Rachel Miskowiec will be the new executive producer of
Disney/ABC's Katie when it returns this September for season two,
according to Vicki Dummer, executive VP of the ABC Media Group.
"Rachel Miskowiec is an incredibly passionate and
experienced veteran of daytime TV," said Dummer. "She is creative,
smart and a great leader. Rachel is fearless and competitive, and she truly
loves making daytime television. We are very excited to have her join the Katie team as we enter our second
season."
Miskowiec is the third executive producer on the freshman
talker. She follows Michael Morrison, who took over for Jeff Zucker in January,
after Zucker left to run CNN. Another Katie co-EP, Michael Bass, also
departed in April, although he has a long working relationship with Zucker and
was expected to follow him to CNN.
Other coexecutive producers on the show are Kathy Samuels,
who has been with the show since its launch, Matt Strauss and Ethan Nelson.
Couric also is an executive producer.
Miskowiec is a daytime vet, having executive produced Warner
Bros.' The Tyra Banks Show, for which she won two Daytime Emmys. She's
also executive produced Dr. Drew's
Lifechangers and OWN's Your Best Life
Now. She's also served as senior supervising producer on Twentieth's Judge
Hatchett, and supervising producer on Sony Pictures Television's Life
& Style. She also spent more than eight years on SPT's The Ricki
Lake Show, where she ended her run as supervising senior producer. Most
recently, she was a development exec at Telepictures, Warner Bros. Television's
first-run production arm.
Katie is wrapping its first season as the leading
rookie talker. At a 1.6 live plus same day household ratings average, according
to Nielsen in the week ended May 12, the show is only one-tenth of a ratings
point ahead of NBCUniversal's rookie, Steve Harvey. Harvey also
has been beating Katie in the daytime's key women 25-54 demographic at a
1.0 to Katie's 0.9. That those numbers are so close is significant
because Katie's afternoon clearances on ABC owned and affiliated
stations were far stronger than Harvey's
afternoon clearances on NBC-owned stations.
Deadline
first broke this story.
