Programmers Scramble to Break the Ice

As ink-stained researchers will tell you, women tend to be more regular viewers of prime-time series, while men more reliably gravitate toward movies and sports. The exception is ice skating, a sport to which women have warmed, and which network executives have drooled over since the 1994 Winter Olympics, when the Tonya Harding-Nancy Kerrigan controversy transformed skating into a contact sport, resulting in Super Bowl-sized ratings for the women’s finals. As a result, the start of the Winter Games in Nagano, Japan, on Friday has spawned a number of ice skating-related programs on CBS and elsewhere seeking to share in that popularity. CBS will precede its own Olympics coverage Wednesday with “My Sergei,” a pseudo-documentary based on the story of skater Ekaterina Gordeeva and her late husband and partner, Sergei Grinkov, who died in 1995. Fox weighs in Thursday with “Breaking the Ice: The Women of ’94 Revisited,” which will feature a joint interview with Harding and Kerrigan. Even E! Entertainment Television gets into the act Sunday, carrying a one-hour biography of the eventual ’94 Olympic champion, Oksana Baiul. In short, as television laces up for the games, get ready for plenty of rinky-dink programming.

Forget Love, Let’s Talk About Money

Is this the week that the “Titanic” soundtrack finally sinks? Record retailers will look to SoundScan data Wednesday to see if the James Horner score has been able to maintain its record pace while Sony Classical/Sony Music Soundtrax prepares for the Feb. 9 release of a radio edit of “Southampton,” a cut from the album that may spark sales anew. Already a phenomenon as the first mostly instrumental soundtrack to reach No. 1 in 17 years, “Titanic” sold an eye-popping 419,000 copies during the seven-day period that ended Jan. 18, then scanned a staggering 665,000 copies the following week--unheard-of numbers for this time of year. Interestingly, Sony executives believe that “Titanic” is also fueling sales of the No. 2 album, Celine Dion’s “Let’s Talk About Love,” and vice versa. Both records include the “Titanic” theme and Dion smash “My Heart Will Go On.” “I think it’s very, very clear that people are buying both albums,” says Glen Brunman, executive vice president of Sony Music Soundtrax. “When I look at the chart, I see ‘Titanic’ and Celine selling 930,000 units [combined]. This is the phenomenon of phenomenons, and it’s working incredibly well for two records.”