{alltv} Oprah Winfrey comes into her OWN on new cable network

She has been the queen of daytime TV talk for 25 years. She has conquered magazines. Her book club has breathed new life into publishing. And she's one of the richest women in America.

So what's left for Oprah Winfrey?

She is fulfilling a longtime dream of creating her own cable network, the first to be built entirely around the personality of a lone celebrity. After years of planning, executive reshuffles and delays, the Oprah Winfrey Network will premiere at noon ET/PT Saturday on the channel now occupied by little-seen Discovery Health.

It's "an opportunity to have a more profound impact and affect people's lives with TV," Winfrey says in an interview with USA TODAY. What about her top-rated daytime talk show, which ends its run of original shows in May? "As broad as it has allowed me to be, you're limited with the format," she says.

OWN, as it will be called, will start the new year with a sampler of sorts:

•The first of several specials, Ask Oprah's All-Stars, which will showcase her homegrown talent, including doctors Mehmet Oz and Phil McGraw. Under Winfrey's Harpo Productions banner, both went on to their own successful syndicated shows after debuts on hers.

•Episodes of Master Class, a series of Winfrey's interviews with cultural figures she admires, will offer inspirational lessons from the likes of Jay-Z and Diane Sawyer.

•Sneak previews of some new shows to follow later on OWN, including Kidnapped by the Kids, a reality show in which overworked parents are cut off from their jobs and BlackBerrys to reconnect with their families.

It's a tall order launching a 24/7 cable network — producing hundreds of hours of programming, signing deals with advertisers and cable systems, handpicking a team that shares her philosophy — under the kind of scrutiny reserved for only the biggest celebs.

Winfrey, 56, acknowledges that the challenge gave her second thoughts. "I had a come-to-Jesus meeting with myself and realized what all was involved. I had to step back a moment and say, 'Is this really the thing I want to do?' I thought I would take a relaxed approach to this second phase of my career, do a show a week, travel the world, catch up on books I wanted to read."

Just back from spending Christmas on vacation in Fiji, which came after she did several shows in Australia, Winfrey says that now, "I'm planning a vacation in 2014."

Managing expectations

Many are rooting for Winfrey to succeed.

They include Dr. Phil, who owes his TV career to Winfrey. He predicts OWN will be "a huge success" and says she'll "do it right, or she won't do it at all. She gets to the answers people want to hear about subjects that matter, and that whole philosophy is defining that network."

OWN's competitors — such as Lifetime, Oxygen, WE and Discovery's own TLC, all of which target female viewers — are no doubt rooting for OWN to fail, or at least show signs that Winfrey's magic touch with media has eased. Winfrey herself says that early on, fear of the network failing consumed her.

"I would literally wake up in the middle of the night clutching my chest, thinking, 'What have I done? What have I taken on?' " she recalls.

So in its early days, OWN is trying to strike a delicate balance: to create a buzz with publicity and a big marketing campaign that includes ads in movie theaters, while also trying to manage expectations downward so the network's initial ratings aren't seen as a disappointment.

Other shows on OWN will include a behind-the-scenes glimpse of the final season of Winfrey's talk show, a live simulcast of her best pal Gayle King's radio show, a series in which sex therapist Laura Berman visits couples in their bedrooms, and Your OWN Show, a competition in which the winner gets a six-week series on the network.

Next fall, OWN will launch a talk show starring Rosie O'Donnell. Discovery Health holdover Mystery Diagnosis, movies and repeats of Dr. Phil and Trading Spaces will help round out the network's schedule.

But the biggest draw will be Oprah herself, and her involvement in the network was a bone of contention that almost derailed it. To go forward with its investment, now at $189 million, Discovery wanted Winfrey to go all in. She'd have to take a more hands-on role at the network and double her on-air commitment from 35 hours to a minimum of 70 a year.

Winfrey learned about the trials of cable television the hard way 10 years ago, when, as an initial investor in Oxygen, she had minimal input and saw the channel move away from the uplifting approach she'd envisioned. She later split from it. (Now owned by NBC Universal, Oxygen has made a dent on the cable landscape with trashy reality series such as Bad Girls Club.)

A whole new 'Chapter'

For now, her syndicated show is still Winfrey's top priority and, until summer, will limit the time she can devote to OWN. After she decided in November 2009 to quit the talk show, she rewrote her OWN contract, agreeing to double her on-air commitment. She'll host 70 hours of Oprah's Next Chapter, to air two or three times a week starting in 2012, that will feature Winfrey roaming the world and conducting interviews with celebrity pals.

But she'll pop up elsewhere, hosting Master Class and starring in the behind-the-scenes series chronicling the last days of her talk show.

The gradual rollout makes it difficult to estimate how quickly OWN will make an impact in the crowded cable world.

OWN's CEO, Christina Norman, says she hopes to double Discovery Health's tiny prime-time audience of 84,000 women ages 25 to 54, OWN's target, a number that would be a small fraction of her 7 million daytime fans. Though it would move the channel, which now ranks 49th, closer to a top-20 network, it's an exceptionally modest goal that, if not eventually surpassed, would make the network "a huge disappointment," says Todd Gordon, a managing director of ad firm Initiative.

Norman is taking the long view: "My job here is not to launch a network but to build a business that will be around for the next 25 years and launch the next chapter of Oprah's life."

Winfrey says creating "sustainability" for the network is a "definite process" that will include "maintaining and revising our vision" as viewers respond (or don't) to its shows. She expects some of her talk-show viewers will follow her to cable "and we will create a whole audience of other viewers," while Norman predicts OWN will attract a younger, less female audience than Winfrey has now.

"We're not programming to men, but I don't want to be male-repellent," Norman says. "Men want to take financial advice from her: She's a self-made billionaire, so she's obviously done something right."

The channel is also trying to stand apart from other women's networks with an uplifting, "live your best life" mantra. "We want to entertain people, inspire people, educate people about themselves and others," says Lisa Erspamer, a veteran Winfrey producer tapped as OWN's chief programmer.

OWN has made deals for celebrity-driven reality shows: Finding Sarah, due this spring, features the Duchess of York, Sarah Ferguson, recovering from a scandal in which she was caught trying to sell access to her ex-husband, Prince Andrew. Country singer Shania Twain will go on TV to try to heal wounds caused by the husband who dumped her. Later in 2011, Ryan and Tatum O'Neal and Naomi and Wynonna Judd will mend parent-child relationships in separate shows.

If they seem similar to fare on many other cable networks, Winfrey says, "the distinction is always intention, and my intention is turning the dialog from bickering and blasting to daring and can-do. The vitriolic verbiage wears down viewers' goodwill," and rather than "exploit what's going on in someone's life,"OWN will take a more empathetic approach.

As a 50/50 partner in OWN, Discovery is mindful of hurting its fully owned TLC.

Chief operating officer Peter Liguori is quick to distinguish the two networks: "Oprah takes stars and makes them into real people. What TLC does is take real people and turns them into stars."

Starting with wide reach

Analysts predict OWN will have an easier time getting off the ground than most cable start-ups: It will start out in 85 million homes, 73% of the nation's total. (New York area's Cablevision signed up this week.)

"Certainly her devotees are going to check out her cable network," says Bill Carroll of Katz Media. "The real question is, does it have broader appeal? I don't think we'll really get the true answer until her talk show goes off the air."

Some point to the recent experience of another daytime doyenne, Martha Stewart, who left syndication for the greener pastures of cable on the Hallmark Channel and saw ratings for her show, and the network, collapse.

But Stewart was never as popular as Winfrey, and her show had faded years ago.

"Martha Stewart is a personality, and Oprah is a lifestyle or life force," Liguori says. "Martha could have a show or two, but Oprah's vision can power an entire network."

Syndication is 'fading away'

Cable analyst Derek Baine of SNL Kagan says Winfrey focusing exclusively on cable is not the risk it seems: The size of her audience, now at a little more than half its peak, is evidence that "the syndication market is just kind of fading away. There's an opportunity to take her brand and make a big asset of it, whereas if you leave it in syndication, it will gradually deteriorate as viewership declines."

And though Winfrey is giving up a huge payday, she's not exactly going to the bread line, with a net worth Forbes estimates at $2.4 billion.

"Expectations are going to be very high, (but) those who are realistic will look at it in context," Carroll says. "Coming out of the box, I think it's difficult for anyone with a new venture, especially on cable, where success is measured in a different way."

And Winfrey acknowledges the high hurdle she's set up for herself: "When you have success at your back, you have created a great expectation of people to continue that," she says, relaying an anecdote about Michael Jackson, who complained of never topping Thriller even as Bad was a huge seller.

"I'm ready to move on to whatever is the next thing and not continue to hold the moment of The Oprah Winfrey Show."