Saving Sarah From Herself, Oprah Style

IN the past year or so, Sarah Ferguson, the much-maligned Duchess of York, has been caught trying to sell access to her ex-husband, Prince Andrew; has narrowly escaped going bankrupt; and was shut out of the royal wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton. Among other memorable low points, she recalled one recent afternoon over lunch in the penthouse at the James Hotel here, was a rain-soaked weekend near Edmonton, Alberta, when she showed up to give a motivational speech at a Canadian resort.

“I got there, and it was a casino in the middle of nowhere, right?” said Ms. Ferguson, as she picked at a plate of sliced pastrami and a bowl of lettuce leaves. “I was working weekends. I was working 24/7 to pay for my staff. And I got to the tent and, because of the pouring rain, the water had come into the tent, and only eight people showed up. I took a photograph of the billboard that looked like Buffalo Bill had come to town.”

Ms. Ferguson scrolled though her BlackBerry until she found it: her airbrushed portrait pasted onto a piece of flimsy white paperboard. “I had gone from marrying the queen’s son to now being on a poster in a casino in the pouring rain in a tent in the middle of nowhere with eight people in the audience,” she said with a sigh and a roll of her azure eyes. “I’d got down to bowling alleys.”

Before there was Bethenny Frankel, Kelly Bensimon or Camille Grammer, there was Sarah Ferguson, the irrepressible royal housewife of Windsor. Few other English princess brides have lived their lives so like a reality television star: feuds with the in-laws; weight fluctuation calculated in the tabloids; romantic misadventures captured on film — and, after it all fell apart, a plucky extension of the personal brand with books and a spokeswoman gig for Weight Watchers.

So it seems only natural that when Ms. Ferguson’s self-hatred and poor judgment caused her to “go into the gutter,” as she described it, her rehabilitation would be played out on a small screen.

Who better to oversee her transformation than Oprah Winfrey? It was she who persuaded Ms. Ferguson last year to ditch an offer from “Dancing With the Stars” and become the subject of a six-part documentary called “Finding Sarah: From Royalty to the Real World,” scheduled to be broadcast on the Oprah Winfrey Network beginning June 12.

Ms. Winfrey is attracted to people who need to be made over or done up or who are in the process of reinventing themselves. And Ms. Ferguson’s story in theory makes for compelling television. American audiences are practiced at seeing fallen potentates make a comeback (see Eliot Spitzer). And the British royalty, in particular, remains popular: an estimated 23 million Americans stumbled out of bed in the early hours of April 29 to watch the royal wedding live, with millions more watching it later online.

“With Catherine going up the aisle, you know what went through my head?” Ms. Ferguson said, referring to Ms. Middleton’s wedding walk at Westminster Abbey, retracing the steps that Ms. Ferguson took in 1986. “I feel like I’ve handed her the baton and said: ‘Well done. And you’ll do it right.’ I didn’t do it right, and now I am going to go get Sarah right.”

HOURS before her interview at the James Hotel, Ms. Ferguson arrived at 8 a.m. in the green room at Ms. Winfrey’s Harpo Studios, where she was taping her sixth appearance on “Oprah,” one of the host’s treasured final shows. Forced to jettison a staff of 12 last summer because she had no money to pay them, Ms. Ferguson was trailed by Martin Huberty, her personal assistant whom she has known since she was 16. With no makeup, her curly hair gathered in a knot, she looked like a suburban soccer mom in a knee-length navy and white pleated Ann Taylor skirt, her skin freckled and creased from too much sun.

She plopped into a makeup chair where a hairstylist crowned her head with orange and green curlers. “I lost 45 pounds on Weight Watchers,” the hairstylist whispered to Ms. Ferguson, who congratulated her.

A little before 9 a.m., Ms. Ferguson, 51, slipped into a black Michael Kors dress — the label had been snipped out — that hugged her shapely figure. When she walked onstage, carrying a blue-and-red flowered handkerchief that she later tucked under her left thigh (in case she began to cry), the mostly female crowd cheered wildly.

And she did not disappoint. Audience members nodded sympathetically as Ms. Ferguson dabbed her tears while watching a clip from the new series in which she describes the 1998 death of her mother by decapitation in a car accident. During breaks in taping, they were equally engaged. Ms. Ferguson demurred when Ms. Winfrey asked what kind of pajamas Queen Elizabeth wore, instead effusing about the more than 20 royal attendants available to her at Buckingham Palace before her divorce in 1996, including six ladies-in-waiting. “Get out!” Ms. Winfrey shouted, as the audience gasped. “No wonder you are finding Sarah!”

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Media Decoder: Oprah Winfrey Network Chief Is Out

 OWN: Oprah Winfrey Network Christina Norman, left, with Oprah Winfrey and David Zaslav, the chief executive of Discovery Communications, celebrating the start of OWN on Jan. 1, 2011. Ms. Norman is exiting the channel.

9:17 p.m. | Updated | Dissatisfied by the first ratings report cards for OWN, Oprah Winfrey and her business partner, Discovery Communications, said on Friday that they had dismissed the four-month-old channel’s chief executive, Christina Norman.

Peter Liguori, the chief operating officer for Discovery Communications, will take over OWN through at least the end of the year. His assignment is formidable: to lure more viewers to a fledgling channel that most people cannot easily find on their cable systems and to manage the introduction for its two most anticipated programs, one featuring Ms. Winfrey and one featuring Rosie O’Donnell.

Mr. Liguori indicated in an interview that he would try to amp up the entertainment value of OWN’s programs without losing sight of Ms. Winfrey’s live-your-best-life principles. “I think you’re going to see more joy on the network,” he said. Ms. Winfrey and David Zaslav, the chief executive of Discovery, preached patience in the months preceding the Jan. 1 introduction of OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network, which is built around the supremely valuable Oprah brand. But both have been disappointed by the low ratings for the channel’s mix of feel-good reality shows, talk shows and films. On a total day basis, OWN is barely outperforming the channel it replaced, Discovery Health, despite hundreds of million of dollars of investment.

Already, Discovery has backed off its bold prediction that OWN will be profitable this year. A Discovery spokesman said profitability depended on “rating success, affiliate fees and the strength of the advertising market.”

Kevin Winter/Getty Images For AFI Oprah Winfrey and Peter Liguori, who will take over OWN, Ms. Winfrey’s fledgling channel, through at least year’s end.

Mr. Zaslav acknowledged to investors last week that the channel had a “slower start” than expected. And Ms. Winfrey said in an interview with Entertainment Weekly, published Friday, that “it’s not where I want it to be.”

In part that is because Ms. Winfrey herself has not been a steady presence on the channel — a fact that Ms. Norman noted time and time again in past interviews. Ms. Winfrey is busy winding down her syndicated talk show, “The Oprah Winfrey Show,” which will end on May 25, and only after that point — and a vacation — will she turn her full attention to OWN.

The highest-rated shows on OWN have been “Ask Oprah’s All Stars,” with advice from people like Dr. Mehmet Oz; “Our America With Lisa Ling”; and “The Judds.” In its first four months, OWN attracted 148,000 viewers at any given time, according to the Nielsen Company, only 7,000 more than Discovery Health did in the same time period last year. In the prime-time hours, OWN averaged 297,000 viewers, 44,000 more than Discovery Health.

The decision to oust Ms. Norman was the culmination of several recent conversations among members of the board that oversees OWN, according to two people with direct knowledge of the decision who spoke on the condition of anonymity because their employers had not authorized them to speak.

In an e-mail message to the staff at OWN, Ms. Winfrey said that Ms. Norman’s “hard work, passion and leadership were instrumental in getting OWN on the air,” but added, “Given all that we have to do, the OWN board felt it was necessary that we have a different kind of leadership in place for the next phase of OWN’s growth.”

What the board was seeking, according to the people with direct knowledge of the decision, was a person to improve the channel’s programming voice. “Right now it’s all about the programming,” one of the people said. Mr. Liguori has programming cachet as the former president of entertainment for the Fox Broadcasting Company. He said in an interview that he would apply lessons of the last four months — for instance, that straightforward how-to shows and darker subject matter don’t work as well as shows that are more clearly entertaining. One underperforming show he cited was “Addicted to Food,” which chronicled people’s treatment for eating disorders.

“With all its good intentions, it was just hard for the audience to watch,” he said.

Mr. Liguori said that every show on OWN should be purposeful, in keeping with Ms. Winfrey’s carefully cultivated brand. “But the price of entry for that purpose — that show’s intent, its message, its takeaway — is that you are entertained,” he said.

Asked to elaborate, he said, “It’s going to be compelling characters, storytelling with stakes, and then at the end of the show, you realize you have learned either some moral or practical lesson.”

Ms. Norman did not respond to a request for comment. She was the second chief executive of OWN, having taken over in January 2009 while the channel was trying — and at times struggling — to start up. While Ms. Winfrey provided the vision for the channel, it was Ms. Norman, a former president of MTV, who executed on that vision. She said in a statement Friday, “As I move on to my next challenge, I am confident the strong foundation we have built will position the network to achieve great things.”

A day earlier, Judy McGrath departed MTV Networks, prompting speculation that Ms. McGrath could be in line for the OWN job. But Mr. Liguori called the timing “pure coincidence.”

Mr. Liguori will oversee the introduction of Ms. O’Donnell’s talk show in October, and Ms. Winfrey’s next show, “Oprah’s Next Chapter,” in January 2012. (OWN executives had hoped to start “Next Chapter” in the fall.)

Mr. Zaslav reiterated last week that Discovery was “fully committed to the brand” and reminded investors that building a channel was a “long-term play.”

For her part, Ms. Winfrey has suggested that the channel should not be judged for three years. “I feel like I have not begun to give anything to OWN,” she told Entertainment Weekly. But that will change, she said, after her syndicated show ends — and, presumably, after that vacation. “It’s going to improve exponentially with the amount of time and service I can give to it.”

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