Black Entertainment Television is laying out plans for the annual BET Music Awards on June 26. The broadcast has become the highest-rated on cable, topping the MTV Music Awards, ESPN’s ESPY Awards and the Nickelodeon Kids’ Choice Awards.
This year’s host is Mo’nique, host of “Flavor of Love Girls: Charm School.” But “Charm” has become a big hit for VH1, a cable channel that, like BET, is owned by Viacom.
Mo’nique’s presence illustrates one of the channel’s challenges. Despite being the first and largest Black cable channel, BET has developed few bankable stars and virtually no breakout programs. Instead, it continues to rely on old reruns, B-movies and tired music videos.
While the channel has had success with thugs in “American Gangster”, and the
glamorization of being incarcerated in “Lil’ Kim: Countdown to Lockdown,” they have been overshadowed by hits on other Viacom cable channels. These include Comedy Central’s “Chappelle’s Show”, VH1’s embarrassing “Flavor of Love”, and two spinoffs: “I Love New York” and “Charm School.”The original “Flavor of Love,” in which women tried to hook-up with Public Enemy's Flavor Flav, was a hit for cable and a new low for the image of Blacks everywhere. The second season finale attracted 7.5 million viewers — VH1’s best rating ever — and had 34 percent of all African-Americans watching television during that time watching VH1.
According to a 2005 Nielsen study, African-Americans watch more television than the overall population. That appetite for television raises the question of why BET’s ratings are not higher.
And BET is facing increasing competition from traditional cable networks like USA and Lifetime as well as smaller rival channels like TV One, whose major backers include Radio One. TV One, which is in 40 million homes, aims at a somewhat older audience than BET.
“BET does not have the ratings it should have with 12 percent of the audience being black,” said Leo Hindery, a partner in Intermedia Partners, which owns a majority stake in the Gospel Channel, a cable network. The reason Hindery says, is because “It has never developed a soul of its own..."
CEO Debra Lee disagrees. “When you look at our shows that really work, we get a sizable percentage of the population. We are the No. 1 show in black households. We did a fund-raiser after Katrina and raised $113 million, so there was a strong connect to our programming.”
To develop BET’s new stable of 16 shows, Ms. Lee turned to Reginald Hudlin, who made his name as the writer and director of movies like “House Party,” “Boomerang” and “The Great White Hype.”For the new season, Hudlin is developing “Somebodies,” a post-college comedy based on a 2006 film, and “Baldwin Hills,” a “Laguna Beach”-style documentary about rich teenagers in Los Angeles. Also on deck is Judge Mooney, featuring comedian Paul Mooney holding court.
“I want every black person with a TV watching, and a lot of people with TVs who like black people,” Hudlin said. “We want the black audience to start the day with BET and put the remote down at night without switching channels.”
As BET faces the competition, it must continue to deal with the cultural undercurrents of being the face of black cable television. The network has long been attacked - and rightfully so - for glossing over some of hip-hop culture’s rawer edges.
“We don’t allow that kind of language in our music videos. What we air on BET is the clean version,” she said, conceding that BET does permit other unflattering terms for women in the videos it shows. “The good thing about the Imus controversy is that it raised the issue,” she said. “It makes us more conscious.”
You mean to tell me that it took an old white man calling sistahs "nappy-headed hoes" before BET realized that misogyny - particularly against black women - was a problem?
Family, we have soooo much work to do!
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