It was one of the first local origination cable channels—and the first of two debuting that year—to adopt an entertainment-focused programming concept styled after local broadcast stations; just six weeks later, on September 21, American Television and Communications (ATC) launched “WGRC” on its Greater Rochester Cablevision system in Rochester, New York, with a similar format that incorporated more recent programs.

(“WGRC” eventually evolved into an all-news format by July 1995; it now operates as Spectrum News 1 Rochester under current owner Charter Communications.

)[5] Originally broadcasting for seven hours per day from 5 p.m. to midnight (with the Travel Channel occupying the channel space for the remainder of the day), its initial programming under the new format consisted of classic sitcoms, drama series and Westerns from the 1950s and 1960s (such as I Love Lucy, The Andy Griffith Show, Rawhide and Perry Mason), a daily late-afternoon block of Looney Tunes/Merrie Melodies animated shorts, prime time movies on Monday through Saturday nights, and the syndicated daily newscast USA Tonight.

[5][6][7] Channel 5A also entered into a news share agreement with NBC affiliate WTVG (channel 13, now an ABC affiliate), offering rebroadcasts of the station’s weeknight 6 p.m. newscast (as a lead-in to its 8 p.m. movie presentations under the branding “13 News on Cable”) as well as occasional specials (such as long-form primary and general election coverage); the WTVG agreement ended in September 1994.

W48AP would end up carrying lower-tier broadcast networks (including FamilyNet, Channel America and The Box) through the first half of the 1990s, and would not come back to any prominence until 1995.

Sports also continued to be regularly featured on Channel 5 including Indians, Reds and Mud Hens baseball, Detroit Pistons NBA basketball (licensed from Detroit UPN owned-and-operated station WKBD-TV, now a CW affiliate), and various college sports such as Rockets and (through ESPN Regional Television) Big Ten basketball and football.

In September 2002, the channel rebranded as “Toledo's WB 5”, and began utilizing the fictitious alphanumeric call letters “WT05” for supplementary identification purposes.

Over-the-air viewers with a strong enough antenna were (and still are) able to access The CW through either WKBD-TV in Detroit (which Buckeye carries on selected systems north of the Michigan/Ohio state line) or WBNX-TV from Akron–Cleveland (the network has since moved to WUAB in the latter market), depending on their location within the Toledo DMA.

Gray indicated that it planned to add The CW to one of the station’s digital subchannels, allowing viewers without a cable subscription to receive the network’s programming for the first time.

[13][14] The move to WTVG would eventually allow SJL/Gray to add the subchannel as part of the station's carriage agreements, making a locally based CW affiliate available to subscribers of satellite (DirecTV) and virtual MVPD providers (Hulu, YouTube TV and DirecTV Stream) throughout the market, thus giving it more extensive pay-TV coverage than which predecessor WT05 could provide.