The Associated Press

Mark Shapiro, the man who is responsible for development of all programming for three ESPN networks, is tiptoeing beyond their traditional boundaries to introduce drama into the mix.

Playmakers, ESPN's first fictional series, will have its premiere Aug. 26.

Set for a 10-week initial run on Tuesday nights, the hour-long episodes will dramatize the lives connected to a professional football team - from players, coaches, families and cheerleaders to the front-office personnel.

"We're on a mission to increase our audience levels by producing non-traditional forms of sports programming," said Shapiro, who was coordinating producer of ESPN's Emmy and Peabody Award-winning series, SportsCentury. From 1997-99, it chronicled the lives of the network's selected 50 greatest athletes of the 20th Century, plus other famous sports personalities.

ESPN's own demographic studies show that "20 percent of our audience watches 80 percent of the time," Shapiro said. "Eighty percent are not stuck on ESPN, and that makes us vulnerable."

That's where the tiptoeing comes in. ESPN wants to bring more of that 80 percent into the fold without losing the solid 20 percent to other programming.

"There's a casual audience of more males and more females that we can get when we break away from the X's and O's by adding drama," Shapiro said. "But we can't go so far off brand as to antagonize our hard-core audience."

The football drama is among ESPN Original Entertainment projects that eventually will run the gamut from original movies and dramatic series to game shows and reality-based shows, he said.

Playmakers will seek to build an audience with plots about behind-the-scenes struggles within a pro football franchise, the kind of drama Shapiro describes as "pulled from the headlines."

Asked if that kind of subject matter might adversely affect the network's relationships with athletes, he said:

"They will get the fact that it's a fictional approach. Athletes won't feel attacked. No athlete is going to shut us out because he or she feels attacked by a dramatic series."

John Eisendrath, executive producer of ABC's dramatic spy series, Alias, also has that role in Playmakers, which he created for ESPN.

Lead actors in the series include Tony Denison, Omar Gooding, Russell Hornsby, Jason Mathew Smith, Marcello Thedford and Chris Wiehl.