moving from Chicago to OWN’s Los Angeles headquarters.
Logan said he understands the hard work in establishing any cable channel, and this one in particular.
“One of the greatest gifts and challenges is to have her name on the door,” Logan said of his top boss. “Everything you do garners a high level of scrutiny and attention. … We don’t run from that.”
The initially slight programming lineup is being beefed up, most notably with “Oprah’s Next Chapter.” The weekly series debuts at 9 p.m. Sunday with Winfrey’s visit to the New Hampshire home of Steven Tyler.
“Next Chapter” turns the once studio-bound Winfrey into a globe-trotting interviewer who drops into the home of a Hasidic Jewish family in New York, George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch in California and cook Paula Deen’s Georgia estate. There is also a trip with Sean Penn to Haiti, fire-walking with Tony Robbins and a planned India trip with Deepak Chopra.
OWN has averaged about 136,000 viewers a day, a drop of 8 percent from what Discovery Health drew in 2010, although it’s up slightly in total viewers in prime time and has seen an 8 percent increase among women ages 25 to 54, part of the channel’s hoped-for demographic.
Popular shows include “The Judds,” which ran for six episodes in April and May; “Our America With Lisa Ling”; and the reality series “Welcome to Sweetie Pie’s,” which attracted a strong African-American audience.
Winfrey also is on-air with “Oprah’s Lifeclass,” which draws on her talk-show archives, and “Oprah’s Master Class,” high-achiever biography specials. But, she said, she never “was supposed to carry the channel on my back, and it never was supposed to be about me being on the air as much as possible.”
She attributes the channel’s rough start to a more basic error: The lack of a “library” of programming for the many hours of airtime not filled by original shows, compounded by overconfidence about her market value in general.
“People didn’t turn on ‘The Oprah Winfrey Show’ because my name was on it. It was absolutely topic driven every day,” she said.
Discovery is also in it for “the long term,” said a spokesman, citing the three to five years that other cable channels have needed to develop audience-grabbing hits and firmly establish themselves.
Winfrey, who describes herself as obsessed by ratings for the first time in her career, said she’s giving OWN “everything I’ve got. I’ve spent more energy doing this than anything I’ve ever done in my whole life.”
Winfrey’s Plan B if the channel falls short: “If this doesn’t work out, I’m going to go into organic farming in Maui. And I’m not kidding.”
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