OWN announces projects with Toni Braxton, Octavia Spencer

Oprah Winfrey’s OWN Network announced Wednesday an upcoming slate of projects featuring the likes of Toni Braxton, Octavia Spencer, Justin Timberlake and of course Oprah herself.

The network will make its first foray into the TV movie genre with “My Name is Love: The Darlene Love Story,” scheduled to premiere in December. The biopic will star the Grammy-winning Braxton as the legendary backup singer and subject of the Oscar-winning documentary “20 Feet From Stardom.” It also shares an executive producer, Morgan Neville, with that film.

The network is also developing a two-part miniseries, “Tulsa,” featuring the Academy Award-winning Spencer, which centers on a 1921 race riot in which as many as 300 people died but was covered up for decades.

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Winfrey will present the new seven-part event series “Belief,” which will explore the origins of faith and “humankind’s ongoing search to connect to something greater than ourselves.” It is scheduled to premiere in 2015.

OWN also announced a 20-episode order for the series “Single Moms Club” from Tyler Perry, based on the film released earlier this month to disappointing box office returns. It will premiere sometime this fall.

“Coming off our most watched quarter in network history, we are excited to get to work on these new scripted projects with Octavia and Toni,” said OWN President Erik Logan in a press release. “By diversifying our programming, we are also growing our audience, and these new projects put us in a great position to take the network to the next level.”

The announcement also highlighted several returning series. In its upcoming fourth season, beginning May 11, “Oprah’s Master Class” will showcase musician and actor Timberlake, comedian Whoopi Goldberg, country music star Tim McGraw and “Good Morning America” host Robin Roberts, among others.

New episodes of the upstairs-downstairs soap “The Haves and the Have Nots,” also created by Perry, will begin May 27.

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Twitter: @MeredithBlake