Lifetime

**Lifetime** is an American pay television channel that is part of Lifetime Entertainment Services. It picked up Hoarders after it was cancelled and aired the seventh season. It is a subsidiary of A&E Networks, which is jointly owned by the Hearst Communications and The Walt Disney Company. It features programming that is geared toward women or features women in lead roles. As of January 2016, it is received by 93.8 million households in America. Lifetime was established on February 1, 1984 as the result of a merger of Hearst/ABC's Daytime and Viacom's Lifetime Medical Television. A board for the new network was formed with equal representation from Hearst, ABC and Viacom, and the board elected Thomas Burchill as the new network's first CEO. It was not an initial success, reportedly losing $36 million in its first two years of operation, and did not become profitable until 1986. The channel suffered from low viewership, with a poll reportedly finding that some TV viewers erroneously believed it carried religious content.

In 1985, Lifetime started branding itself as "Talk Television" with a nightly lineup of talk shows and call-in programs hosted by people including Regis Philbin and Dr. Ruth Westheimer. In the process, the creators dropped the apple from the logo.

In 1988, Lifetime hired Patricia Fili as its head of programming. In the first three years of her tenure, she changed 60 percent of Lifetime's programming, by her own estimate. In addition to overhauling Lifetime's signature talk show, *Attitudes*, by hiring a new producer and refocusing it on current women's issues, Fili acquired the rights to syndicated network hits like *Moonlighting* and *L.A. Law*. She also oversaw the production of the first Lifetime movies ever made, along with carrying the final three seasons of the Blair Brown–starring dramedy *The Days and Nights of Molly Dodd* from NBC after the network canceled it. The network also showed movies from the portfolios of its owners, Hearst, ABC, and Viacom. In 1991, reporter Joshua Hammer stated, "Considered one of cable TV's backwaters, Lifetime network was replete with annoying gabfests for housewives and recycled, long-forgotten network television series, such as *Partners in Crime* and *MacGruder and Loud*. Under Fili's direction, Lifetime has gone a long way toward shedding its low-rent image."

Lifetime began airing a limited amount of women's sports coverage, including the WNBA and the America's Cup, in which it sponsored the first women's crew team to compete. McCormick also strengthened the network's ties with women's organizations such as the National Organization for Women, and began airing public service announcements about women's issues, such as breast cancer awareness. Lifetime also adopted a new tagline. "Lifetime – Television for Women."

Meanwhile, the channel's original programming was aimed not just at women aged 24–44, but these women's spouses, who research showed watched the network in the evenings with their wives. This was done by making the male characters in Lifetime's original programming – such as the film series *Spencer for Hire* – more appealing to men by making them more masculine. These roles were more stereotypical than previous Lifetime movies, which usually featured women protagonists on their own. This helped Lifetime take advantage of a known bias in the Nielsen ranking system that favored "upscale" couples who shared a television set. By January 1995, Lifetime was the sixth most-highly rated subscription network by Nielsen.