Could you say a bit about your promotion and your career at USA?

    The promotion was actually quite flattering. I’ve been here since fetal life. In 15 years here, I’ve had every position except serf. It’s daunting but it’s fun. 
   I certainly didn’t dream in school of being in TV research. I actually went to film school. It’s not really the research guys who get the groupies.

USA was back on top last month. Why is that? Has the network carved out a new identity?

    For a long time  all you’d read in the press was, "USA down." So now we’re "USA, down from last year, but No.1." But I think it’s a shift in focus. We’re moving away from some of those audiences who don’t speak to our core.
    What’s worked is that we have become a more 25-54 network. If you look at what we did last year, excluding wrestling, we’re up 13 percent in 25-54 this February compared to last February.
   All our programming now speaks to that audience. That’s nice to see, especially when you look at some of these other networks. You look at their acquisitions and you scratch your head and say, "What are they going to be when they grow up?"

What does a general interest cable network have to do to distinguish itself from all the similar cable networks? From broadcast networks?

     The first thing you have to do is know your core audience, serve them, and broaden from there. 
   I see some of the USA clones out there, and it looks like they take whatever shows the parent company has to offer. 
    One thing USA has been very smart about is buying the kind of series that has legs, as opposed to shows that may have been hot on broadcast but fade really fast as strips.
   USA is not going to be this 12-34 boy network. We’re not going to be about kids. We could try to win in this demo here, and in that demo there, but then it becomes a multi-front war. It’s a promotional nightmare. It’s hard to tell people about a big, 25-54 movie on "Saved by the Bell" and wrestling.

By most accounts, having wrestling is sort of a mixed blessing. It brings in a huge audience, but one to whom it’s very difficult to cross-promote or build a slate of programming around. What has changed at USA, for the better and the worse, now that the WWF has departed?

    It was a show you had to defend on one hand and sort of shy away from on the other. But now that it’s gone we have that opportunity to be more focused.
    Wrestling was a high-rated show but it was a drug. We couldn’t even sell most of the ad time, and it was not a great promotional platform. People started thinking of us as the wrestling network. 
    The reality is that we’ve been No. 1 for nine of the last 11 years, and there were some years there where wrestling shows were not rated all that high.

Is what happened to broadcast as a result of cable’s ascent now happening to the established cable networks? By that I mean, are the big cable networks experiencing fragmentation and cannibalization of their audiences by the upstarts?

    With all the channels that are out there, everybody’s going to be hit a little. For instance, I just got digital cable, and now I have 400 channels. 
    Sure I’m going to sample the Sri Lankan Snowboarding channel for a while, but eventually I’ll go back to my core channels. I’m going to go, "Okay, I watched the Lesbian Fishing Channel, I know I have it. Thank you, goodbye."
     I think it’s just that more networks are losing their way. But there are just as many networks who did keep up.

For as much as we like to talk about fragmentation, there are more people watching television now. Is that a story that’s not being told as well as it ought to be?

     A little yeast got added somewhere because the pie got bigger. I’m actually amazed sometimes that so many things are doing so well at the same time. One of the other things is that you don’t see as much of the "Cable versus Broadcast" battle going on. These days, when CBS is part of the same company as TNN and MTV, it doesn’t make sense to say that.
    Or the press likes to say that reality is this found genre. Hasn’t "Cops" been on the air since 1989? It’s like anything else you see on TV. It doesn’t always work. I think people like the shows that are good, and they don’t watch the ones that aren’t.
   A season or two ago, the sitcom was dead, supposedly. Maybe that was just a season where the sitcoms being produced just weren’t that good.

With second-run movies, sports and events routinely topping the cable ratings, how profitable are original movies and series really?

     It’s hard to build an identity if you’re just yesterday’s news. It’s one thing if you pick up some current movies or current shows because you can drive people to your original programs. 
    There’s no loyalty to movies. You can air "Die Hard" wherever you want and do a good number. But if I ask you where the last time you saw "Die Hard" was, who knows and who cares?

Do you feel like the advertising community has a better understanding of these things than the press?

    With the ad community, unlike the press, they’re truly looking at the numbers, and they know what USA is apart from wrestling. I think they were buying us the same way they buy on Fox or NBC. 
   The loss of wrestling gave us two more hours in primetime, where we could not only promote to 25-54 but sell to them too. You didn’t see a lot of Procter & Gamble during wrestling.
   In short, the ad community always sort of laughs at that "who’s No. 1 in household ratings?" It doesn’t mean a whole lot to the ad community. It’s a nice flag to wave, but the currency is demographic delivery.

-Gabriel Spitzer is a staff writer for Media Life.

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