When it comes to musical icons, there are few names and personalities bigger than Michael Jackson, Elvis Presley, The Notorious B.I.G, New Edition or Tupac Shakur.

On cable, those artists are among many music legends featured in original movie biopics, scripted series and limited series that are aimed at longtime fans, but also bring young, diverse audiences to their respective networks.

Original movies such as Lifetime’s Michael Jackson: Searching for Neverland, limited scripted series like CMT’s Sun Records — about when Presley, Johnny Cash, Jerry Lee Lewis and Carl Perkins were starting out at the famed Nashville studios — and miniseries like BET’s The New Edition Story are giving viewers shows to tap their feet to while illuminating the lives of favorite musical performers.

“Biopics on their own have always been a way to do a true story, and with music added, it just elevates the entertainment value,” Tanya Lopez, Lifetime’s senior vice president of original movies, said. “I think people come to these shows to learn something different about these artists — it’s not just Behind the Music,” referring to VH1’s venerable music-documentary series.

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Though music biopics are not new to the television landscape, networks have recently turned up the volume on the genre, especially with more recent artists (than, say, The Beatles) intriguing both younger and older viewers. The more contemporary music stars have a built-in audience from millions of social-media followers — and the older stars are being rediscovered by young millennials.

Lopez said the network’s musical biopics — which includes this past February’s Britney Ever After, on the life and career of Britney Spears, and previous films showcasing R&B legends Toni Braxton and Whitney Houston — have appealed to younger, more diverse viewers that extend beyond Lifetime’s target demo of women 25-54.

Connecting With Music Fans
“It’s an audience that was really connected to music and, more specifically, to the period when they listened to that artist’s music,” she said.

BET’s January three-part miniseries The New Edition Story, about the 1980s R&B group, drew more than 29 million viewers across its three-night run, many of them young viewers discovering the group for the first time.

BET CEO Debra Lee said the series combined the group’s triumphs and tribulations over the years with familiar songs that appealed to a broad cross-section of viewers in a scripted format that tends to underscore the drama of the storytelling better than a traditional documentary feature.

The series’ success has led BET to develop a spinoff miniseries about New Edition member Bobby Brown.

“Scripted really gives us a chance to be authentic and create drama from a storyline, as opposed to a reality setting,” Lee said.

Of course, viewers who watch biographical flicks about music stars expect artists’ top hits to be part of the soundtrack. But music isn’t always needed to convey the movie’s message. Michael Jackson: Searching for Neverland, for example, focused more on Jackson’s relationship with his three children than on the King of Pop’s musical portfolio. It pulled in 2 million viewers for the May 29 premiere, Lifetime’s second biggest original movie of the year behind the January remake of Beaches, according to Lopez.

“When you’re talking about biopics on these musical artists, the challenge is to tell a part of the story that no one has heard,” Lopez said. “This was more about his personal life than his entertainment life where he was actually creating and performing music, but you can still use the musical star that is Jackson to grab the audience’s attention.”

USA Network will dance to a different beat with the upcoming limited series about the life and death of hip hop icons Biggie “Notorious B.I.G.” Smalls and Tupac Shakur. The true-crime anthology series, Unsolved: The Murders of Tupac and the Notorious B.I.G., delves into the police investigations of the 1996 fatal shooting of Shakur and the 1997 murder of Smalls.

Alex Sepiol, USA’s senior vice president of development, said the series, slated to debut in 2018, hopes to draw fans of mysteries, period dramas and the music industry, as well as fans of the two artists.

“Ideally there are a lot of entry points for people … it’s a fascinating investigation and case that intersects with these distinctly American icons of Biggie and Tupac,” Sepiol said. “It’s finding that overlap of a really good mystery and compelling narrative that also touches on the world of hip hop.”

Docuseries as Film Fodder
The success of these productions has cable executives looking in-house for inspiration and material for new music biopics.

TV One, for example, is looking to convert episodes of its long-running Unsung documentary series into scripted biopics after finding ratings success with the 2016 movie Love Under New Management: The Miki Howard Story, which became the network’s most widely viewed original movie, according to officials.

TV One is planning two 2018 Unsung-influenced movies based on R&B groups DeBarge and Xscape, as well as a biopic this year about Bobbi Kristina, the daughter of Whitney Houston and Bobby Brown.

“Our Unsung movies are setting the standard for biopics of music artists,” D’Angela Proctor, TV One senior vice president of original programming and production, said. “We have a treasure trove of musical shows from Unsung to build our movies around.”

Get complete coverage of the 2016 TCA Summer Tour.

Beverly Hills, Calif.—Eight panelists affiliated with shows on El Rey, Starz, TV One and WGN America tore into the multifaceted issues of TV diversity during a vibrant, insight-packed panel at the TCA summer press tour.

El Rey founder and chairman Robert Rodriguez delivered a brief introduction to the session. “Cable has made great strides,” he said. “There’s never been a more important time to build cultural understanding of people and working together.”

Panelists spent ample time talking about the positives — more shows with diverse casts on air, multiplying outlets, more people of color involved behind the scenes — but also brought to light the ongoing struggle to reflect America in full.

“The way the system is set up, in order to get a job or be able to vote on awards, it’s all just old practices that don’t suit us at all,” said Victoria Mahoney, a director with credits on feature films as well as TV series like Starz’s Survivor’s Remorse and OWN’s Queen Sugar.

“The old guard’s got to let go of their grip a little bit because that’s not the way the world looks,” said Jurnee Smollett-Bell, who stars on WGN America’s Underground. “Storytellers have a right to express what’s inside of them … and consumers and viewers have a right to see themselves.”

Mahoney noted that she is among the 4% of overall directors who are women of color, according to recent guild surveys. “I’ve never been in the bottom 4% of anything in my life,” she quipped.

D’Angela Proctor, senior vice president of original programming and production for TV One, said the executive suite is another area with a lot of room for improvement.

“We have to be at the table at every single level” for truly inclusive programming to permeate the TV business, she said.

Read more at broadcastingcable.com.

TV One’s acquisition of the cable rights to Fox broadcasting’s hit series Empire is a “game changer” for the 12-year old network, TV One president Brad Siegel said during the network’s Thursday morning upfront breakfast event.

As part of the network’s major deal with 20th Century Fox Television, the African-American targeted network in May will air every episode from the current season of Empire leading up to the sophomore series’ May 18 finale on Fox.

In addition, TV One will run episodes from the first and second seasons of the music-themed drama starring Terrence Howard and Taraji P. Henson throughout the summer, according to Siegel.

The deal, terms of which were not disclosed, is the biggest acquisition for the 12-year old network, which is known mostly for its original docu-series such as Unsung as well as classic sitcoms such as Sanford & Son. Siegel told Multichannel News that the network had been negotiating with series producer 20th Century Fox Television for two months before landing the deal.

“For TV One, to be the home for the number one drama on television that coincidently happens to be centered around an African-American family and has the largest African American audience, is a game changer,” said Siegel. “There’s no more perfect show for TV One.”

The Empire deal was one of several programming announcements made during TV One’s upfront presentation. On the original movie front, the network will air 26 tele-films in 2016, including 14 straight weeks of original films from Memorial Day to Labor Day, according to D’Angela Proctor, TV One senior vice president of original programming and production. 

The network will also launch several new reality series including Sneaker Pawn, which follows 17-year old entrepreneur Chase Reed’s New York-based sneaker business; and Family Bond, a docu-series that follows a family-owned bail bonding company.

TV One will also jump into the game show genre with The Dating Games, in which groups of families and friends compete against each other to correctly answer questions about the actions of two people on a date, Proctor said.

Scary Halloween-themed programming may be dead and buried until next year, but there’s still a lot of frightful content currently on cable channels featuring real-life blood, murder and mayhem — and women viewers can’t get enough of it.

True-crime reality series with such ominous titles as Fatal Vows, Homicide Hunter, Snapped and Fatal Attraction are killing with female viewers who can’t stop watching dramatic re-enactments of grisly murders committed by real-life women who make fictional horror movie characters like Freddy Kreuger and Jason Voorhees seem rational by comparison.

Witness an episode of Investigation Discovery’s docuseries Deadly Women, in which a professional female wrestler is sentenced to 759 years in prison for a series of grisly murders of mostly elderly women, committed out of a longstanding resentment felt for an unloving, abusive and mostly absent mother.

“Fiction can’t compare with human nature,” Henry Schleiff, Investigation Discovery, American Heroes Channel and Destination America group president, said. “We can’t make these stories up.”

GUILTY PLEASURE

True crime-based reality content is a guilty pleasure for women viewers, who are just as interested in the sins leading up to the crimes — such as jealousy, betrayal or infidelity — as the acts themselves or the repercussions that follow, network executives said.

“It is the ultimate drama with the ultimate stakes, and that is why it has broad appeal with women,” Rod Aissa, executive vice president of original programming and development for Oxygen Media, said. “The themes within an episode — whether it’s sin, jealousy, love or relationships — are themes that women like in their programming, and make it incredibly relatable to them.”

The true-crime reality genre is in effect an off shoot of the popular crime genre that has always drawn big audiences in mass entertainment, from TV shows to movies to books.

True crime “is a universal theme and genre ... if you look at what’s coming to a movie theater virtually every week, in addition to the tentpole action fi lm, it’s usually a movie in the crime genre,” Schleiff said. “If you look at this week’s New York Times book list, 10 of the top 15 [bestsellers] were in the mystery/suspense/crime category, so it’s not hard to see why it works on television.”

On the small screen, scripted crime procedurals such as NBC’s Law & Order franchise, CBS’s CSI and NCIS franchises and Criminal Minds, ABC’s Castle and HBO’s True Detective are popular with both men and women due to the fast-paced action, compelling storylines and attractive characters.

But it’s unscripted true crime dramas based on real crimes affecting real people that have increasing appeal specifically to women.

“Women have a unique intuition — they love the twists and turns, as well as the high stakes in emotionally compelling stories,” Schleiff said. “Most of all, they love the fact that these stories are real. This is not another scripted drama.”

That bodes well for Investigation Discovery, which produces more than 650 hours of true-crime programming each year, including such salacious titles as Wives With Knives, Who the (Bleep) Did I Marry? and Southern Fried Homicide. The network’s true-crime focus has helped make ID the most watched cable network among adult women (age 25-54) for September on a Nielsen live-plus-three-day basis, according to ID.

Catchy show titles and top-name talent — such stars as Roseanne Barr (Momsters), Susan Lucci (Deadly Affairs) and Wendy Williams (Death by Gossip) host shows on the networks, and Barbara Walters's American Scandal With Barbara Walters premieres tonight (Nov. 2)  — are the secret to ID’s success, according to Schleiff.

The network even has a social-media website dubbed IDaddicts.com, in which mostly female viewers talk about their “addiction” to ID’s programming. “It’s not unusual for viewers to watch three, four and five hours of ID at a time,” Schleiff said.

Another long-running show, Oxygen’s Snapped — which features women who have killed or maimed their spouses and lovers — has been successful because it showcases all the elements of a crime so that viewers can determine who is ultimately responsible, according to Aissa. Now in its 11th year, Snapped remains one of Oxygen’s most-watched programs and has spawned a pair of spinoff s: Snapped: Killer Couples and Snapped: She Made Me Do It.

“While the crimes more often than not are very dark, the nature or why they got to the point of where they have appeal to women viewers,” Aissa said. “It’s all rooted in themes of love and relationships — there’s usually a sense of a love gone wrong, of some kind of betrayal, or a longing for a better life. Watching those things go bad has appeal.”

Viewers also have a need to see justice meted out to the perpetrators — whether that comes from the police or those affected by the crime — D’Angela Proctor, head of original programming and production at TV One. The network’s Fatal Attraction, which profiles true life stories of women whose lives are ruined by the men they love, always ends with the bad guy going to jail, she said.

Not surprisingly, women make up more than 60% of Fatal Attraction’s audience, per TV One.

“What these true-crime dramas give you is a sense that there is justice in the world and that all can be right,” Proctor said.

Added Oxygen’s Aissa: “What women love is that there is an outcome and justice is served — someone is held responsible for someone’s murder, and that’s complete satiation for viewers. It’s empowering to watch justice get done.”

ID’s Schleiff also said the shows provide opportunities for women to learn what to do — and more importantly what not to do — when faced with situations depicted in the shows.

“[Viewers] feel that they can learn something, whether it’s through a show about stalking or whether we do a show about crime on the Internet,” he said. “Not everything we do is going to have a morality lesson, but there is a huge amount of learning that comes out of these shows.”

A&E’s The First 48 Hours tackles the desperate hunt for a killer, based on evidence found at the crime scene, over a two-day period. One of the longest-running true-crime series, the show — now in its 14th season — ranks as the top nonfiction crime/justice series on cable, averaging 1.4 million viewers.

“It’s that kind of play-along fun of solving something, versus just an action-oriented program that has a female appeal,” Elaine Frontain Bryant, executive vice president of programming for A&E, said. “Also, the authentic nature in which we tell the stories makes you feel like you are there along with it.”

Executives said there’s no end in sight to the genre, as female viewers in particular continue to gravitate to the strange but alluring mix of emotion, blood, death and justice. TV One later this year will debut a new series, Justice by Any Means, which spotlights people who take matters into their own hands to get justice for their loved ones, according to Proctor.

Oxygen’s Aissa said the network is looking at other opportunities to play in a genre in an effort to target younger female viewers, but would not reveal specifics.

PLENTY OF FODDER

With the amount of salacious headlines generated everyday around the world, ID’s Schlieff said there will always be an appetite for true-crime stories on television.

“Just pick up a consumer newspaper, and I guarantee you that there’s a front-page or second-page story in this genre,” he said. “We have a $3 billion marketing budget that comes from the incredible support we get from all of the newspapers and the magazines in the world who write about a crime, and to the extent they promote it, they’re also promoting our network and the genre.”

RATINGS CHARTS

Crime Pays

Reality shows based on true crime have been a ratings magnet for Investigation Discovery in its appeal to women aged 18-34. With 653 hours of original programming dedicated to the genre, the network is No. 3 in the demo this year on a total-day basis, behind USA Network and HGTV.

Network                       Women 18-34 Viewers (000)
USA Network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 229
HGTV . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224
Investigation Discovery . . . . . . . . . 206
Adult Swim . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201
TNT . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189
Nick at Nite . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 185
Nickelodeon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178
TBS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165
Food Network . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159
Disney Channel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158

SOURCE: Nielsen

Reality’s Most Wanted

A snapshot of how several true-crime reality series on basic cable stack up within the female 25-54 demo:

Program                          Network                       Viewers *
The First 48 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A&E. . . . . . . . . . . . .424
Nightwatch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A&E. . . . . . . . . . . . . 370
Homicide Hunter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ID . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 313
Fatal Vows . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ID . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261
Snapped . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Oxygen . . . . . . . . . . . 161
Snapped: Killer Couples . . . . . . . . . . Oxygen . . . . . . . . . . . 141
For My Man . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . TV One . . . . . . . . . . . 106
Fatal Attraction. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . TV One . . . . . . . . . . . 103
Snapped: She Made Me Do It . . . . . . . Oxygen . . . . . . . . . . . .71
* Women viewers 25-54 on a live-plus-same-day basis, in thousands

SOURCE: Nielsen

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While multicultural cable TV series have been getting all the press recently, made-for-TV movies with people of color both in front of and behind the camera are very quietly receiving major play on a number of cable networks and streaming services.

Recent multicultural-themed original cable movies have drawn both critical acclaim and large audiences. HBO’s Bessie, starring Queen Latifah as blues artist Bessie Smith, drew 13 Emmy nominations this past July — the most for any made-for-cable movie.

Lifetime’s Whitney, which chronicled the life of the iconic performer Whitney Houston, drew 5.1 million viewers this past January, the biggest audience for an original cable movie this year other than those on kids-targeted Disney Channel.

Lifetime has produced several original films in the last three years featuring predominantly African-American actors and actresses, in an effort to reach African-American women, who represent 36% of the network’s movie audience.

Lifetime senior vice president of original movies Tanya Lopez said movies such as Whitney — as well as Trip to Bountiful, based on the popular play of the same name and starring Cicely Tyson, and an African-American version of 1989’s Steel Magnolias — super-serve that already strong base.

As many as three multicultural-themed movies are being developed for Lifetime and Lifetime Movie Network, she added, though she would not reveal specifics.

TV One, responding to viewer requests for more storytelling, is airing a monthly movie series. D’Angela Proctor, the network’s head of original programing, said original movies allows TV One to develop stories around universal themes that appeal to a wider swath of viewers than a more tightly-focused scripted series.

Original movies, such as the network’s upcoming Runaway Island and Girlfriends Getaway 2, also provide the network with content that has a long shelf life and can work well on various platforms, she added.

UP, formerly Gospel Music Channel, has consistently delivered movies featuring people of color in prominent roles as it looks to broaden its audience base. It recently teamed with actor-producer Robert Townsend on a July basketball-themed film, Playin’ for Love (see Q&A with Townsend), and is developing several movies, including three holiday films with diverse casts: My Christmas Wish, Angels in the Snow and Marry US for Christmas, Barbara Fisher, senior vice president of original programming for UP network, said.

Networks have also used original movies as pilots for potential scripted series. BET’s 2013 airing of original drama Being Mary Jane was so successful that the network turned the Gabrielle Union starrer into a scripted series, with its third season now in production.

“These long leads not only provide great content for us, but also give us an indication of whether this is something we can take further and make into a series,” BET president of programming Stephen Hill said.

Added UP’s Fisher: “There’s not enough people pitching me series with diverse casts or diverse leads, so it’s a great way for me to go back to our movies, which already have that, and use them as possibilities for expanding into series.”