KMYA-DT [Television Station]

KMYA-DT is a television station licensed in Camden (Ouachita County) that primarily serves the central Arkansas area around Little Rock (Pulaski County) as an affiliate called MeTV. It is owned by LR Telecasting, LLC, maintaining studios in Little Rock, although the transmitter is located near El Dorado (Union County). Some cable systems, such those in Fort Smith (Sebastian County) and Fayetteville (Washington County), also receive KMYA.

KMYA traces its history to K22FA, a low-power station serving the immediate Little Rock area that was founded by the locally based Kaleidoscope Affiliates LLC. It received Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approval for a construction permit in 1995. That station changed its call sign to KKYK-LP in 1996. The next year, it became KMYA, an affiliate of “The WB,” which had been created in 1995 as a television entity by Warner Bros. This move allowed viewers in central Arkansas to watch programs on KMYA under the umbrella of The WB. Through the 1990s, much of its programming centered on a teenage audience, with popular shows including Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its offshoot Angel, as well as Charmed, Dawson’s Creek, Gilmore Girls, One Tree Hill, Roswell, and Sabrina the Teenage Witch.

In 2016, KMYA was sold and began broadcasting as MeTV, billed as “Memorable Entertainment Television.” KMYA Little Rock promotes itself as providing classic, family-friendly programming, marketed as “The Definitive Destination for Classic TV” and “the clean shows you grew up with.”

Along with airing classic TV shows such as westerns, police dramas, and situation comedies from the 1960s and beyond, an original MeTV program is Svengoolie, which is broadcast on Saturday evenings and hosted by actor Rich Koz. The Svengoolie character name is a combination of the words Svengali and ghoul. The show plays low-budget horror films and science-fiction movies, interspersed with comedic segments. Many of the films are part of the prolific “Abbott and Costello Meet…” series of comic/horror movies from the 1940s and 1950s, in which the comedians encounter ghosts, werewolves, etc.

The MeTV network airs holiday-themed episodes and also pays tribute to recently deceased classic actors with marathons that showcase their television roles.

A representative sample of programs on MeTV Little Rock includes such programs as Adam 12, The Alfred Hitchcock Hour, All In The Family, The Andy Griffith Show, Barnaby Jones, The Best of The Ed Sullivan Show, The Beverly Hillbillies, Bonanza, The Carol Burnett Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Dragnet, The Fugitive, Gilligan’s Island, Green Acres, Gunsmoke, Hogan’s Heroes, In the Heat of the Night, Kolchak: The Night Stalker, Leave It to Beaver, The Love Boat, Mannix, M*A*S*H, Matlock, Perry Mason, Star Trek, The Twilight Zone, Wagon Train, and The Waltons, along with Toon in with Me, a cartoon program on weekday mornings.