Essay 3079

From The New York Times…

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At BET, Fighting the Rerun

By GERALDINE FABRIKANT

Last week, executives from Black Entertainment Television walked through the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles, laying out the plans for the annual BET Music Awards on June 26. The broadcast has become the highest-rated award show on cable, topping the MTV Music Awards, ESPN’s ESPY Awards and the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards.

This year’s host is Mo’nique, a popular comedian who is the host of “Flavor of Love Girls: Charm School,” a reality show that draws a large African-American audience. But “Flavor of Love Girls: Charm School” isn’t on BET. Instead, it has become a big hit for VH1, a cable channel that, like BET, is owned by Viacom.

Mo’nique’s presence on the BET podium illustrates one of the channel’s persistent struggles. Despite being the first and certainly the largest African-American cable channel, BET has developed few of its own marketable stars and virtually no breakout programs. It relies instead on reruns, movies and music videos for the bulk of its lineup.

BET’s chief executive, Debra L. Lee, has tried to reverse that trend, this year increasing the channel’s production budget 50 percent and plunging into original programming with 16 new shows planned for the new season.

“What we have found over the years is that acquired and licensed programming has not done as well as we would have liked,” Ms. Lee said. “It was very clear that we had to invest more in original programming.”

Ms. Lee joined BET in 1986 as general counsel and vice president, working closely with its founder, Robert L. Johnson. She was named president and chief executive when he left the network in 2005. Although she did not have direct programming experience, the programming department had reported to her since 1995. A calm, businesslike executive, she quickly brought in a team to “take BET to the next level,” she said in a recent interview at Viacom’s Manhattan headquarters, where she commutes from BET’s Washington offices.

Ms. Lee’s attempts to remake BET come at time when all cable channels are contending with an increasingly tough landscape as the battle for market share among the mature networks intensifies. BET’s ratings were strong in 2006 but tumbled in the first quarter of this year.

And while the channel has had some success with original series like “American Gangster” and “Lil’ Kim: Countdown to Lockdown,” they have been overshadowed by some recent hits on other Viacom cable channels. These include Comedy Central’s “Chappelle’s Show” and VH1’s “Flavor of Love” and two spinoffs: “I Love New York” and “Flavor of Love Girls: Charm School.”

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