So, What Do Women Want?

Katherine Rosman, a 27-year-old senior writer for Brill’s Content magazine, watches Lifetime, the cable television channel aimed at women, most Sunday afternoons.

She likes the campiness of the programming, with such themes as “Betrayed on Sunday.” It plays upon women as victims, she says, but “there’s nothing else on, if you don’t want to watch sports.” And, she quips, “There’s continuity to it. You can be lying on the couch about to fall asleep as Richard Grieco is trying to kill Tori Spelling and wake up two hours later and Harry Hamlin is trying to kill Valerie Bertinelli and you haven’t missed a thing.”

Rosman’s a big fan, but hers is an odd kind of endorsement for a network engaged in an intense battle for identity. After having the women’s brand largely to itself since its launch in 1984, Lifetime is now being targeted by one of the most hyped new cable networks in years, Oxygen.

That network launches Feb. 2. It is being led by Geraldine Laybourne, who built Nickelodeon into a powerhouse children’s network; by the Carsey-Werner-Mandabach production team behind such hits as “Roseanne”; and by star Oprah Winfrey. All have unspecified financial investments in the network as well as creative input, and Winfrey will be doing at least two shows. Substantial funding has come from the likes of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen and America Online.

Lifetime isn’t in any immediate danger from Oxygen, which will be available in a paltry 10 million households at launch to Lifetime’s 75 million. And with new categories of advertisers, such as financial services, targeting women, there are seemingly plenty of ad dollars to go around.

Moreover, there’s no law that says women should have just one channel dedicated to their interests; indeed, Lifetime says it is largely entertainment-oriented, while Oxygen says it will be service-oriented. But the newcomer--with its splashy ad campaign and high-profile and pointed programming announcements--has sparked an intriguing debate that could eventually have significant consequences: In a post-feminist world, where women’s roles are continuing to undergo huge redefinitions, where women can run for president or home-school their children and no one model dominates, just what does it mean to make “Television for Women” anyway? Can one network be all things to all women? For the first time on television, women will have a chance to choose. How they respond will have implications in the ways the medium frames the gender in the future.

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Lifetime’s definition is an escapist diet heavy in “women in jeopardy” movies such as “Dead by Sunset Part II” (its top-rated November offering) and “Midwest Obsession,” and “Golden Girls” and “Chicago Hope” reruns. The current schedule is also peppered with a smattering of “Intimate Portrait” profiling famous women, some women’s sports and an original drama and a sitcom revolving around contemporary women.

While Lifetime wins kudos from women for its public affairs campaigns that have dealt with breast cancer and child care, its reliance on movies and reruns starring women has long been off-putting to some women, who see in it a male-oriented approach to what they think women want to watch.

Lifetime says women like its movies, which are often criticized (mostly by snarky press people, Lifetime’s president argues) for showing victimized women battling stalkers, abusive husbands, man-stealing girlfriends, murderers, rapists and more. Viewers, says marketing executive vice president Rick Haskins, “look at these movies as instructional, telling them how to act in certain circumstances, how to avoid having that happen to them. They perceive some of these movies as empowering.”

By many measures, Lifetime is a clear success. According to Nielsen Media Research figures, it was the No. 3-ranked cable network on a total day basis for the year, behind Nickelodeon and TBS, drawing an average 760,000 households. Among women, it was tops in all the key groups of female viewers, from all adult women to the highly desirable group of younger women that advertisers crave for their buying power. The channel generates more than $200 million in pretax profits for its owners, Walt Disney Co. and Hearst Corp., analysts estimate.

Despite that success, there remains a feeling among many in the industry that Lifetime has missed a golden opportunity over the years, leaving itself vulnerable to a competitor such as Oxygen. For too long, critics say, it was content with a grab bag of programming, vaguely grouped under the “Television for Women” label, that drew viewers but didn’t connect with women as fully as it could or should have in an era when targeted media are increasingly popular. And in reality, says one executive involved in the channel’s start-up, for many years the “Women” label was simply used to get cable operators interested in carrying the channel, while the programming included many shows meant to pull in male viewers, in order to reach the audience numbers that advertisers demanded. “We fudged it,” the executive says. “We tried to do programming of interest to women, but once you get into prime time, you also have to attract men.” Today, about 30% of the Lifetime audience is men.

Enter Oxygen. It has a New Age-y mantra only slightly less vague than Lifetime’s--”Unleashing the power of women to do great things” is how its executives describe it--but its programming announcements have conveyed more of an edge. It has bragged that it will use women--reached through its extensive Web sites--to determine what topics are of interest, rather than deciding for them.

A promotional tape being shown on the Oxygen nationwide promotional tour shows Candice Bergen interviewing architect Michael Graves; a comedy sketch in which a helpless man is barraged by an airline ticket counter agent who quizzes him about his shortcomings; and Oprah learning to go online.

“Oxygen is more of a service brand than a competitive programming service,” says Caryn Mandabach, president of the Carsey-Werner Co. and a partner in Oxygen. “What we play at 8 p.m. should be very different to get women’s attention in a very important, immediate way.”

The networks’ varied approaches may arise partly out of the very different ways in which their executives view women’s roles in society today. For Oxygen, women are “at a time in their lives where they are feeling good about themselves and their place in society,” says marketing senior vice president Linda Ong. “That’s not something you could have said 20 years ago. Women no longer have to prove themselves; divisive issues such as the mommy track are behind us, and women are at a place where they feel they can balance their lives a little more. It’s a zeitgeist we feel we are tapping into, the recognition that women don’t all feel like they are struggling.”

Lifetime, says Haskins, is seen by its viewers as a “personal decompression chamber.” They look at it, he says, “as a sanctuary, a safe place at the end of a hectic day. The kids are yelling, the husband is yelling, and they can go to Lifetime and find something to relate to, comedies to laugh at, dramas. They can be supported.”

The average Lifetime viewer, according to Mediamark Research Inc. data supplied by Lifetime, is a 41-year-old woman with a middle-class-level annual income of $43,000 and 2.1 children. About 73% of the audience lives in urban or suburban areas; 56% of the viewers are married; and 62% work 30 or more hours a week.

“Women are having to do way too much,” says Dawn Tarnofsky-Ostroff, Lifetime’s executive vice president for entertainment. “They are multi-tasking, working long hours, and they are still responsible for most of what happens with the family; they are the caregivers, best friends, listeners; they are amazing, amazing people.” When they tune in, she says, they should be able to “see someone going through what they’re going through.”

But even if women simply want a place where they can find an entertaining respite from their hectic lives, Lifetime’s programming strategy to date has been so wide-ranging that it could almost apply to a true broadcast network such as NBC, whose audience is largely women. Other cable outlets, such as the Learning Channel, attract more young women to their female-oriented daytime shows than Lifetime.

Accordingly, Lifetime has begun honing its message and its programming; Lifetime itself says it has a huge opportunity in the numerous women who aren’t even aware that there is a cable channel that targets them.

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Lifetime got where it is today because of some of the harsh realities of the early days of cable. As one of the pioneers--it was formed in 1984 by the merger of the Daytime cable network and the Health network, both struggling at the time--Lifetime, like many fledgling cable networks, had a mixed mandate. It aired six days of daytime service programming, designed to appeal to women who didn’t want to watch soap operas and game shows on the networks, followed by shows for doctors on Sundays.

There was little money to devote to original programming, and executives who wanted to do smart service programming lost out. “There is a group of women who really would like to have strong, pithy informational programming, but unfortunately, watching television is pretty low on their agenda,” says one executive who was familiar with the channel’s internal debates at the time. So when Lifetime decided to expand into prime time, it bought up a slew of movies and reruns of shows such as the female cop drama “Cagney & Lacey.”

In 1995, it started billing itself as “Television for Women,” the same year it began airing original movies once a month in a bid to break out from the rerun cycle. Its “Almost Golden: The Jessica Savitch Story” premiered that year to the highest ratings ever at the time for a basic-cable movie.

Although its ad sales grew, its marketing lagged. A new president and chief executive officer, Carole Black, was brought in last year on March 22. Remarkably, she was the first woman to hold the position. (Despite intense criticism, her immediate predecessor, Doug McCormick, was chosen over a woman who was up for the job because he had more sales experience, says a former board member; to compensate, he was told he needed to surround himself with a heavily female executive team.)

Programming changes are in the works. Entertainment executive vice president Tarnofsky-Ostroff says she is focused on shows that depict “real women, real lives, real relationships. I think we deserve to see ourselves” on screen.

Although movies continue to be the top-rated shows, Lifetime has been encouraged by two original series: the sitcom “Oh Baby,” about a woman who decides to have a baby on her own, and the drama “Any Day Now,” about two best friends, one black and one white, which draws an average 1.6 million viewers. Both launched in 1998 and have been moderately successful in finding an audience. (A two-part “Any Day Now” in October, which looked frankly at racism, gave the network its highest rating ever for an original series.)

Lifetime has raised its spending on original series by 40% (it declines to say to what), with a goal of having more than half of its programming original to the network by the end of this year, says Tarnofsky-Ostroff. (Original shows currently only account for about 35% of the total.) It is developing pilots for two more prime-time shows, including a drama about female doctors that would be executive-produced by Whoopi Goldberg; the second is a female cop show titled “City Lights.”

There is a flurry of pilots for daytime as well, from a travel show to game shows to relationship shows, says Tarnofsky-Ostroff. A daily one-hour newsmagazine, “Lifetime Live” from parent ABC News, to air midday, is scheduled to premiere in March, anchored by Deborah Roberts and a co-anchor yet to be determined.

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The role of women’s sports is up in the air, with disappointing ratings for the network’s pro basketball telecasts. Black does see value in sports role models, however, showing women “overcoming enormous obstacles . . . , because women love stories and they love stories wrapped around people.”

Information-oriented shows will be expanded, says Black. “Women crave information,” she says. “They want to learn, to improve; they’re very aspirational, not just satisfied with where they are now.” That’s one reason they’ve gravitated to the Internet, she says.

Indeed, Oxygen’s model touts “convergence” between its extensive Web sites--which have everything from racy message boards about orgasms to advice on how to get male partners to help out in the kitchen to personal finance advice--and its television programming. Lifetime, which says it has the third-most-recognized Internet brand for women, still never fully exploited its Web site in the past several years. But it is now seeing value in online: The Web site budget has been increased about fivefold from a paltry $1 million or so, insiders say.

Lifetime has also--finally, some critics say--gotten serious about calling on the resources of its parent companies, ABC (owned by Disney) and Hearst Corp., with its stable of women’s magazines ranging from Good Housekeeping to Marie Claire. “Once and Again,” a Disney-produced drama about two divorced people venturing into the dating world, airs on Lifetime as a rerun just three days after its first airing on ABC. The “Any Day Now” special racism episode was followed by a discussion on the topic led by ABC News’ Deborah Roberts and Cokie Roberts (no relation). Meredith Vieira, a co-host of ABC’s popular “The View,” is now anchoring Lifetime’s “Intimate Portrait.” Black muses about tying into Walt Disney World’s popularity as a wedding spot and sharing information on health issues and child care with the Hearst magazine Web sites.

Black, who previously ran NBC’s KNBC television station in Los Angeles and worked in marketing at Walt Disney Co. and Procter & Gamble, says she discovered when she arrived that Lifetime’s essential problem was marketing. The brand was strong, she says, but “what I saw was that we were sleeping.”

She views the breadth of Lifetime’s appeal as a positive: “It’s very inclusive rather than exclusive. Women connect with one another on certain issues and feelings that transcend age, race, economic standing, education. They just connect.”

Black has brought in some new executives, including marketer Haskins. He says Lifetime is redesigning its on-air look and will begin advertising for the first time outside its traditional radio and TV Guide ads.

But Haskins has also analyzed extensive research and likes what he sees. “There was a time when Lifetime was struggling with the brand,” he says, but the network is now fulfilling its “Television for Women” position. “Until you state it and make it your mission or purpose, it doesn’t come into focus,” he says.