Amid overall ratings struggles for its parent company Viacom’s portfolio of cable networks, TV Land is looking to build its ratings fortunes by repositioning itself as a comedy-centric network focusing on a 25-54 audience, which is a departure from its previous target audience of 50-plus baby boomers. The network has traded earlier, older-skewing original shows like Hot in Cleveland for new comedies slash dramas like Younger, starring Sutton Foster as a 40-year-old mother trying to pass herself off as 26 to land her dream job, and the upcoming  Lopez series, in which comedian George Lopez plays himself as a Latino comedian who tries to balance the spoils of his success with his humble beginnings. Leading the network’s programming charge is Keith Cox, TV Land’s executive vice president of development and original programming. Multichannel News programming editor R. Thomas Umstead and Cox spoke after the network’s upfront presentation in New York about the network’s repositioning, as well as some of the challenges it faces in a crowded programming environment. Here are some edited highlights.

MCN:How would you define the TV Land brand?

Keith Cox: The DNA for the channel has always been great comedies. Even with our acquisitions, we curated the best comedies that the broadcast networks offered. At the time, my role to augment that was to make multicam comedies like Hot in Cleveland that featured great casts and fun concepts. But now the TV landscape has become so crowded, with 400-plus shows. For comedies, it’s especially hard to get traction, unlike the great dramas that people are driven toward mostly because of serialized storytelling. Big things can happen in dramas — the killing off of main characters and other big surprises — that aren’t really done in comedy.

So where we mutated a bit is staying in comedy, but adding more dramatic elements; nobody’s really doing that in a half-hour sitcom. Our first foray into that was [producer] Darren Star’s Younger, and then we launched [dark comedy] Impastor, which has a big mystery element built in into it. So yes it’s an evolution, but it’s not a total rebrand because we’re still in the comedy space.

MCN:So if the brand has evolved, has your target audience changed as well from baby boomers over 50 to a younger audience?

KC: It was boomers, but they have aged, so now we’re looking at Gen X. We do like people with life experience … we sell adults 25-54, but we’re leaning more 18-49. We wanted to do something real and less fabricated, which is a risk, but it stands out for the audience.

MCN:How do you appeal to a younger audience while serving your core viewers?

KC: Through shows like Younger, which was our first soap and is working for us — we’ve just picked up our third season. With the Lopez show, I’ve always been a George Lopez fan and he knows how to push buttons but there is a lot of likeability there. He’s basically playing himself and he has a distinct voice. He really goes into some dark places, but it’s really funny. It’s a nice balance and it’s really a different genre and I’m excited about that.

MCN:What are the challenges you face as a programmer within a very crowded multichannel environment?

KC: There is a lot of TV in the marketplace and it’s hard to create urgency with the comedy genre. With Game of Thrones crazy stuff happens and people talk about it; The Walking Dead is eye-popping. Comedies are harder: they are there but you can catch them almost anytime, there isn’t as much urgency. People want spectacular television, so we need figure out how to add that drama into our comedies. You want to tell stories that invest the audience — we need to develop superfans. If you try to build it for everybody, it loses its voice.

There’s also a need for more diverse writers. That’s a challenge, but it’s an exciting challenge for us.

The realities of scripted TV show pitching, evaluating and promoting were shared with The Content Show attendees during a lively opening panel that followed a keynote conversation with Donny Deutsch Wednesday.

Pearlena Igbokwe (pictured, right), executive vice president of drama development for NBC Entertainment, had a popularly-tweeted comment when she estimated she heard 400 show pitches from July to October yearly. Of those, perhaps 50 scripts are ordered into development, eight shows gets pilot orders and four get series orders. “It’s quite a lottery,” she said.

Igbokwe, a former Showtime content executive, said broadcast networks are under competitive pressure to produce shows that don’t feel like traditional network fare, and don’t have the luxury some streamed series seem to have of audiences watching four or five episodes before deciding they like a show. NBC needs “eyepopping” first, second and third episodes “because every week you need to earn the viewer’s attention.”

Kim Rosenblum, EVP of digital, creative and marketing at Viacom-owned TV Land, said that network has evolved the way it approaches and markets original series from when Hot In Cleveland launched in 2010 and Younger debuted in 2015. TV Land is more willing now to make deals that have somewhat less favorable economics for the network in the first season -- provided the first season sets the stage for continued success in later seasons, she said.

Network marketers also must constantly go through social media sites looking for comments about a show and communicate with those fans and create a fear of missing out that will keep drawing in new viewers, Rosenblum said. “We go and read every comment on every social platform and find where the fans are and then just start to talk to them directly to try to snowball it, to try to get those people to talk about it, to bring up the next week and the next week,” she said. 

Shows also hope their stars will exploit social followings to help bring in viewers, panelists (questioned by Leftfield Entertainment CEO Brent Montgomery) said. Younger’s Hilary Duff, for example, can help by promoting the show, but then the network has to work and build on those new leads, not rely on Duff to do all the marketing, Rosenblum said.

Lisa Honig, senior EVP, program distribution, The Americas, for FremantleMedia (pictured, left), agreed that shows need to have buzz as part of the package and get talent to commit to help marketing. Chris Donahue, president of Paulist Productions, said original ideas are still paramount: his studio successfully pitched a series about cryogenics and what happens when frozen people come back to life.

Igbokwe stressed that the real key to successful scripted shows is great storytelling.

The Content Show continues today and tomorrow at The Park Central Hotel in midtown Manhattan.