Oxygen's Rebranding (With Michelle Williams!)

Well, it looks like television for women is rebranding itself — or at least, it's making a noble effort. Oxygen is rebranding and unveiled its new lineup which includes seven new series. The revamp is to attract younger viewers, specifically in their twenties (as opposed to moms, I guess). So, assuming I am in their ideal demographic, I took a look at their new lineup. Is this more youthful, rebranding going to displace all of the young women form whatever other shows they're watching?

I dunno, maybe — if the stuff is actually good or has some pulling power will drag us in (see: The Glee Project for further reference, which, indeed appeared on Oxygen). But it makes sense to target this audience, and Oxygen Media President Frances Berwick said:

We're definitely appealing to young women [...] Everything we're looking at is who are these women, what are they not getting on other networks and really focus in on a midrange audience. The place in the market where there's definitely some white space doesn't involve downscale.

That means seven new series that received the green light for the 2014-2015 season. These include Fix My Choir (which features Destiny's Child's Michelle Williams, riding the Jesus Christ Superstar momentum — or the #poormichelle momentum, that's your call) and Nail'd It! which is — you guessed it — a nail art competition. This could either be incredibly addictive (who knew nail art could be that high-stakes and exciting?!?!) or incredibly difficult to watch. Street Art Throwdown is an art competition featuring emerging artists.

My Crazy Love is a half-hour series in which people will get to re-live all the irrational things they did for love (uh, I'll pass on that one — no need to hear about that time you sold your house accidentally or something along those lines. Living Different is, I'm going to assume, about living different, since the network has yet to release much info about it.

What does seem to pull some weight are there documentaries that do not have a prize at the end. T.I.-produced Sisterhood of Hip Hop follows female hip-hop artists Siya, Nyemiah Supreme, Diamond, Brianna Perry and Bia as they work towards becoming hip hop's next biggest female star. The only thing that's disconcerting – and that seems ill-informed — is that the press release says that hip hop has always been a man's game. While hip hop certainly is dominated by men, there have been plenty of women who have indisputably held titles as "reigning queens" — Missy Elliot, Lil' Kim, Foxy Brown, and Nicki Minaj — just to name a few in mainstream culture over the past decade and a half. Hopefully this series, which should be authentic with T.I. backing it, won't discredit the women in the industry.

The network also has new documentary Funny Girls, which follows a bunch of L.A. comediennes trying to make it. Assuming these women are funny on their downtime, this could be something I could get behind (or in front of, like, in front of my television).

This marks the latest brand from NBCUniversal to undergo a makeover since Bonnie Hammer took over the company. She most recently tried to make E! a tad classier — so will she make Oxygen more younger and vibrant? If Funny Girls is the idea of vibrant, then I'm behind it, but if network execs thinks that what the twenty-to-thirty crowd wants is a nail art competition, then they may need to rethink it a bit, even though, I do concede, as I stated previously, a nail art competition has the slight potential to be incredibly riveting, but only for so long. It's tough to want to watch nail art if I can watch VEEP — or RHONY — instead.