Carole Black: For This TV Executive, a Full Lifetime of Achievement

摘要

Ask Carole Black, president and CEO of Lifetime Entertainment Services since March 1999, who has most influenced her career, and she names Arax Boya-jian, her late Armenian grandmother. The owners of three Cincinnati candy stores, Boyajian and her husband taught Black three lessons early in her life: how to make a good living, how to make customers happy—and how to repay one's own success. "I sampled a lot of product," she jokes. "But what I learned from them is that you always have to give back. They were great humanitarians, always giving back to the city. They sent kids to college. I learned by watching." From a single cable channel everyone pooh-poohed back in February 1984—TV for women?—Lifetime has today grown into a media behemoth, comprising a television network, movie network, Lifetime Real Women channel, Lifetime Radio for Women and Lifetime Online. These are part of Lifetime En-tertainment Services, a 50/50 joint venture of the Hearst Corp. and The Walt Disney Co. For two years after Black arrived—in 2001 and 2002—Lifetime was the top basic-cable network, bigger than "general-interest" networks like TNT, TBS and USA. Tastes then shifted to reality shows, and Lifetime was slow to follow. But, for millions of American women, Lifetime is still a brand that engenders great loyalty. The typical Lifetime movie, about an "ordinary" woman put in peril but ultimately victorious, strikes a resonant chord. Some original series like Strong Medicine and The Division have a loyal following. Now the network is in the reality business, with How Clean Is Your House?