Oxygen channel shifts its strategy to court viewers

There’s a thin line between desperation and innovation, between trash and feminist sensuality. So where exactly does the cable channel Oxygen fall?

It’s been four years since Oxygen launched as the anti-Lifetime, an alternative to what it described as the airhead channel for women. Oxygen would be a classier product for classier female viewers, a high-heeled thinking women’s guide to programming.

But this business has a way of altering the best laid plans, of humbling and humiliating. So here we are with Oxygen, circa 2004, no longer able to hide its blond roots or its marketing desperation.

Oxygen’s latest batch of scripted series —”Good Girls Don’t,” “Naked Josh” and “Show Me Yours” —are a kind of collective orgy, all in the name of female (sexual) empowerment, enlightenment and hooking more viewers.

Along with Oxygen’s popular unscripted shows, “Girls Behaving Badly” and “Sex Talk with Sue Johanson,” the three new series are attracting the kind of water-cooler chat this network has longed for, even if it isn’t necessarily for the right reasons.

“Good Girls Don’t,” about a pair of Minnesota transplants trolling for sex and booze in Los Angeles, stoops to juvenile humor about sex and may die a quick death if only because it’s void of humor.

“Naked Josh” tries to say something meaningful about sex by following the exploits of a hapless, brainy anthropology professor who teaches the theory of sexual behavior but is completely clueless when it comes to his own love life.

“Show Me Yours” takes a similar tack, except the “high-minded” purveyors of sex talk are male and female co-authors of a sex study of young people and their erotic experiences. It’s a he-said, she-said, they-said, will-they-won’t-they comic drama that looks smarter than it is.

Truth is, women need Oxygen as much as men need Spike, the frat-boy cable channel with shows called “Trucks!” and “Horsepower.”

Even when Oxygen came along, citing a drought of “real” women’s issues, several channels outside Lifetime were sustained in large part by female viewers. Trying to shoehorn women-specific TV into a single channel was rather pointless then and now.

Oxygen has since found this out but isn’t ready to admit it.

So Oxygen moves on in its new direction, seeing what sticks.

As “Naked Josh” says: “In Western culture, we’re obsessed with sex. No one feels they are getting enough. Why not start with something they care about? Like sex?”

Oxygen couldn’t agree more.