As TLC’s Cable Rivals Struggle, Chief Howard Lee Brings in Record Ratings

“At that moment in mid-March when the pandemic hit all of us, [Discovery chief lifestyle brands officer] Kathleen Finch and I didn’t miss a beat,” Lee, Adweek’s TV Executive of the Year, recalls. “I hurried up and jumped along with the team and thought, ‘What can we do during this time when we are in lockdown?’”

Even before the pandemic, TLC was gearing up for a great year. In the first quarter of 2020, the cable network, known for hits like Say Yes to the Dress and Cake Boss, held the No. 1 spot in prime-time ad-supported cable among women 18-49 and women 25-54, with some of TV’s most well-known television franchises, including smash hit 90 Day Fiancé, long-running Little People, Big World and the 19 Kids and Counting spinoff, Counting On.

When the many challenges brought on by Covid-19 came into focus, so did the opportunity: Lockdowns meant more downtime for the cable network’s fans, and those viewers would want updates on the colorful cast of characters who comprise TLC’s already robust unscripted programming slate. “The TLC talent has already been conditioned to always be shooting about things going on in their lives in front of cameras, since that is the bread and butter of the storytelling we make,” Lee says. “They just had to learn how to do it without a crew entering their doors. They had to learn how to do that remotely through a computer screen or through their phones. That was the key to that transition.”

That shift also offered up a chance to make new programming entirely. Fans of TLC’s 90 Day Fiancé franchise “were very curious about what was going on with their favorite couples during quarantine,” Lee says. So, his team got to work contacting several of them from past seasons of the show. For many of those cast members, it was an easy sell—“They all wanted to be on,” Lee says—and by the end of April, TLC aired the first episode of 90 Day Fiancé: Self-Quarantined, a five-episode spinoff that featured 40 people who had previously appeared on the six-season series.

The turnaround time was “blazingly fast,” Lee says, and it required a complete overhaul of getting programming to the air. Producers directed and shared notes remotely, giving directions on lighting and recording techniques, while confessional interviews were filmed via video chat. Lee himself had to get comfortable with the imperfection inherent in the remote production experiment.

TLC tried other experiments, too, debuting a live reality dating series Find Love Live!, which sets up eligible bachelors and bachelorettes over videoconference calls on live TV with a moderator. (After the show brought in a total of 5 million viewers in its first three episodes, TLC ordered nine more.)

“We have nothing to lose here,” Lee recalls thinking. “We’re all in this Covid environment, and this is populating our lineup even more and making us come up with even more inventive ideas with what to do.”

Lee admits he was worried about how viewers would respond to the sometimes haphazard-looking programming that talent were filming on their own. “I realized things will look scrappier, things may not look as perfect, things will not look and feel like it was prepandemic any longer,” Lee says. “For me, for all of us, we had to say, ‘Would they be willing to accept that, or is this too sloppy for them to watch?’”

Viewers were, in fact, willing to accept it, and they flocked to TLC in droves. In the third quarter, TLC notched single- to double-digit ratings growth on four nights of the week, and Darcey & Stacey, another 90 Day spinoff series that premiered earlier this year, is the No. 1 freshman cable series in 2020 to date. On Sunday nights, TLC was the No. 1 cable network among both women and all viewers in the 25-54, 18-49 and 18-34 demos; on Monday nights, it was the No. 1 cable network among women 25-54 and 18-49.

The recently concluded third quarter was TLC’s best Q3 prime-time performance ever in the adults and women 25-54 demos and the women 18-49 cohort, beating its previous best quarter (Q1 of 2020). While TLC’s main viewers are younger females, there has even been a spike in viewership among younger male audiences, who the network believes turned into fans while watching with their wives, partners or friends. “This is all unexpected, but it’s such a great surprise for us,” Lee says.

The network chief follows his gut for some of his programming decisions but otherwise credits much of the network’s success to the fact that TLC listens and responds to its most devout fans. TLC monitors social media closely, using that data to help make programming decisions. “I think that our viewer somehow is the programmer of our lineup,” Lee says. “They make our job easier, and we listen to them very carefully. Because, at the end of the day, we’re not making this programming for us; we’re making all of this programming for them.”  

When it comes to 90 Day Fiancé, easily the most successful franchise on the network, “the audience told us that they wanted more; one night a week was not enough,” Lee says. In response, he made the show a bigger part of TLC’s schedule: “90 Day Fiancé went from year-round on Sundays to also on Mondays.”

TLC is easily bucking cable television’s larger downward trend, notching all-time wins and regularly breaking performance records, but slowing down isn’t an option for Lee. After all, there are still plenty of stories to tell—and he knows viewers want to watch.

“I am trying to ensure that we nourish this community of avid TLC watchers,” Lee says. “They’re hungry. They’re starving. They keep coming back to us, and I have to ensure our entire team continues to have enough food on their plate for them to keep coming back, as well as any other desserts or side dishes. They want it all from us. And that makes us so happy.”

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