In the Toronto area, we picked up WUTV from Buffalo. According to Wikipedia, it was one of the original Fox affiliates in 1986.
I want allowed to watch Married With Children, but at some point in the late 80s our local Fox affiliate broadcast Spaceballs completely uncensored. We recorded it on VHS and watched it repeatedly. It has commercials, and every time the commercial breaks ended, they’d display a warning about the profanity.
? And so was his. He was adding additional information, not trying to correct you.
He was adding utterly irrelevant information. My point was that the memory pinned down my area getting a Fox station to before the premiere of Star Trek the Next Generation on September 28, 1987.
One of my jobs at KOIA was going through the tapes of movies scheduled to air and cut out the nudity/blip out the profanity.
On another note, KOIA was another one of the Fox stations that aired Star Trek: The Next Generation when it originally hit broadcast TV. Since Fox didn’t start with a full nightly lineup (or even shows every night of the week, if I remember correctly), stations needed to find other programs to fill their schedules - so ST: TNG would have been connected to a lot of original Fox stations.
OK. I thought it was an interesting tidbit. Part of the discussion is about Fox original programming and it is totally on point to mention that although it was shown on Fox it wasn’t produced by them.
Or to be more precise, it was syndicated for the first few seasons, until Paramount started the UPN network in the early 1990s, at which point it moved to UPN. In my market, it first aired on an independent UHF station, which later became a UPN affiliate, so there was basically no change. But I’d guess in some markets it probably moved from some other station to the UPN affiliate if there was one.
Thought I’d chime in… I am from the 4th largest town in Montana (Great Falls) and Fox wasn’t available there until I’d say 89/90.
If I remember correctly FOX bought the rights from the NFL in 1993 to televise games from the National Football Conference—which had been airing on CBS since 1956—starting with the 1994 season.
This was the impetus for many areas trying to make sure a FOX station was part of their cable/satellite TV* package.
*By Satellite TV-- I mean the one that used the old C-Band 8 to 12 foot satellite dishes.
ST:TNG had ended before UPN was even created.
ETA: Star Trek: Voyager was the series that debuted with the UPN launch.
Never heard of re-runs?
If that is referring to my post, re-runs have nothing to do with it. The entire run of ST:TNG was first-run-syndication, it never aired on a specific network UPN, Fox, or otherwise. The syndication agreement required stations to buy reruns, so they also would not have been tied to any specific network. Star Trek: Voyager, which was a UPN exclusive for first run episodes, also sold its reruns to syndication.
I remember that. Fox bid what was considered a huge overpayment and CBS threw one of the most crybaby hissy fits I have ever witnessed over the “drunken sailor” offer.
Fox’s innovations took the NFL to the next level which people also whined about. Horrible things like extra cameras, informative graphics and showing the score and clock time up in the corner during the whole game. 
My small town, Paducah, KY, had cable in 1979, long before Fox signed on. They could have picked up Fox’s Nashville affiliate as early as 1986.
My childhood TV market (the big city having a population < 100,000) had 6 over the air channels, 3 carrying the “Big 3”, a PBS station and 2 independents, including one that started broadcasting sometime in the early to mid 80s while I was in grade school. That late arriving independent became the Fox channel, I presume with the start of the network in fall 1986 or near to it, because I remember my parents watching Joan Rivers’ late night show.
I presume smaller markets out there might not have had independent stations available for Fox, but my market was pretty small!
I remember a David Letterman monologue after CBS wooed him away from NBC with a multi-million dollar contract. He was talking about CBS losing NFL broadcast rights to FOX, and joked that CBS executives were saying “well, we just don’t have that kind of money anymore.”
And the robot. Don’t forget the robot.
As a young person, I lived in two mid-sized TV markets (Green Bay, currently ranked #69 on market size, then Madison, WI, which is #72). Green Bay didn’t have an independent TV station until the end of 1980, and Madison didn’t have one until mid-1986.
Both markets had Fox affiliates from the start: in Green Bay, another independent station (founded in 1984) was an initial Fox affiliate, while the then-brand-new station in Madison joined Fox immediately.
I was born in 1985 and grew up in the 1990s. My grandpa lived in a small town, and I don’t remember there ever not being a Fox channel that he could get via his antenna. The stations he had available with his antenna taller than the house were WGN, NBC, PBS, CBS, Fox, and ABC.
Since I remembered the channel number, I was able to find the history of the specific station. It appears it became a Fox affiliate the same year Fox debuted. They had lost their ABC affiliation earlier that year to another station which had negotiated exclusivity rights in that area.
Something else I found interesting: before we had an ABC affiliate, the local NBC affiliate would run ABC content after NBC had gone off the air.
Fox was available here (a metro area) from when it first went on the air.There was an independent station that picked it up from the first, when it was only broadcasting on Sunday.
My hometown (pop. 2500) got it from the first via cable.