Hallmark Channel

Martha Stewart has a knack for transforming dated rooms into design showpieces. Now she's undertaking another major renovation: the Hallmark Channel. Beginning Monday, Stewart will provide eight hours of programming each weekday as part of an ambitious revamp of the Hallmark Channel. After pinning its fortunes on the broad appeal of sentimental made-for-TV movies and reruns of such classic shows as "The Golden Girls" and "Little House on the Prairie," Hallmark plans to focus on home and lifestyle improvement and cooking shows.

Get ready for more change along the  Las Vegas Strip: Look for alterations to the faces of the New York-New York and Monte Carlo hotels and the addition of an expansive public plaza featuring a variety of new restaurants and shops. The new outdoor space, expected to open early next year, will bring significant changes to the facades of both properties, it was announced Thursday. New York-New York's mock skyline, including its replica of the Brooklyn Bridge, is to be modified to make room for the new development.

Meredith Baxter recalls that when she met Michael Gross 30 years ago at the first table read for the award-winning NBC sitcom, "Family Ties," she gave the lanky actor cast as her husband a good once-over. "I am thinking my first words to him were, 'You need a tan!,'" she said, laughing. "He is a New Yorker and I am born and raised in Los Angeles. " Three decades after that first encounter, they are playing husband and wife once again in the Hallmark Channel holiday film, "Naughty or Nice," which premieres Saturday on the cable network.

Click here to download TV listings for the week of Feb. 10 - 16, 2013 in PDF format This week's TV Movies       SERIES Ripper Street:  The clearing of a local slum reveals a murder scene in a new episode of the 19th century police procedural drama (6 and 9 p.m. BBC America). The Graham Norton Show:  Helen Mirren, Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann are guests and Little Mix performs in this new episode (7:15 and 10:15 p.m. BBC America). American Ninja Warrior: Host Matt Iseman presents footage from last season, including some that didn't air (8 p.m. NBC)

This is not an easy day for Martha Stewart. Sitting in her Manhattan office, surrounded by sparkling walls of ribbons, puff-paints, glitters and decorative hole punches, all carefully arranged by color and size, she has a very serious look on her face, which has been freshly repowdered after a midday yoga session. FOR THE RECORD: Martha Stewart: A Dec. 5 Calendar article about Martha Stewart reported that her jail time cost her company $1 billion. That figure is not an annual financial loss for the publicly traded Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc. but an estimate from Stewart based on possible damage to her brand name and loss of future business deals.

Get ready for more change along the  Las Vegas Strip: Look for alterations to the faces of the New York-New York and Monte Carlo hotels and the addition of an expansive public plaza featuring a variety of new restaurants and shops. The new outdoor space, expected to open early next year, will bring significant changes to the facades of both properties, it was announced Thursday. New York-New York's mock skyline, including its replica of the Brooklyn Bridge, is to be modified to make room for the new development.

Hallmark Channel, owned by Crown Media Holdings Inc. of Studio City, said it bought the rights to 99 movies from Walt Disney Co., including "Old Yeller" and "The Santa Clause," to reach younger audiences. The deal is for eight years, a Hallmark Channel spokeswoman said. Financial terms weren't disclosed.

The little-known Odyssey cable network will change its name to the Hallmark Channel and shuffle its programming to slightly reduce its religious fare, executives said Wednesday. The new Hallmark Channel will start Aug. 6. Odyssey, formed in 1990 largely as a religious network, already shows reruns of old Hallmark-produced movies, as well as series such as "Happy Days" and "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman." The basic cable channel is available in nearly 30 million homes. Hallmark Inc.

"Landslide," a TV movie that was to have premiered tonight on the Hallmark Channel, has been shelved temporarily "out of respect for the victims of Hurricane Katrina," the outlet's programming chief, David Kenin, said. He said story elements in the film "are vaguely and uncomfortably similar" to the Gulf Coast disaster. No new air date has been scheduled.

The January tour was canceled because of the writers strike, so the question of the Screen Actors Guild negotiations are hanging over this summer's proceedings. During Tuesday's second session, at a panel of actors from Hallmark Channel movies, the question of a strike was raised because one of the panelists was Ed Asner, the union's former president. Would there be another? "I doubt it, I truly doubt it," Asner said. "The town has been fairly terrorized this year and actors don't have more guts than the average person.

As a child of the San Fernando Valley, I knew the yuletide as a time of frost-free mornings when I could not see my breath. Turning down my collar against the warm, I would trudge sludgeless streets past yards absent of snowmen, where green and even flowering hedges hid no foes waiting to pelt me with snowballs, on my way to school, where we would sing songs of sleigh rides and mistletoe and holly. Of Frosty. Rudolph. Santa. Later at home, the family would gather before the television set, our glowing hearth, to watch actors on hot Hollywood sound stages aspire not to perspire beneath their sweaters and scarves and overcoats as they shook the cornstarch from their boots as if entering stage left from a winter's day in Minneapolis or Cincinnati.

Meredith Baxter recalls that when she met Michael Gross 30 years ago at the first table read for the award-winning NBC sitcom, "Family Ties," she gave the lanky actor cast as her husband a good once-over. "I am thinking my first words to him were, 'You need a tan!,'" she said, laughing. "He is a New Yorker and I am born and raised in Los Angeles. " Three decades after that first encounter, they are playing husband and wife once again in the Hallmark Channel holiday film, "Naughty or Nice," which premieres Saturday on the cable network.

Sitcom favorites Shelley Long and Cindy Williams get to strut their comedic stuff together for the first time in the Hallmark Movie Channel's new film, "Strawberry Summer," which airs at 8 p.m. Saturday. Both stars say they are surprised it took them this long. "It seems strange that we haven't worked together," said Long, who came to fame 30 years ago as waitress Diane Chambers on NBC's "Cheers. " "I feel like I know her. " "We shared a nanny," recalled Williams, who demonstrated her uncanny mastery of slapstick as Shirley Feeney from 1976 to '83 onABC's"Laverne & Shirley.

Not surprisingly, this is a big time of year for the Hallmark Channel, which has been offering a non-stop medley of new and old original movies since Thanksgiving week, all testifying to the various transformative powers of Christmas. This Saturday it's "Annie Claus Is Coming to Town," a slight, sweet tale that should appeal to fans of the Big E's — "Elf" and "Enchanted," the two films from which it borrows most heavily, (although "The Santa Clause" franchise also figures in.) Annie (Maria Thayer)

After appearing as James Bond in seven hit films beginning with 1973's "Live and Let Die" and concluding with 1985's "A View to a Kill," Roger Moore put his acting career on the back burner. For two decades, he has devoted much of his time to being a goodwill ambassador for UNICEF, and was knighted in 2003 for his charity work. But Saturday, he returns in Hallmark Channel's holiday fantasy "A Princess for Christmas. " Moore, 84, plays the fabulously wealthy Edward Duke of Castlebury, who invites his estranged young American niece, nephew and their aunt to his castle in the snowy countryside of a fictional European country (the film was shot in Romania)

This is not an easy day for Martha Stewart. Sitting in her Manhattan office, surrounded by sparkling walls of ribbons, puff-paints, glitters and decorative hole punches, all carefully arranged by color and size, she has a very serious look on her face, which has been freshly repowdered after a midday yoga session. FOR THE RECORD: Martha Stewart: A Dec. 5 Calendar article about Martha Stewart reported that her jail time cost her company $1 billion. That figure is not an annual financial loss for the publicly traded Martha Stewart Living Omnimedia Inc. but an estimate from Stewart based on possible damage to her brand name and loss of future business deals.

No Emmy for this deal: TV-miniseries kingpin RHI Entertainment Inc. priced its initial public stock offering late Tuesday at $14 a share, below the $16-to-$18 range the company had hoped to get. RHI, based in New York, is the production house of the Halmi family -- legendary producer Robert Halmi Sr. and son Robert Jr. RHI was a public firm in the early 1990s until it was bought out by Hallmark Cards in 1994. The Halmis stayed on board under Hallmark's wing, producing a slew of content for the Hallmark Channel and for other outlets.

IN October, Henry Schleiff, a consummate New York executive whose resume includes top jobs at HBO, Viacom and most recently Court TV, became president and chief executive of Crown Media Holdings.

Hallmark Channels, reeling over the lackluster ratings of its recently launched Martha Stewart programming block, forced out a key executive who had been hired just four months ago to work closely with the lifestyle maven. Laura Sillars, a former HGTV programming executive, joined Hallmark in June as senior vice president for lifestyle programming. On Friday, her tenure with the Studio City company ended abruptly. "We mutually decided to go in different ways," said Bill Abbott, chief executive of Hallmark Channels.