have encountered big struggles – “Happyish,” which starred the late Philip Seymour Hoffman, and “Halo,” which is being produced by the dissolving Microsoft Xbox – are still in play.

“Happyish,” for which Nevins has read five scripts, is looking for the perfect recasting opportunity, although it will likely be hard to fill Oscar-winner Hoffman’s shoes. And conversations are still going on about Halo, which remains a “premiere production” for Microsoft, according to Nevins.

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