Andrea Wong Wants to Reinvigorate Lifetime. (Step One: Steal Project Runway)

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LIFETIME THEN: The channel has long been known for melo-dramatic TV movies featuring mostly B- and C-list talent, including Growing Pains' Tracey Gold and veterans of Beverly Hills, 90210.

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LIFETIME NOW: Under Andrea Wong, Lifetime is focusing on nonmovie original programming, including (clockwise from left) Project Runway, the drama Army Wives, and comedies such as Sherri. Photographs by Mike Yarish/Lifetime Networks (Project Runway); Carol Kaelson/Lifetime Networks (Sherri); Dan Littlejohn/Lifetime Television (Army Wives)

If Project Runway had a needlepoint challenge, the show might find itself with an unlikely contestant. "About a year ago, I started needlepointing," confesses Andrea Wong, CEO of Lifetime Networks. She is perched on a chair in her Los Angeles office, wearing a black Yves Saint Laurent pantsuit. "It completely relaxes me." Well, usually. There was that time she was stitching a cushion for her boyfriend. "I was needlepointing while doing conference calls. It practically killed me."

Wong's coexisting affection for high fashion and homey crafts are the perfect metaphor for her plan to reinvigorate the dowdy, if successful, cable channel. Lifetime has been the top ad-backed female-focused network for years but, before Wong's 2007 arrival, was plagued with a reputation for lowbrow movies like My Stepson, My Lover. Its ratings were falling or flat for five straight years.

"We needed to pull back the curtains and blow fresh air through the whole thing," says Wong, 43. "Bring more energy to it. Make it more contemporary." On August 20 comes the biggest salvo so far in her push to do so: The sixth season of Project Runway, which she hijacked from Bravo, will premiere. It's the clearest sign yet of how the woman who brought Dancing With the Stars to U.S. television intends to restore Lifetime's luster -- with a lineup heavy on fun. Says Wong: "We want to be the great escape for women."

Wong's TV career seems like an escape from the life she thought she was destined to live. Growing up in Sunnyvale, California, she decided that she wanted to be Steve Jobs's CMO. ("Apple Computer was down the street," Wong recalls.) She went to MIT, majored in electrical engineering, and yet became a banker. She didn't find her calling until B-school at Stanford, during which she took an internship at NBC. "I sat in the control room of the Today show and fell in love with news," she says. "It had the same energy and immediacy as being on a trading floor did."

She landed a research job on ABC's Primetime Live and quickly got plucked by Bob Iger, then president of ABC and now chief executive of Disney, to help run ABC's special projects. After three years, she felt the need to prove her creative chops and took a lower-level post in ABC's alternative programming department, which oversaw shows such as America's Funniest Home Videos. "There were no rules," Wong says of reality TV in those days. "It was the Wild West."

Which also means it was a backwater to which nobody paid much attention, until Wong started making hits such as The Bachelor. "She really recognized that so much of what drives young women is about transformation," says Susan Lyne, who was ABC's president of entertainment. Wong relentlessly, futilely pitched Lyne, then-Disney CEO Michael Eisner, and ABC Entertainment chairman Lloyd Braun a series about people losing weight. "None of us were able to see beyond the idea that this was about losers," Lyne says. "[NBC's] The Biggest Loser is now one of the most successful shows in that genre. She just understands what hooks people."

Lifetime needed some of that. Sure, it had Golden Girls reruns and those unapologetic melodramas ("It's wily-woman-who-kills-her-husband-and-frames-her-boyfriend," says Marketing to Women author Marti Barletta). But the network, a pioneer when it was created by Hearst and Disney 25 years ago, was losing ground to rivals such as TLC and Bravo, which boasted addictive reality shows such as Trading Spaces, Top Chef, and, of course, Project Runway.