Sci-Fi gets "Ghost Whisperer," "Star Trek: TNG," "Charmed," "Highlander," "Mork & Mindy"

from variety

Sci Fi Channel, WE to see 'Ghost'
Cable networks get rights to CBS drama
By CYNTHIA LITTLETON

Sci Fi Channel and WE will be seeing ghosts next year. Cablers have
jointly acquired rerun rights to the CBS drama “Ghost Whisperer”
beginning in fall 2009.

Ion Television also has chipped in for off-network rights on the
broadcast side. The trio of deals brings CBS Television Distribution’s
take for “Whisperer,” starring Jennifer Love Hewitt as a woman who
communicates with the dead, to a healthy $650,000-$700,000 per
episode, industry sources said.

Series, now in its third season, is a co-production of ABC Studios and
CBS Paramount Network TV.

Thomas Vitale, Sci Fi’s senior veep of programming and original
movies, said the skein was a natural fit with the cabler’s audience,
particularly with the success of Sci Fi’s unscripted spook show “Ghost
Hunters.”

Cabler is hoping that “Whisperer” and its star Hewitt will help bring
more femmes to Sci Fi without alienating its core sci-fi-loving male
demo. Sci Fi has been on a push to broaden its aud profile with more
women.

“Whisperer” was appealing to Sci Fi because research showed that the
cabler’s core aud has not seen much of the series in its initial run
on CBS. Research also made it clear that there’s very little overlap
between the viewership of Sci Fi and the femme-focused WE, so there’s
not much concern about the WE telecasts cannibalizing Sci Fi runs and
vice versa, said Scott Koondel, CBS Television Distribution exec veep
of off-network, cable and digital media.

“We think there’s a huge untapped audience for (‘Whisperer’),” Vitale
said. “Our audience has only seen a little bit of it, but it’s still
an established show that is very highly promoted by its network and
has high resonance with the (supernatural drama) audience.”

Sci Fi will run the show in a stack, or multiple episodes airing one
or two nights a week, while WE is expected to program it as a strip,
Koondel said.

In conjunction with the “Whisperer” deal, Sci Fi also picked up
off-net rights to a range of shows from the CBS vault, including “Star
Trek: The Next Generation,” which has never before aired on Sci Fi; WB
hit “Charmed”; syndie cult-fave action-drama “Highlander”; and for
comic relief, sitcom “Mork and Mindy.”

The strategy of stacking off-net acquisitions around compatible
originals on one or two nights a week, instead of a traditional
Monday-Friday skedding pattern, has given Sci Fi’s primetime slate
more of a network feel, with a different lineup of shows each night,
Vitale said.

“We’re really changing what Sci Fi Channel is with these kind of
acquisitions,” Vitale said, referring to “Whisperer,” “Charmed,” “Star
Trek: The Next Generation” and the other shows in the CBS pact. “As
the original programming strategy ramps up, the acquired programming
strategy has had to ramp up too.”