PEDAL PUSHER: Oprah Winfrey’s interviewwith Lance Armstrong, in which he will confess to doping, will air tomorrow and Friday nights. (
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Call it Oprah Winfrey’s “Jay Leno/Hugh Grant Moment.”
Winfrey’s two-part interview with disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong, a huge “get” in the TV news/entertainment world, could go a long way toward putting her cable network, OWN, on the map after two mediocre, money-losing years.
Winfrey herself — realizing this is a watershed moment for OWN — has pulled out all the stops to promote the Armstrong two-parter, sitting for an interview yesterday on pal Gayle King’s “CBS This Morning” and tweeting, three times, about the interview and even where to find OWN on the cable dial.
The Winfrey/Armstrong scenario recalls Jay Leno’s July 1995 interview with Grant, who’d been arrested with a Hollywood prostitute several weeks before. Leno’s opening salvo to Grant — “What the hell were you thinking?” — was that year’s “must-see” TV moment, and helped propel Leno’s second-place “Tonight Show” past rival David Letterman’s “Late Show” in the late-night race.
But while the Armstrong interview is likely to draw the biggest audience in OWN’s history, industry analysts say it still has a long way to go to become a “top-tier” cable network.
“It’s only one show, and the interview is over two nights — and they’re broadcasting seven days a week, 24 hours a day,” says Brad Adgate of Horizon Media. “In theory, [the Armstrong interview] is certainly going to be a positive — but I wouldn’t necessarily say that OWN’s audience is suddenly going to double overnight.”
The Armstrong interview was originally slated to air only tomorrow night, but another night was added (Friday) after it generated so much media buzz.
In essence, this gives OWN the chance to capitalize on its sudden exposure — something it failed to do following Winfrey’s touted interview last March with Whitney Houston’s daughter, Bobbi Kristina, just a month after her mother’s death at the age of 48.
That interview drew the biggest audience in OWN’s history — 3.5 million viewers — an audience Winfrey has failed to match ever since.
“This is the biggest thing Winfrey has done for her network — you have to go back to her days on her [syndicated] talk show to find something similar,” says Adgate. “She’s getting a lot of free press — it’s the magic of Oprah’s name everyone thought OWN would have when it launched two years ago.
“They’re headed in a positive direction, but it’s going to be a while for OWN to reach the expectations it had when it was launched.”
Marc Berman, editor-in-chief of TV Media Insights, thinks the Armstrong/OWN hype is just that — and will ring hollow when all is said and done.
“I don’t see OWN as a very quickly growing network,” he says. “It’s getting better ratings now, but that doesn’t mean it’s suddenly going to be like the Hugh Grant-on-‘Tonight’ scenario.
“You have to keep in mind that Oprah has had several big interviews since she launched OWN,” Berman says, referring not only to Bobbi Kristina but also to Winfrey’s sit-down with the elusive David Letterman, which aired earlier this month and drew only 710,000 viewers, according to Nielsen.
“Do I think this will push her over the top? Not necessarily,” Berman says. “It will help OWN and will give it momentum. But will it make OWN a keeper? No.”
“It’s a nice spike for [Winfrey] and is going to help the network, to some extent,” says Adgate.
“But there’s still a lot of work to be done in making OWN a top-tier cable network.”