Owned by Nexstar Media Group, the station maintains studios on East Mason Street in Green Bay, and its transmitter is located north of Morrison, Wisconsin.

CBS continued to own WFRV-TV until 2007, when it traded the Green Bay and Escanaba stations to Liberty Media in exchange for shares of its stock.

WNAM-TV began telecasting from Neenah on ultra high frequency (UHF) channel 42 on January 26, 1954,[3] after beginning test transmissions in December 1953.

[8] The combined station would retain some operations at Neenah for program production in the Fox Cities, but it would use the tower and transmitter building of the former WJPG-FM on Scray's Hill near De Pere.

[7] WFRV-TV signed on channel 5 on May 20, 1955, after an appeal lodged by WMBV-TV to block the merger of Valley Telecasting and Neenah-Menasha was declined for the final time; the station aired film programming for its first ten days before beginning affiliations with ABC and the DuMont Television Network—then on its way out—on June 1.

[9] By 1956, Neenah-Menasha owned all of WFRV-TV;[10] that same year, the company announced plans to build a studio base in Green Bay.

[11] Master control switched to Green Bay in December when a new tower and transmitter building were activated, and production from the station's present Mason Street studios began in mid-January 1957.

[12] WFRV-TV was the Green Bay station in the short-lived Badger Television Network, which operated in 1958 and also included Milwaukee's WISN-TV and Madison's WKOW-TV.

[17] Channel 5 began to broadcast local programming in color in the fall of 1965, making it the second station (behind WBAY-TV) with that capability in the market.

[18] Two years later, the station began its move to build a satellite in the Upper Peninsula when it filed for channel 3 at Escanaba, Michigan, on June 20, 1967.

The merger would put the combined company over the limit for the number of VHF television stations it could own, prompting it to immediately announce that it would divest WFRV/WJMN.

[29] It was not until March 1983 that outgoing ABC outlet WLUK-TV and NBC reached an affiliation deal, which allowed the switch to take place on April 18.

On June 3, Nexstar announced it had opted to keep WFRV and would sell WBAY along with another merger divestiture, KWQC-TV in Davenport, Iowa, to Gray Television for $270 million.

[52][53][54] In the early 1980s, WFRV was the first local station to start a full news bureau in the Fox Cities area, which at the time accounted for a third of the newsroom budget.

Where the original news bureau was in the reporter's apartment, by 1983 the station had dedicated facilities including a microwave link for sending stories back to Green Bay.

[63] McCarren was elevated to sports director when he signed a new long-term contract with channel 5 in 1994; this came even as CBS lost NFL rights.

Bounce TV was added in 2016 as part of a group deal made with Katz Broadcasting,[75][76] while True Crime Network debuted in April 2020.