Selling True Stories
New Programming Strategy Fuels Record Audience Levels For LMN
by Stewart Schley -- Multichannel News, 6/22/2008 8:00:00 PM
For nearly 20 years, Washington state detective Dave Reichert conducted an obsessive pursuit of the serial murderer known as the Green River Killer, who terrorized women in the Northwest until his capture in 2001. Reichert chronicled his odyssey in a 2005 book, which would play an important part in the transformation of Lifetime Movie Network.
The Capture of the Green River Killer, LMN’s March 2008 TV adaptation of Reichert’s book, was the sort of breakthrough program — like Mad Men for AMC or Trading Spaces for TLC — that brands a network with a new sense of currency.
The two-part movie smashed through past ratings records, attracting more than 2 million viewers to a network whose normal primetime audience is less than 500,000.
The movie also performed well on iTunes: more than 5% of those who sampled a clip bought the program, an enviable conversion rate. For LMN, the profitable but lesser-known sibling of the Lifetime network, it was a stunning achievement, economically and creatively.
“The Capture of the Green River Killer returns us to the glory days of made-for-TV movies,” wrote Los Angeles Times television critic Mary McNamara (who also writes a blog for Multichannel News).
Green River’s success was part of a calculated effort to elevate LMN from its reputation as a home for predictable and formulaic “women’s” movies.
It’s a heritage that has made the network an easy target for pop critics. Entertainment Weekly TV writer Gillian Flynn recently called LMN’s lineup “a dazzling, 24/7 rotation of mostly made-for-TV films, usually of the women-in-jeopardy variety, typically retrieved from the mid-’90s, and generally starring at least one former Charlie’s Angel, one blond TV mom, or one 90210 alum.”
Although the four hour Green River stuck fast to the women-in-distress theme that frequently is seen in LMN’s movies, a taut script and adroitly assembled cast — former Ed star Tom Cavanaugh played the determined detective — helped it rise above the norm.
Susanne Daniels, former president of Lifetime’s entertainment operations, said Green River is emblematic of a fresh approach to original programming for a network that some believe had become predictable.
The critique of LMN as a home for prosaic movie-of-the-week fare has validity, Daniels admitted. But she said that is changing with every new title. It’s not an instant makeover, she said, considering Lifetime has rights to nearly 1,000 movies in its library, and continues to rely on them to populate its 24-hour schedule.
“But slowly and surely you start to turn over your library and let go titles that are more along the lines of the old Lifetime,” Daniels said. “We’re starting to build a library of movies that are a little sexier, more relevant, and don’t always have that pathetic 'victim, husband is trying to kill her’ theme.”
So far, so good. LMN has racked up nine consecutive months of double-digit household gains in primetime and total-day ratings as it continues to add original content.
The network began producing original movies in 2006, pledging to premiere a new title each month. Since then, LMN has increased its programming production slate to 18 new movies for the 2008-2009 TV season.
The original programming plan isn’t entirely limited to Hollywood professionals like Stanley Brooks, the executive producer of Green River. LMN last year began inviting aspiring directors to contribute short movies to the network’s Web site, where they’re evaluated by Hollywood film figures in a competition that awards $5,000 plus trips to two film-industry events.
The winning film in the “Every Woman’s Film Competition” also will be televised nationally on LMN.
For feature-length movies, the new programming slant reflects research that suggests the viewers LMN targets, typically women 18 to 49 years old, find true stories particularly compelling.
In the case of Green River, “It’s a dark and tragic story, but I’ll tell you that the research showed me how much women love movies based on true stories,” Daniels said.
She has equally high hopes for August’s Little Girl Lost: The Delimar Vera Story. Starring Judy Reyes (Scrubs) and Ana Ortiz (Ugly Betty), it’s based on the true story of a mother’s reunion with a young daughter who was believed to have been killed in a fire six years earlier. Daniels thinks the movie will resonate with viewers who will identify with the instinctive will of a mother. The story’s advance exposure on The Oprah Winfrey Show also could help build viewership.
Keeping with the true-story emphasis, LMN will air two original movies based on books by true-crime writer Ann Rule in the upcoming season.
Daniels had planned to freshen up the network’s schedule by buying rights to more theatrical movies.
She said certain titles that show up regularly in the primetime schedules of competing channels, like Julia Roberts’ Pretty Woman or Legally Blonde with Reese Witherspoon perform well, time after time.
“I took out of our research that we should diversify our movies and acquire more theatrical runs,” Daniels said. “These movies repeat incredibly well on cable.”
Aside from acquiring new content, Daniels was counting on some new scheduling and promotion wrinkles to keep up the ratings momentum.
Some are seemingly straightforward, like starting movies at the top of the hour, a common TV industry approach that only recently has been applied by LMN. Also, for viewers that may stumble into films after they’ve begun, the network now regularly applies brief text descriptions that convey the title, the actors and a brief synopsis of the storyline. That idea came from staff meetings at Lifetime’s Los Angeles offices, where monitors were tuned to LMN with the sound turned off.
Other changes are more subtle. Aiming to stray from past perception of the network, its promotions department has reedited close to 300 movie promotional vignettes to minimize the women-in-distress emphasis and play more to the theme of empowerment that ultimately prevails in the films.
The technique already has paid off in higher ratings for the titles, said Bob Bibb, LMN co-chief marketing officer. “It played to our hunch with about a 12% increase in ratings, doing nothing different than that,” he said.
Bibb and co-CMO Lew Goldstein are shaking up the network in other ways. A new tagline that will debut later this year — “Lifetime’s own movie network” — is designed to clarify that LMN has a place on the TV lineup separate from its more popular sibling, Lifetime. “We have to make it clear there are two distinct services,” Bibb said.
To reinforce the point, Bibb is changing the graphic feel of LMN so there’s more individuality to the graphic look for each movie. In the past, promotions took on more of a cookie-cutter approach, with only slight variation in the way movies were presented on Lifetime versus LMN.
At the same time Bibb is attempting to create some visual distance between the two networks, he’s running promotions for LMN within commercial breaks on Lifetime, a practice that was employed rarely before Andrea Wong became Lifetime president and CEO last April.
The increased investment in original productions and the complementary promotion efforts reflect Daniels’ determination to build up LMN’s profile. It helps that the network managed to rack up higher ratings than other women’s cable channels even before Daniels began putting her imprint on the channel.
But Daniels is convinced there’s still plenty of untapped potential ahead.
“I think we can really break out Lifetime Movie Network to stand on its own,” Daniels said.
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