By LYNN ELBER (AP Television Writer)
LOS ANGELES — Oprah Winfrey earned the rare opportunity to convert her media charisma into a monogrammed TV channel. Now she’s the one tasked with rescuing OWN, the Oprah Winfrey Network, after a disappointing first year.
It’s a high-stakes, potentially ego-shattering challenge that could make the strongest woman or man flinch. But win or lose, Winfrey says she relishes the fight to turn OWN’s fortunes around.
“Yes, some mistakes were made. Who hasn’t made mistakes? The real beauty is you can say, ‘I learned from that,'” Winfrey said.
The cable channel, which marks its first year Jan. 1, is trying for a fresh start after executive turnover and missteps that proved OWN lacked a solid foundation on which to build, this despite a Discovery Communications investment of a reported $250 million and counting.
Viewers snubbed the lineup that skimped on programming and, surprisingly, what should have been OWN’s unique weapon of choice: Winfrey herself, whose limited on-air presence will be boosted Sunday with a new weekly series, “Oprah’s Next Chapter.”
OWN has failed to improve on, or in some instances even match, the modest ratings and small audience earned by the low-profile Discovery Health channel it replaced.
“I would absolutely say it is and was not where I want it to be for year one,” Winfrey said.
Year two for OWN will reflect executive changes made last July, when Winfrey expanded her role at the channel by adding the roles of chief executive and chief creative officer to her position as chairman. Discovery Communications COO Peter Liguori had filled in as interim head after OWN CEO Christina Norman was dismissed in the wake of poor ratings.
Although the channel’s ownership is split evenly between Discovery and Winfrey’s Chicago-based production company, Harpo Inc., it is Discovery’s money that’s on the line.
With more scheduling consistency, movies, original series with and without Winfrey, and “a lot more Oprah in general,” Discovery is “a lot more confident that we’re heading in the right direction,” said company spokesman David Leavy.
Sheri Salata and Erik Logan, two veterans of Harpo, were brought in to share the title of OWN president, with Logan
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.”