After work: a date with the soaps

Among the many things ABC’s “Desperate Housewives” has proved this season is this: Women in the ‘90s did not stop watching daytime dramas because they wanted to. They simply couldn’t. Work beckoned some out of the house; others were called to a different type of duty by their multi-tasking offspring who required transportation to and from play dates, school and soccer practice.

That’s a truth about women’s lives that Deborah Blackwell, the former William Morris television agent who is now senior vice president and general manager of SoapNet -- the 24-hour basic cable network devoted to soap operas -- realized four years ago, when she began to mastermind the channel’s “new way to watch soaps” philosophy. The plan was to give women back their soap operas by airing them at night.

SoapNet’s programming now includes current daytime soaps and old soaps (“Ryan’s Hope”), along with prime-time classics (“Dynasty” and “Melrose Place”) and original series that cater to the soap opera fanatic. Already a mid-size network, the channel’s distribution reached 40 million households on March 31, when DirecTV moved it to its most popular programming tier. SoapNet now ranks sixth in prime time in the 18-to-49-year-old female demographic among all basic cable networks, with a total average audience of 14 million. Blackwell and her executive team of die-hard soap fans have done all of this while wearing wigs to work, conducting business in their pajamas and giggling their way through each workday. Those days of power lunches in Beverly Hills long gone, Blackwell pushed past the already laid-back office culture of cable television, looking toward the more experimental and free-flowing environment of MTV to motivate her staff of 35 to “live the brand” and immerse themselves in the whimsical nature of soaps as they went about marketing and promoting the channel, acquiring existing programming and developing original series.

“This is a channel that is devoted in every single way to the soap opera fan: what they want to watch, what they want to hear about and the kinds of reality shows they would want to see on television,” said Anne Sweeney, president of Disney-ABC Television Group, who oversees the channel’s operations. Blackwell’s team, Sweeney said, “really knows and understands the genre, and Deborah is very daring. So as a result, they have a whole lot of fun.”

Blackwell was the first to buy a wig for an impromptu office celebration of “great soap hair.” When “Pajama Day” fell on the morning she was to lead consumer product sessions about the network’s new brand, Blackwell threw on a hooded sweatshirt over her “Go to Bed With SoapNet” camisole and marched on. But as wacky as the SoapNet executives can be -- they dressed up the elevators in their Burbank building to look like showers for a “Dallas” bash (a tribute to the show’s “dream” season) -- they view their frivolity as serious business.

Blackwell, who wants to build an empire similar to its sibling network, ESPN, said her goal is to reach full distribution -- about 85 million homes -- and then expand to a second channel where she could air the daytime dramas she has no room for in the current schedule. Of the nine soaps aired during the day, SoapNet airs four at night: “All My Children,” “One Life to Live,” “General Hospital” and “Days of Our Lives.”

“ESPN owns sports on cable, and we want to own the category of soaps on cable, satellite and online,” she said. “Powerful brands are ones that people have an emotional bond with, and ESPN is something I can enjoy as a sports fan even if my particular sport is not on at the moment. Most soap fans want to know more about the stars, the way the shows are created, and they want to go behind the scenes. They want a deeper, richer fan experience. We feel if we get that to them, they’re going to have the emotional alliance to SoapNet that sports fans have to ESPN.”

Blackwell, 49, a graduate of Harvard Business School and Brown University and a self-declared childhood bookworm, never watched daytime soaps until it became her job in June 2001 to become obsessed with them. Now, listen to the woman who kids that she relates to Dr. Marlena Evans (Deidre Hall) on “Days of Our Lives” because “she’s a strong, professional woman, but life always throws her curves, and sexy men adore her”:

“I love stories that are about families and relationships told from a woman’s point of view,” she said. “When you see the success of ‘Desperate Housewives,’ you see there is a hunger for this. The world of soaps is fun because women rule the world on soaps. The heroines are not necessarily young, but they still maintain their attractiveness to men. And the men come over to your house and talk about their feelings with you.... How can you not love that? This is the easiest job in the world.”

What makes it easy is the genre’s decades-old built-in audience. The challenge lies in distinguishing itself in a cable universe of hundreds of channels, and from daytime programming on the broadcast networks. “Early on, when we were new, everyone was wondering what our role would be in the soap community,” Blackwell said. “We had to be very careful that our humor was always having fun with and not making fun of. It’s been very interesting to me because many of the producers who come in to sell original programming have the idea that soap operas are old-fashioned. Or they will want to poke fun at the soap conventions. We’ve had to encourage them not to make fun of it but to find an edgy, cool attitude about it. We wanted to be the ones to make people feel that it’s cool to watch soaps again.”

Blackwell, who had learned to let loose during a stint as a dot-com entrepreneur after her days at William Morris, motivated her staff to borrow from soap’s wild conventions even when it came to designing their business cards. Sherri York, who became vice president of marketing in November 2001, for example, was “caught in a high-profile love triangle with the Shah and a Texas oil baron. Now she has what every woman wants: beauty, fame, power and two dead rich husbands,” according to the back of her business card. “We felt that watching a soap -- especially if you’re watching it with a group of people -- it’s fun, it’s indulgent, and that’s how our environment should feel,” said York, formerly national director of marketing and communications at MTV. “We try to promote soapiness internally as much as we do externally so that everyone can feel its value. That’s why we have a lot of humor and playfulness on our air[waves] -- and in the office.”

Originally, SoapNet, which launched in January 2000 and is owned by Disney, was conceived as a way to lure more people to watch ABC Daytime. Since 1990, the median age for viewers of daytime dramas has gone up by an average of seven years, making the audience less attractive to advertisers targeting the young. With more women working and more programming choices as a result of cable, fewer viewers are tuning into daytime soaps. “Cable has proved to be a tough competitor because committing to soap viewing requires such a great time investment,” said Brian Frons, president of ABC Daytime. “It makes enormous sense to have SoapNet as the ultimate convenience to the viewer. If you were in charge of the food business at a hotel, wouldn’t you be in favor of 24-hour room service?”

Foreseeing the same benefits, Sony Pictures Television signed a $30-million, five-year deal last year to replay “Days of Our Lives,” which airs on NBC, on SoapNet at night. Scheduling “Days,” the top-rated daytime drama among 18- to 34-year-old women, as well as programming a bloc of prime-time classics that include “Dallas,” “Knots Landing” and “Beverly Hills, 90210” helped round out the schedule until executives were ready to take it to another level and develop original programming.

Now viewers can also indulge nightly in soap-oriented original shows such as the Daytime Emmy-nominated “Soap Talk” or “One Minute Soap,” a six-episode “micro-series” that airs in one-minute installments. Last year with its reality show, “I Wanna Be a Soap Star,” SoapNet blossomed from a little-known start-up to a network worthy of industry buzz. The second installment of the reality series, hosted by Cameron Mathison of “All My Children,” will award one contestant a role on that soap this summer.

“We try to steer left, not go down the straight and narrow path,” said Mary Ellen DiPrisco, vice president of original programming. “If it’s going to be original, it has to have a little bit of quirkiness to it and it has to be irreverent. It has to hit high standards and it has to be soapy enough.”

Although SoapNet’s audience is 20% male, the network’s goal is to capture the 18-to-49-year-old female audience both on the tube and online. A survey showed that about 3.6 million of SoapNet’s viewers are single or married women of the age group that works outside the home, said Sandy Wax, senior vice president of program planning, scheduling and acquisitions.

That woman does not match the conventional portrait of a soap opera viewer -- an idle middle-aged woman in her bathrobe eating bon bons in front of the tube. The SoapNet lady is about 42 years old, and she juggles many responsibilities. To feel less burdened, she turns on the TV at night and sits back with a glass of wine, ready to discover who switched the babies on “All My Children.”

One step ahead of “All My Children,” its top-rated show, SoapNet will air a Mother’s Day special titled “Who’s Your Momma?” Why? Because it can. “Only soaps can question motherhood,” York said.