Tension mounts. “Do you mind if we walk through a little exercise?” asks CEO Geraldine Laybourne, as she pushes back from the table, tugs at her black leather jacket and takes charge of the room. Laybourne opens a giant white work pad and engages her managers in a word-association game to zero in on the tone of each show–irreverent, introspective, bitchy, sexy. They work through the lineup. Three hours after they entered the room, the re-energized group has hashed out a hip, eclectic roster of animated shows that just might contain a buzz-creating hit after all. The leading contender? “Breakup Girl,” about a superhero who flies through the air and helps women escape doomed relationships.
It will take more than Breakup Girl’s superpowers to get Oxygen through the next few months. Oxygen is undertaking a task of daunting proportions: building a new cable network from the ground up, without relying on the reruns and old movies that have been used to start new channels in the past. Laybourne’s ambitious charge to her frazzled staff is to kick off with 55 hours of original shows per week. But any viewer of prime-time TV knows how hard it is to produce just one mildly entertaining half hour of television. Some staffers are already grumbling that there’s no way they can make their February deadline with sets unbuilt and talent still to be hired. Early creative efforts have already stumbled. Critics panned the Oxygen Web site when it debuted in May. The page designs weren’t bold enough, the content wasn’t rich enough and it was too tough to navigate.
Beyond the enormous creative challenges, the company faces a host of ugly business hurdles. Oxygen will be in 10 million homes to start off. But in New York and Los Angeles, where many important advertisers, TV critics, producers and actors live, viewers won’t be able to watch it, because Laybourne hasn’t been able to persuade the cable companies in those cities to sign up her new channel. Equally scary, Oxygen has landed only a couple of major advertisers, including Hewlett-Packard and children’s product company Right Start. And competitors like fast-growing Internet company iVillage are gaining credibility and backing as dominant forces in the women’s market. All the while the bicoastal media world is watching intently, relishing the prospect of the much-hyped venture’s stumbling out of the starting gate.
Despite the Himalayan obstacles, even skeptics aren’t counting Oxygen out. That’s largely because of Laybourne, 52, the programming whiz who turned kids’ channel Nickelodeon into an $8 billion brand and sparked a rebirth of the animation business. Her partners include sit-com phenoms Carsey-Werner-Mandabach (creators of “The Cosby Show,” “Roseanne” and “Third Rock From the Sun”). And there’s Oxygen’s nuclear weapon, Oprah Winfrey, one of the most powerful brand names in the entertainment industry. In addition to lending her stature, Winfrey will host “Oprah Goes Online,” where she will, as she puts it, “release her Internet shame” and help women conquer cyberspace. (Given Oprah’s sway over her fans, insiders say she could eventually have the same influence on the Web as she does on the book industry.) With heavyweight financial backers that include AOL and Microsoft cofounder Paul Allen, the company’s valuation–before a single show airs–is estimated at more than $1 billion.
For Laybourne, Oxygen is a high-risk attempt to re-energize her career. In the spring of 1998 the television executive was languishing in her position as head of Disney/ABC’s cable division. She had taken the job two years earlier, after 16 years with Nickelodeon, for a chance to launch new channels. But her efforts to get fresh projects off the ground floundered, so she quit and decided to try to do for women what she had done for kids at Nickelodeon. She named her new venture Oxygen. “It came from a sense that everybody needed more breathing room,” says Laybourne. “It felt like a good rallying cry.”
When she left Disney in May 1998, one of the first calls she got was from friend and TV producer Marcy Carsey. If Laybourne would form a network, the Hollywood producer promised, she, Tom Werner and Caryn Mandabach would develop the programming. The new partners spent the summer searching for a definitive punch to take Oxygen over the top. Finally, they found it. “It was like Marcy said ‘O’ and I said ‘prah’,” jokes Laybourne.
Oprah Winfrey, as it turned out, had been doing some musing of her own. Months earlier she had read about Laybourne’s exit from Disney in The New York Times. One quote from the departing executive about doing “something brave” so piqued the talk-show host’s curiosity that she wrote it out in the black leather journal that she keeps for inspiration. When Laybourne, Carsey and Mandabach plopped down on the sofas at Oprah’s Harpo Studios in Chicago and laid out their mission–a company to inspire and empower women–Winfrey was floored. That night she penned an additional entry in her journal. “I think some angels showed up today,” she wrote. “I recognized them because they spoke to me in my own language.” She signed on as a partner.
Oprah’s involvement made Laybourne’s project even sexier to backers. In the fall of 1998 Laybourne persuaded AOL to trade three of its top women’s sites for a stake in the company. And she persuaded cable giant TCI (now part of AT&T) to include Oxygen as part of its basic package, winning the nonexistent product entry into 7 million homes. Her daily call list read like a who’s who of media–newscasters, producers, studio executives, all wanting in on the action, with one caveat. “It was hilarious,” says Laybourne. “I thought these big shots wanted to come work with me. Then I realized they wanted me to hire their kids.”
Laybourne’s ambitions transcend simply starting a new-media empire. She likes to say she is trying to create a new type of workplace. At Nickelodeon she instituted afternoon recess to get the staff to loosen up. At Oxygen, Laybourne put a small conference table in her office that employees could commandeer for impromptu meetings. Walking in on one such meeting in progress, Laybourne threw up a fist and cheered, “Estrogen!” She listened in briefly, grabbed a stack of papers, then left her office to the staffers, taking her work into another room. She is flexible with parents, allowing some producers with children to work from home. Men make up about 40 percent of the company, but the overall vibe is decidedly chick-centric, from idea sheets posted at sitting eye level in bathroom stalls (“Did anyone remember to hang this by the urinals?” someone scribbled in the corner of one) to restaurant coupons in cute, woven baskets handed out as welcoming gifts to new employees. New staffers receive the company’s mission statement, “releasing the energy of women to do great things,” on a blue, wallet-size card.
There has been little time for group hugs lately, however, with a channel to get on the air. Laybourne’s days start with 7 a.m. boxing lessons. Office hours are packed with grinding budget reviews, programming meetings and crash courses on Internet technology. And most evenings are spent networking with millionaire power brokers. She and Winfrey recently had dinner with AT&T chairman Mike Armstrong, to discuss the network’s progress. Other recent late-night meetings have included CBS programming honcho Les Moonves and Oxygen investor and board member Paul Allen (they had a private screening of “Three Kings” at his home theater in Seattle before hashing over programming). And Laybourne is still locked in a daily back-and-forth with top cable executives, as she tries to persuade them to pick up the channel.
Her staff, which has grown to more than 300 people, is working just as hard. They’re still settling into new offices in the carved-out hull of an old New York cookie factory. As workmen hammer and drill in unfinished corners, producers are pasting together storyboards, technicians are fitting production bays and executives are trying to put the final schedule in place. The Internet team launched its revamped Web site last month, sprucing up the pages, adding content and making the site easier to get around. Oxygen’s team of lawyers is working late nights and weekends negotiating with potential advertisers like UPS, Procter & Gamble and BMW. (Each company declined to comment.) And the marketing staff is rolling out a splashy three-month print-and-television campaign, culminating with a $2 million spot during the Super Bowl, which airs three days before the cable launch.
But the marketing blitz ups the pressure on Oxygen to get the programming right. At a time when niche programming like MTV or Nick is all the rage, Oxygen is taking a remarkably broad aim: women of all ages and economic classes. The company is spending $450 million to build its stable of shows. That’s a lot for most cable channels, but it’s peanuts given the amount of original programming Oxygen is trying to produce. There will be no sitcoms or network-style dramas; they are too expensive to make. Instead the channel will feature more inexpensive talk, information and variety shows with a big emphasis on girl power.
The channel’s flagship show is “Pure Oxygen,” a potpourri of news, entertainment and lifestyle segments (a funky hybrid of the “Today” show and “The View”) shot live with an in-house DJ in Oxygen’s New York offices. “Oxygen.Comedy,” a block of sketch shorts and game shows, including a new version of the ’50s hit “I’ve Got a Secret,” is an alternative to the evening news. Teen show “Trackers” is driven by a roving network of girls, equipped with handheld digital cameras, creating segments on everything from music and fashion to getting into college. “X Chromosome,” a series of animated shorts, features cheeky shows like “Breakup Girl” and “Bitchy Bits.” Another, “Drawn From Life,” turns stories from real women around the country into mini-cartoon documentaries.
The experimental shows are balanced by more familiar formats. There is Oprah, who is hosting a Sunday-night talk show in addition to her show on the Internet. And actress Candice Bergen, formerly Murphy Brown, will host “Exhale,” a laid-back, “Charlie Rose”-type nightly talk show. And then there’s “Pajama Party,” a late-night weekend chat show where host, audience and guests hang out in their PJs and dish on life and love. Host Katie Puckrik, who originated the show in England, vows it will be as wild as she is. (For her interview at Oxygen she waltzed in wearing a loud paisley outfit, threw herself on the paisley carpet and declared, “No one else dressed to match the floor.”) But for viewers accustomed to gold-plated network production values, some shows may look ragged around the edges.
The hit makers at the Carsey-Werner studio have worked magic before. (They were the ones who picked an unknown Robin Williams to star in “Mork & Mindy.”) The question is, can they do for girl talk what they did for sitcoms? Especially when they are not doing it full time. The producers are still churning out weekly shows like “Third Rock From the Sun” and “That ’70s Show.” “We love it too much to give it up,” says Werner. Devoting equal energy to both network and cable will be tough.
For Laybourne, Oxygen has become an obsession. Every night before she goes to bed, she makes a list of the problems she has to solve the next day. She often wakes up around 3 a.m. to add to the list. In the mornings she tacks on a few more worries. Looking at the chaos swirling around her, it’s hard to imagine the madness will ever gel into something that works. But Laybourne has stared down skeptics before and won. She’s confident she and her star partners can breathe life into Oxygen.
