“A queen is not afraid to fail,” Oprah Winfrey once said. “Failure is another steppingstone to greatness.” Now the television queen may have a chance to prove the adage. Her Los Angeles-based Oprah Winfrey Network has been hobbled by missteps, ego clashes, a revolving door in the executive suite and, most important, low ratings. OWN's stumbles suggest, at the least, that even in celebrity-obsessed America, fame alone doesn't guarantee success. The network was born 15 months ago with high hopes of becoming the television equivalent of Winfrey's O magazine. It paired the star who transformed a daytime talk show into a multibillion-dollar empire with the cable powerhouse Discovery, the parent of Discovery, TLC and Animal Planet. Both parties assumed that the 6 million fans who still watched Oprah's talk show in syndication, which aired its finale in May 2011, would flock to her cable channel. But sustaining an entire network proved difficult. More than 1 million viewers arrived for the network's debut on New Year's Day 2011. But since that first weekend, OWN has averaged just 259,000 viewers in prime time, according to Nielsen. Reruns of the 1980s sitcom “The Golden Girls” on the Hallmark Channel draw almost twice as big an audience.
