Oprah’s Next Job: Moving Viewers To Cable

Oprah Winfrey will leave broadcast syndication in fall 2011 after hosting the No. 1 daytime talk show, Oprah, for 25 years. But when it comes to dominating daytime television, she may just be getting started.

With partner Discovery Communications, Winfrey is creating her own cable network, OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network, and she and her team are putting together a daytime schedule that mimics the programming on any given network affiliated TV station in the country and targets their viewers.

If OWN’s daytime strategy works, it could whack TV stations’ ratings and ad dollars. And it may ignite an assault by other cable networks on broadcasters in a daypart where they haven’t had much luck so far.

“We wrestled a lot with how aggressive we want to be,” says Christina Norman, CEO of OWN. “It’s an interesting opportunity for us to deliver the type of information Oprah’s audience is used to getting in the time of day they’re used to getting it.”

“Most of cable does not aggressively program originals in daytime,” observes Norman. “We’re making some big bets here.”

The bets include original first-run talk shows, cooking shows and other programming aimed at women. By this time next year, the daytime schedule will feature clones of Live with Regis and Kelly and The View, the second coming of Rosie O’Donnell and significant doses of the Queen of Daytime herself.

When the network debuts in January, daytime will still be a work in progress. The Best of Dr. Phil will get things rolling at 8 a.m., followed by repackaged episodes of Trading Spaces from OWN’s sister network TLC. That show’s host, Paige Davis, will provide new content for the show.

The Gayle King Show will run at 10 a.m., followed at 11 by the half-hour Canadian import Anna & Kristina’s Grocery Bag, a cooking show where the hosts test recipes. Another cooking show, Cristina’s Big Bowl of Love, with frequent Oprah guest Cristina Ferrare, will air at 11:30 a.m.

Gayle will be the highest-profile OWN daytime show at launch. It’s a live show like Regis and Kelly, based on King’s Sirius radio show in which she talks about current events and interviews celebrities.

The rest of daytime in January will consist of movies and repeats of most of its morning block. Over time, OWN may begin rerunning some of its primetime shows in daytime. Among the shows likely to repeat is Our America with Lisa Ling, a weekly documentary series that premieres on Jan. 30. In the show, one-time View co-host and frequent Oprah guest Lisa Ling takes an in-depth look at topical stories like faith healing.

Next spring, the lineup should get a boost from the addition of a View-type talk show, for which producer Mark Burnett is casting four hosts. It is set to air immediately before or after Gayle.

The schedule moves into high gear next September when Rosie O’Donnell begins her new Oprah-type afternoon show.

“It’s a single-subject talk show,” says Scott Carlin, who is executive producing it with Dick Robertson. Both Carlin and Robertson are Warner Bros. vets who were key players on O’Donnell’s old variety-talk show. “Rosie is ready to go.”

At the same time, Winfrey will return to daytime with a repackaged version of her old broadcast syndication show.

“One of the tremendous assets Oprah brings to this network, besides herself and her energy, is her library, which has never been seen,” says Norman.

“The team at Harpo is producing this. They’re not approaching this as just the ‘Best of.’ They are really going back and revisiting episodes, repackaging it and catching up with stories and guests you’ll remember. This is going to be a fresh take on a library, which I think Oprah fans will really love.”

In addition, the network plans on repeating, probably in the afternoon, one of Winfrey’s primetime shows, Oprah’s Next Chapter, in which she will interview celebrities from locations around the world. Discovery expects multiple episodes each week.

“Oprah is obviously very focused on the last season of Oprah,” says Norman. “I think she’ll fully turn her attention to where Next Chapter is going at the beginning of next year. So, let’s see where she wants to go and who she wants to talk to. There is still a lot for us to develop on that show.”

Cable’s luck with first-run talk shows and other programs typical of broadcast daytime has not been good. Winfrey herself stumbled in cable early this decade when she had a financial stake in Oxygen. That network’s original programming, including shows like Oprah Goes Online, quickly gave way to reruns and reality.

Other cable networks also stumbled in daytime, including Lifetime’s Jane Wallace Show in the early 1990s. And right now, Hallmark Channel is losing viewers with its daytime block of Martha Stewart programming, which launched in September.

“It may be counterintuitive, but Oprah being on cable will be additive to our effort, not a detraction from it,” says Bill Abbott, president-CEO of Hallmark Channel’s parent company, Crown Media Holdings. “The more viewers become accustomed to watching high-quality, original programming on cable in daytime, the more success we’ll have.”

Even for Winfrey, beating broadcasters at their own game may prove challenging.

“The daytime landscape has changed, but broadcast network TV and syndication is still the dominant force,” says Bill Carroll, VP and director of programming at Katz Television Group.

Cable networks like TNT that do relatively well during the day do so mostly with repeats of network shows like Law & Order. So far this season, TNT is No. 1 in daytime with an average 571,000 female viewers.

As a point of comparison, CBS ranks No. 1 among the broadcast networks in daytime with 2.5 million female viewers, followed by ABC with 2.2 million and NBC with 1.9 million.

“If I had to list 10 things that I lose sleep over, [OWN] wouldn’t be one of them,” says Doug Lowe, EVP of Meredith’s local media group, which owns TV stations including WGCL Atlanta. “She does have name recognition, which will draw viewers to it. But if they don’t see the programming they want or need, they’ll go back to what they were watching before.”