Quick Takes: Sarah Ferguson joins Oprah network

With television royalty starting her own network, it only makes sense to seek royal personalities to fill the programming. Or, in this case, a former member of the British royal family.

Move over Weight Watchers commercials! Sarah Ferguson is the latest personality to join OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network.

In the six-part series, which is produced by World of Wonder and will premiere in early next year, viewers will watch as the Duchess of York struggles to rebuild her life with the help of experts Dr. Phil McGraw, Suze Orman and Martha Beck, among others.

The Duchess will open up about her recent public troubles and explore her lifelong battles with weight, relationships and finances,” said Lisa Erspamer, chief creative officer of OWN, in a press release.

“I’m doing this because I need to heal my mind, body and spirit,” Ferguson said in a press release.

She joins Rosie O’Donnell, who will make her return to television hosting on the new network with a one-hour daily show based in New York.

OWN will debut Jan. 1 on what is currently the Discovery Health Channel.

—Yvonne Villarreal

KIIS still tops radio ratings

Pop station KIIS-FM (102.7) maintained its grip on the top spot in the latest radio ratings, even though its share of the Los Angeles-Orange County audience dipped slightly from the previous month, according to numbers released Friday by the Arbitron ratings service.

KIIS captured 6.3% of listeners age 6 and older during the August survey, down from 6.7% in July, while classic hits station KRTH-FM (101.1) held on to second place with 4.7%. Top 40 station KAMP-FM (97.1) and talk outlet KFI-AM (640) also held steady from July, in third and fifth places, respectively. Adult-contemporary station KOST-FM (103.5) took over fourth place from hip-hop KPWR-FM (105.9), according to the survey of listeners from July 22 to Aug. 18.

KFI again ruled morning drive, from 6-10 a.m., with its tag-team of Bill Handel and the first hour of Rush Limbaugh’s program, increasing its audience share slightly from July. Ryan Seacrest on KIIS held steady in second place.

—Steve Carney

‘Spider’ musical creators speak

The creative team behind Broadway’s “Spider-Man: Turn of the Dark” appeared on ABC’s “Good Morning America” Friday to plug the new show, which is set to officially open in December. The multimillion-dollar production has been plagued with delays and rumors of a runaway budget.

Bono and the Edge spoke via satellite from Nice, France, where they are currently on tour with U2, while director Julie Taymor sat with host George Stephanopoulos in the “Good Morning America” studio.

Taymor, the Tony-winning director for “The Lion King,” said the stage would feature “pop-up” sets that will give audiences a vertiginous feel for the skyscraper canyons of New York.

She also revealed a new villain invented for the show who is being called “Swiss Miss” because she’s made of Swiss Army knives.

Taymor said the musical would feature “a lot of dance” and “flying over the audience,” but at its core, it is “a profound and moving love story.”

—David Ng

Lost Burroughs work due in 2011

The long-lost graphic novel by William S. Burroughs and Malcolm McNeil will be published in 2011, Fantagraphics announced Wednesday. The Seattle-based publisher will release “Ah Pook Is Here” in a package with McNeil’s memoir of working with Burroughs, “Observed While Falling.”

The project began with a Burroughs-McNeil collaboration in the 1970s on the comic strip “The Unspeakable Mister Hart,” which appeared in the British magazine “Cyclops.” The magazine folded, and the two decided to turn their work into a full-length project. At the time, Burroughs was 56 and McNeil was 23. They worked for seven years but never found a publisher.

—Carolyn Kellogg

Lady Gaga, ex drop lawsuits

They may have had a bad romance, but now there’s an amicable professional split between Lady Gaga and a music producer who said he helped launch her career, though she ditched him as a collaborator and a boyfriend on the road to stardom.

Court papers filed this week show the Grammy Award-winning “Bad Romance” singer and songwriter-producer Rob Fusari agreed to dismiss the lawsuits each filed against the other in March. He’d sought $30.5 million, but it’s unclear whether they made any monetary deal.

Fusari had said the pop-meets-performance-art sensation shoehorned him out of her lucrative career after he co-wrote such Gaga hits as “Paparazzi” and “Beautiful, Dirty, Rich” and helped get her record deal.

Lady Gaga’s lawyers have said Fusari was just an agent and got the then-inexperienced singer to sign an unfair agreement in 2006.

Associated Press

Finally

Frosty/Heidi & Frank will exit KABC 790 TalkRadio when their contract is up Oct. 1.

“Nothing against KABC because I appreciate everything they did for us by even putting us back on the air when KLSX ended,” Frank Kramer said Friday.