Meduim too. I don't know, I still think Lifetime basically sucks and has so many evil man kidnapped, raped, abused me or child theme movies running through. The last time I watched it, it was a chick who killed her father cause he was leaving them, never wanted men to leave her so had her "split-personality" sister kill all the lovers with some poison. It was a pretty crappy movie, I only watched it cause Charisma Carpenter from Buffy was on it.

But now the station is trying to maintain the cheese factor while adding new programming to attract younger viewers

I mean really - salon is commenting on a cheesy makeover to attract younger viewers in Broadsheet ! ROTFL!

However this goes beyond stupid:

most fiction readers are women, after all

I'm gobsmacked - thats a new level of drivel even for broadsheet. You need to return in your writer credentials to the cereal box.

Endless repeats of Golden Girls, Designing Women and The Nanny, not to mention 15-year-old episodes of Unsolved Mysteries. And of course who could live without more Will & Grace and Frasier? I mean, these two haven't been shoved down our throats nearly enough by other channels in the last few years.

And contrary to popular opinion, most of us don't particularly enjoy the over-the-top "women in peril" flicks, where women are kidnapped and held in mountain refuges, or stalked by split-personality asylum escapees who think we're their long-lost high-school sweetheart. However, so many of us have been lied to, cheated on, manipulated, abused (physically and emotionally), sexually harassed and stalked by garden variety losers, that yeah, we DO relate movies with storylines that reflect that. As long as they're realistic. Too many on Lifetime are not. While most of us have been cheated on, not many of us have been cheated on by a devastatingly handsome pilot who has three other wives in Paris, Miami and Maui, whom we somehow get together with and create devilish plots to bring him down.

Lifetime now has three separate channels, most of which have become a waste of space. Lifetime Movie Network--which seemed like a good idea at the time--repeats the same movies over and over in a loop all week. Fall asleep watching one and there's a good chance it will be on again when you wake up. Lifetime Real Women... ugh. What a load of unwatchable rubbish. "Girlfriend" game shows, "style" shows and big favorites such as Caroline in the City, Suddenly Susan and Laverne and Shirley. Not to mention MORE repeats of Any Day Now (let it go, already!) and Intimate Portrait.

If Lifetime wants to be more relevant to women, forget redesigning the logo and tagline. Try listening more to what we actually want to see, instead of simply buying the cheapest, often most excruciatingly dated programs you can find and repeating them incessantly, figuring that as long as there's a woman somewhere in the show, we'll want to watch it five times a day.

My "sub-basic" cable plan has swapped out Lifetime for "We" ("Women's Entertainment") for The Hallmark Channel, and it's still the same channel on that same spot in the dial.

Perpetual Hallmark M*A*S*H reruns are a guilty pleasure of mine and a huge step up from Golden Girls -- but otherwise it's the same experience. On the weekends they run hilarious movie cycles you can fall asleep during. The theme is always love, these being Hallmark original productions, and the titles include the word to make sure you know: "Love's Penultimate Wish" is succeeded by "Love's Final Triump" with no discernible break.

The effect is more dramatic on TV where you've got the mass market going on, but last night in the bookstore my 10-year-old niece and I looked over the various series for young teen girls. They are similarly difficult to tell apart.

Why is it that nobody adapts books like "Are you There God, It's Me, Margaret" for film or TV? It's not like there aren't some great novels out there. On the more adult of things, even a completely painful mediocrity like "The Jane Austen Book Club" would be five steps up from these networks' usual fare.