in living color bet schedule

LOS ANGELES — On a recent morning in the colorful new office of Black Entertainment Television here, Reginald Hudlin, entertainment president, was tweaking a new docudrama with his team. The show, “Baldwin Hills,” follows the lives of a group of mostly hip, affluent black teenagers, most of whom live in the neighborhood here that gives the show its name. It is one of five shows beginning on the BET network this month, as it introduces 16 shows through 2008, the biggest lineup of debuts in its 27-year history.
“You’re talking about a class of people invisible to the mainstream,” Byron Phillips, executive vice president for entertainment at BET, said of the characters in “Baldwin Hills” as he and other executives watched a flat-screen television showing the teenagers at a party.
“Baldwin Hills” is one element in a BET face-lift. The oldest and largest cable network aimed at African-Americans, it has long depended on reruns, movies and music videos, developing few hits of its own. But now, in an increasingly competitive cable market, BET hopes to freshen its profile.
The network, a division of Viacom, has its first original scripted series in “Somebodies,” about a group of recent college graduates in Athens, Ga., which is to have its premiere in early 2008. Though no one would accuse BET of suddenly going highbrow, “Baldwin Hills,” which begins tomorrow night at 10, and “Exalted!,” a biography series starting in the fall that will focus on ministers, help answer the long criticism that BET fails to mirror the complexity of black life.
“This is the largest aggregation of black programming in television history,” said Mr. Hudlin, a 45-year-old Harvard graduate who came to BET in 2005, having made a name as a director. His films include “Boomerang” and “House Party,” and he directed the pilot for “Everybody Hates Chris,” the hit television series inspired by the life of the comedian Chris Rock.
“We’re developing a class of creators that will develop the next generation of stars who will transform the game,” Mr. Hudlin said, sitting in his sunny office decorated with superhero dolls and photographs of his young daughter. “Unless you make institutional changes, things aren’t going to be made.”
He continued: “Where’s the black David Kelley or Dick Wolf? That’s how we’re going to grow at BET. The model is Motown.”
The network, which says it reaches about 85 million homes, has an 18 percent nonblack audience, and its core viewers are 18 to 34 years old.
“They are working toward finding a balance,” Mark Anthony Neal, director of the Institute for Critical U.S. Studies at Duke University, said of BET’s new shows. Professor Neal, who teaches black popular culture, predicted that at a network geared toward mostly young people, in a television landscape that shuns complexity, “the analysis is never going to be in-depth, but at least they will begin touching on different subjects.”
The new shows come as television can no longer depend simply on demographics for audience loyalty, said R. Thomas Umstead, the programming editor for Multichannel News, a publication that provides cable-television news and analysis. “African-Americans are not monolithic. They are not going to sit and watch one channel all day long.”
Black women tune into Lifetime in large numbers, for example, and network shows like “Grey’s Anatomy” on ABC, with blacks in prominent roles, appeals to blacks. The new TBS sitcom “Tyler Perry’s House of Payne,” about a multigenerational middle-class black family, drew big audiences with its premiere last month.
“I’m sure they’re looking over their shoulders at TNT and TV Land, which tend to draw a substantial number of African-American viewers,” Mr. Umstead said of BET’s ambitions. “They realize they need to do more than music videos.”
Some of the new offerings are “pretty interesting,” Mr. Umstead said, and could broaden the core audience.
Mr. Phillips, the BET vice president, said: “Cable is a mature market now. The only way to grow your audience is to do programming on par with” the major networks. “We were in a place where it was a natural evolution.”
Viacom would not say what it was spending on the new programming. But SNL Kagan, a media research firm, said its analysis of industry figures showed that BET had $103.6 million in programming expenses last year and estimated that it would spend $119.1 million this year.
Jeanine Liburd, a BET spokeswoman, could not comment on the 2007 estimate, but noted that Viacom had increased the programming budget by 50 percent over the previous year