The opening-night party for Oprah Winfrey’s new net work, OWN, is over and a hard, cold reality has begun to settle on the cable channel.
How is she doing now that the band has gone home and the kitchen is closed?
* Perhaps predictably, the most popular shows on OWN in the first few weeks are the ones with Oprah’s name in the title.
Tops on the list — judging by total viewership over the last two full weeks since OWN has been on the air — are “Your OWN Show: Oprah’s Search for the Next TV Star,” “Ask Oprah’s All Stars” and the No. 1 show “Season 25: Oprah Behind the Scenes.”
The documentary series “Oprah Behind the Scenes,” which takes viewers behind the cameras of the final season of “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” is still the network’s all-time ratings champ.
More than 1.1 million viewers tuned in to the first two episodes when they aired on New Year’s Day.
But since the series moved to a regular Friday time slot, it has dipped.
Last week, “Oprah Behind the Scenes” slid to 557,000 viewers.
* Overall, in Week 2, OWN has dipped about 20 percent among its target audience, women over 25 years old.
“Not even Oprah can be surprised at the decreases,” said Robert Seidman of ratings site tvbythenumbers.com. “She and other executives at [network co-owner] Discovery and OWN have been pretty public that they expect plenty of bumps in the road when it comes to ratings.”
The ratings are “a little lower than I’d thought it would be, but I don’t think it’s alarming,” says industry analyst Brad Adgate of Horizon Media. He pointed towards the abundance of network and cable series premieres this month, which is likely eating into OWN’s audience.
Although Adgate anticipates a viewer decline of 10 percent to 15 percent, he says it isn’t a “four-alarm fire.”
“The first weekend was huge — over 1 million viewers the first night and over 800,000 the second night — but I don’t know whether that’s sustainable right out of the box,” he said.
By last week, the average audience in prime time was 310,000 people.
* Oprah’s best friend Gayle King’s new daily morning show — a TV simulcast of her XM satellite radio show — which debuted last week, has not gotten off to a promising start.
Since its first day, the show’s numbers have been dropping — from 154,000 on Day 1 to 86,000 on Day 5.
* Reruns of “Dr. Phil,” which are running twice a day, are doing well, averaging 250,000 viewers every time.
That’s not bad for cable — and a bargain to boot, because it costs nothing to produce.