KICU-TV (channel 36), branded as KICU Fox 2 Plus, is a television station licensed to San Jose, California, United States, serving the San Francisco Bay Area. It is owned by Fox Television Stations alongside Oakland-licensed Fox outlet KTVU (channel 2). The two stations share studios at Jack London Square in Oakland; KICU-TV's transmitter is located on Monument Peak in Milpitas. It is programmed primarily as an independent station, although it carries Fox's secondary service, MyNetworkTV, as a graveyard slot offering.
History Early years The Continental-Urban Television Corporation applied to the Federal Communications Commission (FCC) on May 20, 1964, to build a new television station on channel 48 in San Jose. The FCC granted the construction permit on September 30, but before construction began, a national overhaul of UHF allocations moved the station to channel 36. (Guide to reading History Cards)
Channel 36 first signed on the air on October 3, 1967, as KGSC-TV (for Greater Santa Clara County), from studios located at 1536 Kerley Drive in San Jose. In addition to syndicated off-network series, talk shows and religious programs, the station aired some San Jose-area sports events; a daily women's show hosted by Adel Hall; nightly and weekend Spanish-language programs; a daily children's show, Cosmo's Castle; and bullfighting. The station was small, but that suited the market and the times. KGSC-TV survived at a time when San Francisco had a series of high-profile UHF failures.
Channel 36 was also locally known for its all-night movie presentations, which were co-hosted for several years during the early 1970s by Andy Moore as prospector Old Sourdough and Gary Ferry as his Native American companion Chief Wachikanoka, characters that Moore and Ferry originated for a similar movie showcase on rival independent KEMO-TV (channel 20, now KOFY-TV) (Moore and Ferry hosted a similar program, as the characters Race Street and Bascom Avenue, until Moore left KGSC in 1973–74). The two characters often made jokes about the movies being showcased (similar to the humor used in Mystery Science Theater 3000), as well as engaged in comedic banter with guests promoting local businesses. The format would eventually be revised, with the interstitial segments conducted by Moore and Ferry being phased out in favor of a half-hour segment preceding the film. While there were several sets of hosts for the all-night movies, including Eugene Hogan, an experienced emcee who was best known for his work at San Jose radio station KLOK (1170 AM), most of the station's film presentations following Moore's departure from the station were branded as Movies 'Til Dawn (which was also used by KTLA in Los Angeles for its overnight film telecasts during the 1970s and 1980s), and sponsored by local retailer MMM Carpets, with which Ferry served as its television spokesman until the mid-1990s. The station promoted itself as "The Perfect 36" during the 1970s, employing busty San Francisco stripper/entertainer Carol Doda as its spokesmodel for station image promotions; Gloria Aponte-Rodriguez also served as spokesmodel for the Latin Weekend Audience programming block during the period.
After a 1978 sale application to Booth American Corporation fell through, Continental sold the station to Ralph Wilson Enterprises, another business owned by the Detroit businessman and Buffalo Bills founder/owner, in 1979. It was the third station owned by the Wilson group and its first independent; Wilson dropped the Perfect 36 image and introduced a new local talk show, known as Noonday. The station subsequently changed its call letters to KICU-TV (a play on the phrase "I See You") on March 27, 1981. The KICU call letters had previously been used in California on channel 43 in Visalia. Doda remained with the station after the Wilson acquisition, taking on a second role reading the station's then-required editorial segments, which were done tongue-in-cheek with double entendres, and with the station's low budget, only one take was recorded without editing and broadcast, even if Doda read something in error.
Over the years, the station ran a number of drama series and older movies; it also added more classic sitcoms and children's programs by the mid-1990s. However, the station gradually decreased the amount of children's programs it carried on its schedule between 1998 and 2002, outside of those it aired on Saturday mornings. In 1992, William Hirshey and three members of the station's management staff—president/general manager Jim Evers, vice president of operations Bill Beeman, and vice president and general sales manager John DuBois—acquired minority ownership stakes in the station, with Ralph Wilson Enterprises retaining majority control.
Cox Media Group ownership
On August 28, 1999, after having rejected unsolicited bids to sell the station for the several years, Ralph Wilson Enterprises announced that it would sell KICU-TV. Station management cited the FCC's August 5 decision to relax its ownership rules to allow a single broadcasting company to own two television stations in the same market (on the pretense that one of the stations is not among the four highest-rated) as a caveat in its decision to divest KICU.
Among the station groups reportedly interested in acquiring KICU was NBC Television Stations, which sought to acquire an owned-and-operated station in the Bay Area after NBC was outbid by Young Broadcasting for longtime NBC affiliate KRON-TV in November 1999, leading to a dispute between the network and Young (which has since merged with Media General, now Nexstar Media Group) during negotiations to renew NBC's affiliation agreement with KRON that resulted in the latter group declining to renew the contract after it expired on December 31, 2001. NBC would ultimately reach an affiliation deal with San Jose-based ABC affiliate KNTV (channel 11), after then-owner Granite Broadcasting Corporation (from which NBC would later acquire KNTV) on February 18, 2000.
On November 29, 1999, Wilson sold the station to the Cox Broadcasting (now Cox Media Group) subsidiary of Cox Enterprises. The resulting pairing of KICU with KTVU created the Bay Area's first television station duopoly when the deal was finalized in March 2000; the operations of KICU migrated from that station's original studio facilities on Kerley Drive in San Jose, where KTVU relocated its South Bay news bureau, and were consolidated into KTVU's Jack London Square facility in Oakland.
Acquisition by Fox Television Stations On June 24, 2014, Fox Television Stations announced that it would acquire KTVU and KICU from the Cox Media Group, in exchange for trading two Fox owned-and-operated stations, WFXT in Boston and WHBQ-TV in Memphis, to the latter group. The trade was completed on October 8, 2014. It was part of Fox's pursuit of station acquisitions in the markets of NFL teams that are part of the National Football Conference—the San Francisco–Oakland–San Jose market, where the San Francisco 49ers are based, became the sixth-largest NFC market where Fox owned at least one television station.
With the completion of the deal, KICU became the first independent station to be operated by Fox since September 2006, when it converted KDFI in Dallas–Fort Worth into a charter owned-and-operated station of the co-owned MyNetworkTV programming service. Until September 2024, KICU was the only Fox Television Stations outlet that was not a MyNetworkTV O&O, due to a pre-existing agreement with KRON-TV, which, since the launch of MyNetworkTV, was their primary affiliation from 2006 to 2023 and, after transitioning to a CW owned-and-operated station on September 1, 2023, the service aired after KRON-TV's late newscasts on a secondary basis.
In November 2014, when KTVU transitioned from Cox's in-house digital platforms to the WorldNow platform used for Fox Television Stations' websites and mobile apps, KICU discontinued its standalone website, with Fox reducing the station's web presence to a minimalist subpage on the revamped KTVU site, incorporating only listings for KICU and KTVU, FCC-required disclosures for Children's Television Act and employment requirements and forms of contact, and the default TMZ on TV video portal.
On April 25, 2016, KICU adopted the "KTVU Plus" brand, replacing the "TV 36" branding that had been in use since September 2007. The co-branding with sister station KTVU is similar to that adopted in 2009 by San Jose PBS member station KQEH (channel 54), when that station, as a result of its purchase by Northern California Public Broadcasting two years earlier, changed its branding to "KQED Plus" to reflect its ties to sister station KQED (channel 9). The "KTVU Plus" branding has since inspired Fox to de-emphasize its localized MyNetworkTV brand and rebrand to an extension of its Fox O&O sisters in Washington, D.C., Phoenix, Minneapolis–St. Paul, Dallas–Fort Worth, Orlando, Seattle, Los Angeles, and Chicago.
On September 17, 2024, KICU began carrying MyNetworkTV after the expiration of KRON-TV's affiliate agreement, though effectively it is still run as a complementary independent sister to KTVU and continues to carry its sister station's newscast in prime time. The service's programming airs in the graveyard slot on KICU Tuesday through Saturday mornings from 3 to 5 a.m. (the latest possible time it can in a broadcast day), and is sparingly promoted.
On September 23, 2026, KICU was rebranded to "KICU Fox 2 Plus", aligned with the new rebranding across all of the others MyNetworkTV owned and operated stations.
Programming Occasionally as time permits, KICU may air Fox network programs normally seen on KTVU in the event that Channel 2 is unable to air them because of extended breaking news coverage or conflicts with Fox Sports event telecasts or locally produced special programming on that station; this was also the case when KTVU aired San Francisco Giants baseball games that ran into or aired during prime time hours, until that station lost the broadcast television rights to the Giants to NBC owned-and-operated station KNTV in 2007. Channel 36 assumed additional backup programming responsibilities in April 2016, when it began to air local newscasts normally seen on KTVU whenever that station is scheduled to air Fox Sports event telecasts that will overflow predeterminedly into the time slot of the given program.
KICU previously aired select NBC programs pre-empted by the network's designated Bay Area affiliates at three separate times throughout its history. After the market's original NBC affiliate, KRON-TV, removed the program from its schedule in July 1998 (in favor of syndicated talk program The Howie Mandel Show), KICU aired Another World until the soap opera ended its run on the network in June 1999. Ten years later, after KNTV became the broadcast home of the Giants in 2008, KICU took on the role of airing NBC daytime and prime time programs pre-empted by the NBC-owned station. In April 2010, KRON took over the duties of running NBC programs preempted by KNTV. The duty of being NBC's backup affiliate in the Bay Area in the event that KNTV broadcasts Giants games and breaking news coverage reverted over to KICU in 2012. However, as of 2014, it is unlikely that preempted NBC programming will air on KICU due to its ownership by the corporate parent of competing network Fox; NBC O&O KNTV later used its Cozi TV-affiliated second digital subchannel to carry network programs in such situations. Currently it delays preempted programming until early morning hours.
Sports programming