On New Year’s Day 2011, OWN went live in 80 million households across the country, replacing the channel Discovery Health. Though it was an upstart network, it had legacy cred—Oprah’s star power and an investment of $500 million from Discovery Communications. “We were attempting to do something that had never been done before,” says Erik Logan, who became the president of OWN six months after its launch.
The goal was to “take the idea of a person and embody her belief structure and vision” in every aspect of the network, he says. “Everything that makes the brand of Oprah, we wanted to translate that into a cable channel across over 8,000 hours of content.” As Logan and his colleagues found out, that proved to be a more complicated endeavor—“very, very daunting” he repeats over the phone—than anticipated.
A proud Oklahoman, the 47-year-old Logan began working for Winfrey 10 years ago when she hired him to be the EVP of her production company, Harpo Studios, and later joined OWN where he soon became president. In our multiple conversations, Logan makes no qualms about the network’s early struggles; he often refers to them in PR speak as “big learnings.”
The network’s initial slate of programming wrestled with a crisis of identity: a below-average Rosie O’Donnell talk show, a docu-series from Lisa Ling, and a batch of dull reality TV duds featuring Tatum O’Neil, Shania Twain, and the Judd family. There was also Oprah’s Lifeclass—where the once Queen of Daytime offered guidance on, as she has often phrased it, how to “live your best life.” (One complication upon launching OWN was that it couldn’t actually get Oprah on the network until her noncompete had expired with broadcasters; Lifeclass premiered 10 months after the initial launch.)
Still, despite the lineup of stars, the shows didn’t quite connect with the network’s meager audience. “I was so misled in my thinking. I thought I was going to create a network that was Super Soul Sunday all day long,” Winfrey said in an interview last year. “I thought I was going to bring this spiritual consciousness–awakening channel!” Her impulses, however misplaced, were clear. “I was going to be the Anthony Bourdain of spirituality.” But ratings were anemic, and relevancy—Could OWN be a conversation starter? Could the channel pump out a different kind of Prestige TV?—eluded the grasp of executives.
When I ask Logan why he thinks relying so greatly on reality TV and self-empowerment programming failed, he plays it straight. “I don’t know,” he says. “I think we were more focused on trying to find what could work than trying to diagnose what didn’t. There is a saying that Oprah has—‘What happens to you happens for you.’” Those early struggles, he says, helped the network better understand its intention (a favorite buzzword of Winfrey’s) and who exactly it was speaking to: black women.
During March of its sophomore year, OWN aired one of its most watched episodes to date—an Oprah’s Next Chapter interview with Bobbi Kristina. It was the first full-length interview she’d given since her mother, R&B singer Whitney Houston, was found dead in a bathtub at the Beverly Hilton Hotel the month prior. It pulled in just north of 3.5 million viewers. “What it said to me was, if we get the content right they will find you,” Logan says. From there, the network leaned in and found comparable success with Iyanla Vanzant’s no-holds-barred brand of TV therapy on Fix My Life. It remains the most watched unscripted series on OWN, and Vanzant one of its most fiery and intriguing figures.
For Logan, that codified the path—OWN had found an unexpected route. “That wasn’t the intention of the network going into this, to talk to the African American viewer,” he admits. After Fix My Life aired in 2012—the two-episode premiere about Basketball Wives star Evelyn Lozada pulled in an average of 1.5 million viewers—Winfrey called Logan immediately. “She says to me, ‘Listen, that’s all I got. If this doesn’t work, I don’t know what works. If this is it, I know nothing about television.’ It was one of those damn-the-torpedoes kind of moments. Obviously it was a huge success, but there are those moments you have with her.”
It was the network’s next jump that would turn out to be its most formative. In a partnership with Tyler Perry, OWN applied its most paramount lesson from Fix My Life: It would now target black women through a scripted series format. Perry quickly midwifed—as creator, writer, and director—the soapy The Haves and Have Nots and trite platitudinal working-class comedies like Love Thy Neighbor.
The network was getting traction. OWN ended the year “cash-flow positive,” according to Discovery CEO David Zaslav. Eventually, Perry had four scripted shows under his aegis, proving he could guarantee a fiercely loyal audience. (Last year in a surprise move, Perry decided to leave the network and inked a film and TV deal with Viacom for an undisclosed amount; new episodes of his shows will continue to air on OWN through 2020.)
Winfrey now says OWN is in its “best place ever”—a spot that has allowed her to access a long-desired dream: “elevated premium scripted storytelling.” (Winfrey declined to be interviewed for the article.) This is where Queen Sugar, the Ava DuVernay-directed austral drama about the Bordelon family and Greenleaf, the megachurch series set in Memphis (on which Winfrey has a small role) come into play. They became not just the standout shows on the network but two of the best dramas on TV—offering nuanced and knotty sketches of black Southern life. Both are among the top five original scripted series on ad-supported cable for women 25-54.
In OWN’s Greenleaf, a megachurch drama set in Memphis, Lynn Whitfield plays Lady Mae and Keith David is Bishop Greenleaf.
DuVernay, who was pursued by other networks before choosing OWN, tells me she was “honored to be asked to carve out a new kind of story for a network that wanted to turn a corner.” When she began to envision the show, after working with Winfrey on the 2014 film Selma, she says her hope for it was simple: “To connect with an audience. To find an audience. And to have them stay. To engage. To care about the characters in the way that I have cared about television families in the past.” DuVernay is all gratitude when it comes to discussing the show’s enduring influence among fans. “So to have that now is quite dreamy.”
The arrival and sustained praise for Queen Sugar (based on the novel of the same name by Natalie Baszile) and Greenleaf signaled an official sea change for the network: In addition to renewing its marquee scripted series, Winfrey signed high-profile first-look deals with DuVernay and Packer, announced a new show from Brock Akil (what became Love Is___), and greenlit a coming-of-age drama set in South Florida from McCraney, on which Michael B. Jordan will serve as an executive producer.
In giving DuVernay the first-look deal, Winfrey also has found a successor. Her superpower on daytime TV—the thing that made her so huge—was being at once unapologetically black and relatable for all, which DuVernay pulls off with equal aplomb.
While working on Moonlight, McCraney met with several networks—including Netflix, who wanted the project but was outbid by OWN. According to him, he wanted his first foray into TV to be on a network that genuinely fostered his vision. In meeting with OWN brass, Winfrey wasn’t expected to be in attendance, but, to his surprise, there she was. “She came in and sat right in front of me, and from the start was wanting to open the story up and understand what it was about,” he tells me when I reach him by phone in Los Angeles. “Almost immediately she began trying to find people and ways to make it work and happen. She was just instantly looking at, ‘What’s the frame here?’ Like, ‘If this is a portrait, what kind of frame to do we use? How do we put the right support around it? What’s the best gallery for it? Is there a gallery?’ Whenever that happens—and it’s rare that it does—it’s a clear sign that someone has already invested their heart in it. They’ve already invested in it as not just something else to add to a list of things that they have, but it’s something that they want to get behind and present to our people, to people who they feel need this, not necessarily just want it.”