A Trip to ‘Mars’ Signals a New Look for National Geographic Channel

LOS ANGELES — Over the last year, the National Geographic Channel has turned itself inside out.

Gone are derivative, low-cost reality shows set in Alaska. Arriving are lavish productions like “Mars,” a mini-series from an Oscar-winning team that began on Monday. Even as it spends more on less — about $400 million a year for 150 hours of programming, compared with $300 million for 450 hours before — the channel has cut advertising minutes by up to 50 percent.

Will this HBO-ification of National Geographic succeed?

Some people in the television business think the answer is no. But James Murdoch, now in his second year as chief executive of 21st Century Fox, is betting that his unorthodox plan signifies the future — how little-watched networks like National Geographic must evolve if they are going to survive (and, hopefully, thrive) in a rapidly changing media environment.

The overhaul is Mr. Murdoch’s first major entertainment initiative. “It’s not really a linear ratings game anymore,” he said in an interview about the channel, which is majority-owned by Fox. “It’s about creating demand across platforms, and part of the way to do that is to have programming that is big and commands attention. The last thing you can be in this world is disposable.”

After sauntering along for years without posing any real threat, National Geographic and other lightly viewed channels — CMT, Oxygen, truTV — are now facing a survival-of-the-fittest future. Younger viewers increasingly live in an on-demand world, where networks don’t matter. Tired of paying for channels they rarely watch, consumers are downsizing to so-called skinny core bundles or forgoing pay television altogether.

“National Geographic has not been considered a must-have network,” said Anthony DiClemente, an analyst with Instinet.

Higher-quality series represent National Geographic’s effort to avoid getting squeezed out. Fox also hopes to convince distributors like Comcast and AT&T to pay more to carry National Geographic. The channel, available in 91 million homes in the United States, receives about 23 cents per subscriber per month, according to SNL Kagan. Discovery Channel, in comparison, receives almost double that amount.

In many ways, the new National Geographic plan is similar to the one Fox has long used at FX, home to prestige dramas like “Fargo.” “Premium is a word we are using exhaustively now,” said Courteney Monroe, a former marketer for HBO and others who was named chief executive of National Geographic Global Networks last year. “Entertaining and smart are not mutually exclusive.”

“Mars” marks the hairpin turn.

The $20 million mini-series, produced by a team that includes the Oscar-winning pair Ron Howard and Brian Grazer, mixes scripted drama and documentary sequences in a story about efforts by humans to colonize the red planet. The fictionalized portion looks at a crewed mission to Mars in 2033. Interviews with scientists and footage taped at SpaceX, the aerospace firm founded by Elon Musk, make up the rest.

Mr. Grazer said he first pitched the expensive project to Peter Rice, chief executive of Fox Networks Group, over lunch.

“It was the fastest ‘yes’ I think I’ve ever gotten,” he said, emphasizing that Mr. Rice has played an important role in National Geographic’s turn. Mr. Grazer described Ms. Monroe, who has limited programming experience, as “high quality, a big thinker, the opposite of petty, someone who will forgive the little things to get to the big things.”

In the pipeline behind “Mars” are ambitious scripted projects like “Genius,” an anthology series, and “Dragon Teeth,” a limited series from Steven Spielberg’s Amblin Television. These kinds of efforts, which Declan Moore, chief executive of National Geographic Partners, called “exciting, adventurous, audacious, awesome,” are designed to attract cable viewers who are tired of rote reality shows.

Mr. Moore plans to monetize viewing across platforms (video on demand, streaming services, iTunes, DVD) while profiting through improved corporate synergy. There are “Mars”-related books from a publishing division; the titular yellow-bordered magazine has Mars on its cover; and digital channels (National Geographic is the No. 1 noncelebrity brand on Instagram) will also push out “Mars”-themed content.

Much of what Fox is doing runs counter to conventional business methods, leading some rivals to scratch their heads. Specials are great, but what fills all the hours in between? And since when is the game not about linear ratings?

A recent stunt by National Geographic was seen as particularly odd. The channel paid millions of dollars for “Before the Flood,” a climate change documentary produced by a team that included Leonardo DiCaprio, and after running it a couple of times, the channel gave it away for free on YouTube.

National Geographic executives readily acknowledge that they will not make money on the film; rather, they always saw it as a brand-building effort. National Geographic, after all, got its start in 1888 as an academic society dedicated to spreading geographic knowledge. A company spokesman, Christopher Albert, said the film was viewed, at least in part, by roughly 64 million people worldwide. “We see this as a really big success,” he said.

National Geographic Channel has a long history overseas, where it reaches more than 350 million homes. But it became a stand-alone network in the United States only in 2001. There was no real cable niche left to fill, so the channel, then a partnership between Fox and the National Geographic Society, largely copied the reality show playbooks of competitors. It worked only modestly, and serious society members recoiled at lowbrow efforts like “Taboo” and “Meet the Hutterites.”

“We sort of never lived up to the potential of the brand,” Ms. Monroe said.

Then the media business started to fray. National Geographic magazine, with its award-winning photography, watched as subscriptions dwindled, putting pressure on the affiliated National Geographic Society, a nonprofit dedicated to environment-related pursuits. And the television apparatus started to encounter challenges of its own.

Last year, 21st Century Fox paid $725 million to buy the bulk of the National Geographic Society’s business holdings. Together they created a new company, National Geographic Partners, which encompasses television, print publications, maps, digital media, children’s media, licensing and tours. The partners share governance, but Fox owns 73 percent of the venture.

The National Geographic Society continued as a separate nonprofit.

Even as the channel’s new programming strategy has prompted questions, it has answered others.

Some purists were outraged by the Fox deal. As the primatologist Jane Goodall told a Canadian interviewer: “I truly thought it was a joke. This can’t be true. National Geographic, the National Geographic, being owned almost entirely by Fox News, which is filled with climate deniers and almost flat-world science?”

A year later, those worries have dissipated. Gary E. Knell, chief executive of the National Geographic Society, said he has been thrilled by the higher-caliber programming. And he noted that his philanthropy suddenly has lots of money to spend. The society recently announced an expedition to document the sources of the Cuando River in the remote highlands of Angola as part of an effort to protect its ecosystem.

“Most nonprofits spend most of their time fund-raising,” Mr. Knell said. “We now spend our time thinking about how to change the world.”