Psychic Friends Network
Dionne Warwick on a talk-show set, a psychic named Linda Georgian beside her, and the 1-900 number under every satisfied caller. At $3.99 a minute the Psychic Friends Network was the late-night infomercial of the early 90s, airing thousands of times a year until the company behind it went bankrupt in 1998.
The Psychic Friends Network launched in 1991 as a telephone service built on infomercials. The spots, staged like a talk show and hosted by singer Dionne Warwick with self-described psychic Linda Georgian, showed callers marveling at their readings and ended with a 1-900 number. Behind it, a call-distribution system routed customers to a network of psychics working shifts from their homes, so a caller could build a relationship with one reader and ask for her by name. Calls cost $3.99 a minute.
For a few years it was, by the trade press's reckoning, the most successful infomercial on television. Between 1993 and 1994 the spots aired more than 12,000 times, the parent company, Inphomation, was at one point spending half a million dollars a week on cable airtime, and at its peak the network took in as much as $125 million a year, most of it through the infomercials. Jack Schember, publisher of the trade magazine Response TV, called it the most successful infomercial of all time, and USA Today credited it with opening the parody floodgates. Warwick fronted it for close to five years; press reports at the time put her fee at more than $3 million a year.
The company never changed the pitch while rivals repackaged theirs, and Inphomation filed for bankruptcy in 1998 with $26 million in liabilities against about $1.2 million in assets. The successor act was already on the air: Miss Cleo's Psychic Readers Network ran the same playbook into the early 2000s. A former PFN psychic, Mark Edward, later described the operation in his 2012 book Psychic Blues as "a psychic sweatshop," and he has said readers were taught to keep conversations vague, flattering and long; one reading he gave ran two and a half hours and cost the caller more than $600.
The name came back as a web service in 2012 and was renamed Peer to Peer Network in 2014, but the memory is the original: Warwick's smile, the testimonials, and the number you were not supposed to dial from your parents' phone.
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