Act III Broadcasting was a company that owned several television stations that started as independents, and later became Fox affiliates. The stations were located in medium-sized DMA's (markets) and were primarily UHF stations. Act III Broadcasting was in business from 1986 to 1995 when it was sold to ABRY Partners/Sullivan Broadcasting for $500 million. Television producer Norman Lear owned a controlling stake in Act III Broadcasting through his company Act III Communications. Early experience in broadcasting Prior to the formation of Act III, Lear had a history in television station ownership. Along with his longtime business partners Jerry Perenchio and Bud Yorkin, Lear acquired WNJU-TV, a UHF independent station in the New York City area. The station offered religious English-language programming in the mornings and Spanish programming weekday afternoons and evenings. On weekend afternoons, the station offered a variety of ethnic brokered programming. Under their ownership, the station phased out the ethnic shows in favor of more Spanish entertainment programming. In 1984, WNJU formed an alliance with Weigel Broadcasting's WCIU in Chicago and locally owned KSTS in San Jose to acquire Spanish programming to air on all three stations under a network called NetSpan. Blair Broadcasting, which had just acquired WSCV in Miami and KVEA in Los Angeles and converted these into full-time Spanish independent outlets, joined the alliance in 1985. WNJU and KSTS would be sold in 1986 to Reliance Capital Group, which separately acquired Blair Broadcasting; the sale marked Lear and Perenchio's exit from the station business. The following year, Reliance would consolidate its Spanish-language holdings into the new Telemundo network, which is now owned by NBCUniversal. WCIU would be in that alliance for another year but retained by Weigel Broadcasting. Telemundo would eventually acquire Univision affiliate WSNS in Chicago, causing Univision to affiliate part-time with WCIU once again until it could buy WGBO in 1994. These early, primarily Spanish-language, stations are unrelated to the later Act III Broadcasting, which was launched in late 1985. However, they are part of Norman Lear's early broadcast ownership experience. History Act III Broadcasting was formed as a subsidiary of Act III Communications in 1986, controlled primarily by Norman Lear, who had just sold WJNU. It ran primarily under the leadership of Tom McGrath and Burt Ellis. McGrath and Ellis had met in 1984, when McGrath was with Columbia Pictures, and the two had researched the value of independent TV stations at