Will Women Take A Breath Of Oxygen?

By James Poniewozik

When the embryonic women's cable channel/Web network Oxygen posted a preliminary TV schedule online last fall, the blurb for Trackers--a teen girl-power show, sans "sugar and spice"--asked, "What's a girl to do once she's outgrown Nickelodeon?"

Replace "girl" with "woman," and you have the question to which Oxygen chairwoman and CEO and former Nickelodeon president Geraldine Laybourne is unveiling the answer. During 15 years at Nick, Laybourne made a tiny kids' channel into an omnipresent part of youths' lives; in 1998, after an unsatisfying two-year stint at Disney/ABC, she was ready to strike out on her own. So what's an accomplished TV exec to do? She doesn't just start a high-profile cable channel from scratch--with almost all original programming--when it's been years since a new basic-cable channel has become a hit. She doesn't just enter the risky field of new media. She doesn't just bet millions on the still notional idea of "convergence"--the trendy belief that television and online technologies will, somehow, on some machine, combine to form a superinformative, superprofitable supermedium. She does all of the above, taking on well-established women's media brands to boot.

The idea, coming from most entrepreneurs, would be laughed off a venture capitalist's private plane. Time Warner, TIME's parent company, last year scrapped plans to launch a women's information cable network, concluding that it would not be profitable. But Laybourne was able to attract investments from the likes of Paul Allen (co-founder of Microsoft), Bernard Arnault (chairman of the luxury-goods company LVMH) and America Online (which plans to merge with Time Warner), building a programming fund of more than $400 million. She has also drawn a raft of veteran producers and, as business partners, the Hollywood production team of Marcy Carsey, Tom Werner and Caryn Mandabach (creators of The Cosby Show, Roseanne and That '70s Show), which are programming the network; and--hallelujah!--Oprah Winfrey, who will contribute two shows (and, in 2002, reruns of her talk show). She even snared Candice Bergen to act as host of a nighttime talk show, Exhale. The return on these investments and efforts will rest largely on Laybourne's vision of how the Internet will change media and of what 21st century women want--and aren't getting--from TV.

"I had a workman here the other day," Laybourne says at her office in Oxygen's loftlike downtown Manhattan headquarters (very new-media-start-up, very exposed-pipes-and-brick). "He said, 'Hmmm. Network for women. What're you going to do, fashion?'" Not exactly. When the channel launches on Feb. 2 (the date, 02/02, plays off the chemical symbol for oxygen), it will offer a mix of talk shows, comedy and women-oriented finance, sports and consumer shows, from a positive, sister-solidarity perspective. What "fashion" there is comes in forms like a comic riff on the empowering influence of a little black cocktail dress.

The slate is practical--gab shows are faster and cheaper to create--and also fits Laybourne's goal to service women "underserved" by TV (the name Oxygen, she says, alludes to giving women "room to breathe"). As Mandabach notes, the schedule breaks down a woman's day into blocks: yoga in the early morning, news and views in daytime, comedy and interviews for unwinding at night. It's meat-and-potatoes nonfiction programming, but female-centric. "If women programmed World News Tonight, the lineup would be totally different," says Roni Selig, executive producer of Pure Oxygen, the network's flagship daily two-hour talk show. "If there's a story about a health initiative for women, that's going to be our big story." And there's plenty of irreverence: Pajama Party's host interviews celebrities in their PJs; a Pure Oxygen host introduces a female political analyst as a "political diva."

The other key to Oxygen's strategy is synergy between its Web and TV offerings, including close co-operation between its online and TV staffs. Says Exhale's co-executive producer Scott Carter: "Oxygen will be one-stop shopping for women." We've heard such talk before from outfits like MSNBC, which downplayed its on-air techno theme considerably after launching. It's still unclear how, if at all, online and TV will profitably coexist, and much of Oxygen's synergy efforts, such as sending viewers to the website for forums and further information, are already being done by other channels. Indeed, many of its producers concede as much, and Oxygen is still working out what some of the sites connected with its shows will contain. "We can't be judged on the first day," Werner says. "We hope our audience will understand we are still crawling." But Oxygen's website (see box) is ambitious and growing, and the network is employing some innovations, such as a permanent strip at the bottom of the TV screen that can refer viewers to the website (and, during commercials, to advertisers' sites).

And then there's Oprah. Winfrey will be the host of a 12-episode introduction to Web surfing, Oprah Goes Online, which Oxygen hopes can lure and keep Net newbies--and perhaps do for the Web what Winfrey has done for book publishing. (Winfrey also plans an interview show, Oprah &..., which will feature longer conversations than her talk show.)

Oxygen faces big obstacles, chief among them the fact that you probably can't watch it. It's tough for new cable channels to crack carriers' crowded lineups, and Oxygen will be in only 10 million homes when it launches--and unavailable in New York City and much of Los Angeles, capitals of advertising and media. The women's network Lifetime, by contrast, is in more than 75 million homes.

For supposed competitors, Lifetime and Oxygen seem wary of competing with each other--overtly, anyway. "We're not just different from Lifetime," says Laybourne. "We're different from all TV." Lifetime's president and CEO, Carole Black, emphasizes that there's room in the cable market for both networks to grow, and it's true that they have little overlap, given Lifetime's emphasis on movies, series (Any Day Now, Oh Baby) and reruns and Oxygen's on nonfiction. But Lifetime seems to be responding to Oxygen. It has just announced Lifetime Live, a daily one-hour news and information show to be produced by its Disney sibling ABC, and it is relaunching its website on Feb. 24.

Yet the questions remain: What, in this era, is "programming for women" anyway? And is it really lacking? While Lifetime is the only other cable channel explicitly for women, several others target women, and the broadcast networks are courting that market with shows like Once and Again and Judging Amy--not to mention their daytime schedules. What's lacking, Oxygen's partners contend, is shows that account for women's priorities. They say, for instance, that numbers-oriented business shows turn off women, who think of money in terms of relationships. "When a woman sees a car, she thinks about whether it will work for car pool or carrying groceries," Mandabach says. "Her concerns about others prompt her buying decisions."

Ironically, the Oxygen debut that may best evince a fresh approach to "women's TV" is not a talk or comedy program but X-Chromosome, a half-hour weekly anthology of 11 animated-short series by and for women. "Animation has traditionally been a male domain," says executive producer Machi Tantillo, but the network sent out an APB asking female artists for cartoons they couldn't sell elsewhere. There's little slapstick or frog baseball here, but rather dry wit and minutely observed stories from real life: more Ann Beattie than Butt-head. One strip is based on the sex-and-relationship columns of Amy Sohn; another, Closet Cases, tells funny and revealing stories that center on items of clothing from real women's wardrobes. "[Women] don't find big ha-ha jokes funny," says Laybourne. "We find everyday life situations turned on their ears funny."

Shows like X-Chromosome suggest that Oxygen may be seeking younger viewers, but Laybourne, 52, says that while they're aiming at 18- to 40-year-olds, they're really not after a demographic but a "psychographic." Huh? "Women who are leaning into their lives, who are independent and eager to take charge," Laybourne describes it. (Oh.) Oxygen executives talk about reaching entrepreneurs and "women achievers." Would it be churlish to suggest that this sounds like a euphemism for "affluent professional women"? "There are plenty of soccer moms who are really leaning into their lives," Laybourne replies.

But supposing she's right: isn't women's very progress a potential liability? Lifetime has sold itself as a cable safe house, where put-upon women can escape the stresses of family, work and men and settle into the comforting company of Annie Potts. A confident woman might not feel she needs a TV refuge at all. But, Laybourne says, high-powered or no, "women learn from stories of other women. They have from the beginning of time. I've never met a group of people who didn't want to belong."

The idea of viewers belonging to--deeply identifying with--a cable channel is the concept through which Laybourne, at Nickelodeon, may have changed cable. Nick's current slogan, "I believe in Nick, 'cause it believes in me," while a little dubious (do fourth-graders taking tests psych themselves up by remembering that a Viacom subsidiary believes in them?), sums up the philosophy neatly. Oxygen is applying that lesson with an ad campaign that stresses "great reasons to be a woman" ("No back hair," "Baby's first word: mama") and has bought a Super Bowl spot. It's also leveraging its website by taking programming and topic suggestions from women online, which it claims will keep its shows fresh and relevant. "It's about, 'We want to create this network with you,'" says president of sales and marketing C.J. Kettler. Are women interested in the job? On Feb. 2, Oxygen begins learning whether America wants a new best girlfriend.

--With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles

With reporting by Jeanne McDowell/Los Angeles