Networks compete for female audience

NEW YORK — There are no empty champagne bottles littering the floor of Carole Black's office at the Lifetime cable network, but there's a celebratory air just the same.

"Strong Medicine," a medical drama, is part of Lifetime's Sunday night lineup. Associated Press

For the first month in its 17-year history, Lifetime beat all of the other basic cable networks in prime-time ratings in January.

The achievement for Lifetime, which calls itself "television for women,'' couldn't come at a better time. A well-publicized rival, Oxygen, just passed its first anniversary trying to reach the same viewers. This month, a new competitor emerged when the former Romance Classics network became WE: Women's Entertainment.

Three cable channels now make it their business to answer the question, "What do women want?'' So far, only one can rightly claim it knows.

"We're an old friend to them,'' said Black, Lifetime's president. "We've been around and they trust us.''

Lifetime began as a mix of programming for health professionals and women. Series like "Cardiology Update'' gradually faded away until it was mostly entertainment shows for women.

All networks court women, to some degree. But even Lifetime didn't explicitly identify itself as "television for women'' until the early 1990s because its research detected a lingering inferiority complex: many women didn't feel they deserved a network devoted solely to them.

Black, who took over in March 1999, is credited with sharpening Lifetime's focus, improving its marketing and investing in original programming to which viewers have responded.

She made Sunday nights a showcase for the series "Strong Medicine,'' a medical drama starring Janine Turner, and "Any Day Now,'' with Annie Potts and Lorraine Toussaint exploring friendship across a racial divide. A new show about San Francisco police inspectors, "The Division,'' made a strong debut last month.

Lifetime's nimble schedule decisions included airing the movie, "The Silence of the Lambs,'' on the February night its sequel opened in theaters. Ratings soared 32 percent above a normal Friday night.

Network standbys like "Intimate Portraits'' and made-for-TV movies have also seen their viewership increase.

"We're very heartfelt,'' Black said. "We're about relationships — happy, sad, familial, friendships. That's the territory we own. The shows that do best for us, that are huge, are shows about relationships.''

Some observers, like Kim Gandy, executive vice president of the National Organization for Women, believe Lifetime doesn't challenge its viewers. When Oxygen chief executive officer Geraldine Laybourne suggested her network believes women are smart, the unspoken subtext is that Lifetime doesn't.

"They cater a lot to the stereotypical view of what women are interested in — news lite, issues lite,'' Gandy said. "I would like to see a more feminist network, one that addresses all of what women care about and not some narrow areas that are addressed because that's where the sponsorship money comes from.''

Critics have also said Lifetime's three-hankie weekend movies — its highest-rated fare — too often depict victimized women. Sample titles from the past six months: "Deadly Matrimony''; "Gone in the Night''; "Love, Lies & Murder''; "Love, Honor & Obey: The Last Mafia Marriage.''

Lifetime wouldn't air the movies if its executives believed they were bad for women, Black said.

"That isn't how our viewers think of it,'' she said. "They say that it's inspirational. They say that they're learning from it. They wouldn't watch themselves as victims. They see it as women who had difficult times and how they overcame them.''

For Lifetime, success is all the more satisfying given the challenge from Oxygen, a network backed by power players Laybourne, former head of Nickelodeon, Oprah Winfrey and sitcom producers Marcy Carsey and Tom Werner.

"There was so much noise coming out of the launch of Oxygen,'' said Derek Baine, senior analyst at Paul Kagan & Associates, which studies cable television. "Lifetime is not run by stupid people. They acted defensively. They put more money into marketing to keep their existing viewership base intact.''

Nearly 80 million homes have access to Lifetime, virtually everyone who has cable or satellite TV. That's more than Oxygen and WE: Women's Entertainment combined — almost twice as much.

Oxygen is seen in only 12 million homes. It's invisible in major cities like New York, Chicago, Washington and most of Los Angeles.

Many analysts fault Oxygen's decision to charge cable operators to carry their signals for its failure to take off. Traditionally, new networks pay the cable systems to get the exposure; few operators appreciated the switch.

Laybourne essentially bet the young life of Oxygen on this decision. Without a $100 million investment from Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen in December, the network may not have made its first anniversary.

She defends the charges, saying they were necessary for Oxygen to finance a schedule of new programming. Oxygen didn't want to launch with a bunch of soggy reruns, which is all that many new networks can afford, she said.

"Our biggest mistake was that we got sucked up into the online speed warp that you just had to build as quickly as you could and be out there as fast as you could,'' she said.

Oxygen has 15 original programs on the air or ordered, but it has retrenched. The daytime news show, "Pure Oxygen,'' and other programs have been shortened, old movies are being shown in prime time now and Oxygen bought reruns of "Xena: Warrior Princess.''

Oxygen received a boost when Winfrey — whose lack of involvement in the network has raised eyebrows — agreed earlier this month to produce a series on real-life heroes. However, Oxygen's best-known show, the Candace Bergen talk show "Exhale,'' is on hiatus with some question about its future.

There's impressive breadth to Oxygen's schedule: the series "X Chromosome'' presents the work of female animators, "As She Sees It'' features women documentarians, "Daily Remix'' has music from classical to hip-hop and some sports are aired on the weekends.

"We will continue to believe that our viewer is intelligent and we will pursue that with shows that will open their eyes to things,'' Laybourne said. "We think they deserve a wide variety of choices.''

Oxygen is just the type of network NOW's Gandy dreams about. Trouble is: She's never seen it.

More people have seen Romance Classics. It's available in about 37 million homes but is being renamed WE: Women's Entertainment because "we were speaking in a voice that was probably a decade old,'' said network President Kate McEnroe.

The network's owners were struck by a study they had seen indicating that three-quarters of women go back to work after having their first child. Busy women look to TV for a respite, McEnroe said.

"We're not really there to tell about women who are in trouble,'' she said. "What we want to provide is an opportunity for women to disconnect from their professional lives and reconnect with themselves.''

WE says, only half-jokingly, that it is a Martha Stewart-free zone. What woman has time to do everything Stewart does?

Some of WE's new shows include "Cool Women,'' a series of profiles of women with interesting jobs, the Vanessa Williams-hosted "Style World,'' which tries to help working women plan vacations, and "Fashion Flashback,'' where Cindy Crawford dissects the history of clothes.

Black smiles when she hears WE's talk about becoming a sanctuary for women.

"If Lifetime were not the leader, I would be looking at what the leader is doing,'' she said.

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