David Abraham, TLC (US)
June 1, 2006 by
Brendan Christie
For those wags who dubbed TLC the ‘Totally Lost Control’ network two years ago, hope is being restored. Perhaps it’s a case of art imitating life that TLC’s ‘Life Lessons’ campaign has begun to gain traction with viewers and advertisers alike. With ratings having dropped like a paralyzed peregrine, the cablenet certainly must have learned a few lessons the hard way – most especially that too much of a good thing makes viewers reach for the remote.
Enter David Abraham. Former head of Discovery Networks in Britain, the new EVP and GM took control in early 2005 with a mandate to turn the ship around. And he appears to be in the process of doing just that, with TLC’s primetime ratings now in recovery mode. Better yet, in recent interviews for the Discovery’s upfronts, Abraham was actually heard using the word ‘learning’ when making reference to his network, a cardinal sin only a few short years ago.
But, as George Bush almost once said: ‘Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.’ Don’t let viewers catch you airing too many shows about babies or dwarves, or back to the remote they’ll go.
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