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.”

BET tonight (April 27) will hold its network upfront presentation in New York as it looks to further cement its position as the industry’s leading brand for African American viewers. Recently named one of Viacom’s six core brands that the company will put its resources behind, BET is focused on creating quality, original scripted series and movies that it hopes will help thwart increased competition from entertainment-based cable networks looking to reach an African-American audience that watches more television than any other group.

Overall the network plans to increase its original programming lineup by 40% in 2017 with projects like The Bobby Brown Story, a  limited series inspired by the network's successful The New Edition Story mini-series.

BET CEO Debra Lee recently spoke to Multichannel News programming editor R. Thomas Umstead about the network’s brand and its programming strategy heading into the upfronts.

MCN: What does Viacom’s naming of BET as one of its six core brands mean for the network’s brand?

DL: It's really great to be named as one of the six flagship brands for Viacom, and I think that just speaks to the fact that we're the premiere destination for African-Americans, and we have been for a long time. We have been the number one cable network for African-American viewers 18 to 49 for 16 consecutive years, and a top 20 ad-supported cable network for people 18 to 49, so I think that’s part of the recognition by Viacom as to how important our brand is and what it means. I think it's important what BET Networks is to our culture -- we're relevant, radically bold and we're fun -- and I think our audience expects that from us. Our audience sets the trend for not only black culture but culture in general. We are the most social and more engaged audience, so it's a great recognition by our parent company. We've done several upfront presentations in smaller venues and people are responding to us.

MCN: With a number of mainstream audiences developing content to reach African-American viewers, is this one of the most competitive environments in which to reach your target audience?

DL: It gets more competitive every year. I mean 37 years ago when BET started, we were the only network targeting this audience and I'm very proud of that. And over the years other networks have learned what we've always known; that our audience is engaged and are big TV watchers and they are very social. They set the trends and define pop culture, so you know we've seen more competition year in and year out. But competition makes the leaders stronger and that continues to happen. We see what other people are doing -- a network may have a black-targeted night once a week, or a couple of hours of black programming. We're one of the few networks that targets this audience 24 hours a day.

MCN: The network has stepped up its development of scripted programming in recent years. How important has that been in defining the BET brand?

DL: Twelve years ago when I took over as CEO of BET I promised our audience premium scripted programming, and I kept that promise with shows like The Game, Being Mary Jane, Real Husbands of Hollywood. This year we launched The Quad and Rebel, as well as [limited series] Madiba and our huge success with New Edition. So I've kept I've kept my word and now our audience expects high quality scripted programming from us. We also do some unscripted, but scripted really gives us a chance to be authentic and create drama from a storyline as opposed to a reality setting. And so we're going to continue to do that -- we're going to double down on biopics given the success of The New Edition Story with 29 million viewers over three nights.We're going to do The Bobby Brown Story with the same writing that we did New Edition. We have something called Death Row Chronicles which is a six-part look at Death Row Records, so we’re going to continue to tell these authentic stories. Overall we're going to have over 40 percent more original hours of programming going into this upfront. Viewers always wanted us to look like ABC or NBC and have high quality scripted programming, but we will also have talk shows and game shows and everything else so I think you'll see a nice mix.

MCN: Amid the success BET has had recently on the programming side, I would be remiss if I didn’t ask about recent network programming executive departures. Can you talk about what happened and what’s happening within the department going forward?

DL: Well you know there are always changes and so we did have some changes in our programming leadership. [BET senior vice president of specials, music programming and news] Connie Orlando is the head of programming -- she's been here a long time and she's done scripted and unscripted programming. She was put in charge of our tentpoles so she's been doing that for a couple of years running the BET Awards and some of our other big tent poles. So I'm really excited about Connie's new leadership and what she brings to the team.

MCN: What is your sense as to how strong the upfront will be for BET and for cable?

DL: People realize how important our audience is, and you mentioned how many other networks are aiming for this audience. So I think it’s going to be a strong upfront -- [advertisers] are excited to hear about the new Viacom and about the six flagship brands, and to hear what our individual strategies are. So I think it's going to be a good year for cable and especially for BET. One thing I haven’t mentioned is Centric TV. It’s being refreshed as BET Her, which will be the name of it going forward. We think this better aligns Centric with the BET flagship brand. It’s been a destination for African-American women 25 to 54 and we’re going to continue to service her through this channel. So now we’re going to have BET, BET Her, BET Jazz, BET Soul as our network portfolio. I’m really excited about that.

MCN: Will you look to build on BET’s presence on the digital front in 2017?

DL: Yes. We’re always looking at OTT and other digital opportunities because we want to be everywhere our audience is. The technology is changing so much that we always try to keep up, whether that's on iTunes, Netflix or other OTT offerings. We’re doing our first ever Black Twitter impact study. Black Twitter is such an important part of conversation and it really drives mainstream culture, so we've joined forces with Twitter to look at this more carefully and we're going to release the findings with Twitter. We just know it's such a powerful mechanism for our audience and there's a strong correlation between tweeting and watching live TV. So digital is really important to us and along with Viacom -- we're looking at ways to produce more digital content and how to service that audience better.

BET’s The New Edition Story hit the right notes with viewers, averaging 4.2 million viewers in its Thursday night finale on the network and averaging over 4 million viewers for its three-night run.

The finale of the six-hour miniseries, which followed the lives of the members of the classic R&B group New Edition, matched the 4.2 million viewers that tuned into the Tuesday night’s series opener. Wednesday night’s episode two averaged 3.9 viewers, according to Nielsen.

The series also dominated social media, averaging the most social media interactions on television during its three-night run. Last night’s episode drew 2.3 million Facebook and Twitter posts from 975,000 unique accounts, according to Nielsen.

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Tuesday’s premiere episode of BET’s The New Edition Story belted out 4.2 million viewers, the network said Wednesday.

The first episode of the three-part series, which follows the lives of 1980s R&B group New Edition, was the most watched premiere for a BET original series since the 2012 season premiere of The Game, which drew 5.3 million viewers, according to BET.

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The New Edition Story also averaged 2.5 million adults 18-49 in its premiere. Including a simulcast on Centric, the episode drew 4.4 million viewers and 2.6 million viewers in the 18-49 demo, said the network. 

Part two of the series premieres tonight, with the finale airing on Thursday night, according to the network.

Last night’s premiere of BET’s The New Edition Story drew the most interactions on social media for any television show on Tuesday, accoding to Nielsen.

The show, the first of three episodes chronicling the exploits of legendary R&B music group New Edition, drew more than 2.1 million interactions across Facebook and Twitter from 936,000 unique social media accounts to easily top all TV shows airing yesterday, according to Nielsen's daily social content ratings report.

REVIEW: The New Edition Story

The New Edition Story’s final two episodes will air tonight and Thursday, according to BET.

NBC’s This Is Us drew 378,000 social media interactions, followed by USA Network’s WWE SmackDown! (177,000), MTV’s Teen Wolf (84,000) and The CW’s The Flash (67,000).

ESPN2’s live coverage of the Kansas/West Virginia college basketball game was the most social live sports event of the day, averaging 262,000 social media interactions, according to Nielsen.

BET brings the lives and career of R&B and hip-hop group New Edition to life in this new limited (six-hour) series.

The New Edition Story chronicles the 1980s Boston-area singers as they grow from boys looking to land a record deal to men in control of their own careers. Two different sets of actors play the six members — Ronnie DeVoe, Bobby Brown, Ricky Bell, Michael Bivins, Johnny Gill and Ralph Tresvant — as kids and young adults.

The story begins with four members of the band securing a local talent manager Brook Payne (Wood Harris), successfully auditioning for him one night in a dark alley as he leaves a local club.

Payne eventually adds his nephew to the group — the original New Edition — and it quickly gains a following, playing in local clubs and arenas. Record label owner Maurice Starr (Faizon Love) steps in and their careers catapult.

As they gain national attention, rivalries within the group threaten to tear them apart. Their moms also press management to pay the kids more.

BET does a good job weaving in numerous plot developments and nicely transitions the New Edition kid actors to the teen versions during a scene where the group is onstage performing one of their many hit songs. New Edition fans will also appreciate the soundtrack.