From mutt to best in show
Dog lovers power 'Whisperer's' profile
He's Cesar Millan, the self-taught expert on the behavior of dogs, and in less than two years his series "Dog Whisperer" has vaulted to the top of the Nielsen pyramid on the National Geographic Channel.
"Even on a quickly shot, down-and-dirty demo tape, you could tell that Cesar was a charismatic guy who had a real shot at becoming a hit," says John Ford, executive VP of programming for the Nat Geo Channel, remembering the pitch from MPH Entertainment late in 2003. "This guy had the right stuff."
Dog ownership in the U.S. has swelled to record levels -- 68 million, at last count -- and their owners have propelled the charismatic Millan into a pop culture sensation:
- Nat Geo has not only renewed "Dog Whisperer" for a third season, with an option for a fourth, but will move the series from its perch on the second-worst night for TV watching (Friday) to the second best, Monday, beginning Aug. 7. Nat Geo has slated a marathon of second-season episodes to run for six nights (July 30-Aug. 4), two hours a night, boosted by three fresh episodes.
- "Cesar's Way," the book that Millan co-authored with Melissa Jo Peltier, one of the founders of MPH and co-exec producer of "Dog Whisperer," has established a lock on No. 1 for the past eight weeks of the New York Times best-seller list for advice and how-to books. Peltier says Random House, the publisher, is projecting 1-million hardback copies sold by the end of the year. She and Millan are hard at work on a second volume.
- Millan's DVDs released through Universal, including a boxed set of the 26 half-hours that make up the first season, came out two months ago and are being featured in homevideo outlets throughout the country. (No sales figures are available yet.)
When Millan joined Nat Geo's schedule two years ago, weeknights at 6:30 in a one-hour block with a series called "Dogs With Jobs," Ford says, "Dog Whisperer" got off to a slow start.
"We didn't get a whole lot of promotion," says Mark Hufnail, one of the exec producers of "Dog Whisperer" for MPH with Peltier and Jim Milio. "National Geographic is a smaller network, so it tries to be careful about how it spends marketing dollars."
Nat Geo Channel reaches only 59.5 million subscribers, putting it 51st among all ad-supported cable networks and way behind its main competitor Discovery Channel, which appears in 91.1 million homes. (But Nat Geo is one of the fastest-growing networks in the U.S., having racked up 4.5 million homes in the past year.)
Ford says the series "started to build" early last year when Nat Geo separated it from "Dogs With Jobs" and ran two "Dog Whisperer" half-hours back-to-back.
Elevating "Dog Whisperer" to primetime (Friday at 8) in May 2005 proved to be an even smarter move. "We began getting emails from people begging us for new episodes," Ford says, "because they'd seen each of the old ones three or four times."
Such passion made the second-season renewal of "Dog Whisperer" a no-brainer for Nat Geo, which commissioned 20 one-hour episodes. The one-hour form worked better because it accommodated three stories; Nat Geo had tried to shoehorn two stories into each of the half-hours.
Nat Geo and MPH declined to discuss financial matters. But Nat Geo puts up about 80% of the production cost of "Dog Whisperer" and gets the domestic TV rights. MPH has retained worldwide homevideo and foreign TV distribution. MPH has hired Rive Gauche to handle worldwide TV sales, and Hufnail says the series has caught on in at least one international market, New Zealand.
And Peltier is happy about the show's move from Friday to Monday because she'll be able to stop competing directly with her husband, John Gray, who just happens to be creator, director and co-exec producer of another "Whisperer" show, CBS' "Ghost Whisperer."
