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After Ascheim departed in April 2020, Freeform recruited Tara Duncan to serve as its first president who was actually in the network’s demographic. In what could be considered a sign of where Freeform ranks within Disney’s internal priorities, the network now no longer has one executive whose job is entirely to focus on the network. The 2020s has seen Freeform’s roster of original significantly paired down to a mere handful of shows - the final season of Black-ish spinoff Grown-ish (originally developed for ABC but considered too young-skewing to work on broadcast), Cruel Summer and the animated Praise Petey with dramedy While You Were Breeding pushed to 2024. The 2010s delivered a string of hits including Switched at Birth, the beloved Bunheads, Baby Daddy and The Fosters, with the latter’s spinoff, Good Trouble, remaining part of Freeform’s lineup today. Lee, Riley and Ascheim all pushed Freeform deeper into scripted originals as the network carved out a brand identity with shows including Kyle XY, Greek, The Secret Life of the American Teenager and network-defining hit Pretty Little Liars (all developed under Lee’s team). Riley joined the then-ABC Family in 2010 when he took over for Paul Lee, who was promoted to run ABC’s entertainment programming after six years at the helm of the younger-skewing cabler. Ascheim, the former Nickelodeon GM and CEO of Newsweek, took over the network in 2013 from Michael Riley, who brought The Fosters to the network under Disney’s Anne Sweeney. The intention was to focus on what he dubbed “becomers,” that group of adults 18-34 who are experiencing firsts in their lives like love and work as they become adults.

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for $2.9 billion plus the assumption of its debt.įox Family was renamed ABC Family, with the company trying out a number of brands, identities and target audiences before settling on Freeform and its current target audience in 2016.ĭespite its many names and iterations over the years, Freeform still has one critical connection to its founding: It still runs The 700 Club, the religious show hosted by Robertson for most of its run, a term of that original sale decades ago that still holds to this day.Īfter months of focus groups and research, former ABC Family president Tom Ascheim oversaw the rebranding of the network in 2016 to Freeform. Just a few years later, with Saban seeking an exit, the companies agreed to sell Fox Family to The Walt Disney Co. and a company controlled by media mogul Haim Saban, and it was rebranded as the Fox Family Channel. In 1997, the channel was sold for $1.9 billion to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp.

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In the late 1980s, the channel left Robertson’s ministry and became for-profit, rebranding itself as The Family Channel (the deal was financed, in part, by the cable TV mogul John Malone, who, in a twist of fate, is also the largest outside shareholder in Charter Communications).

“We had Bonanza, we had Gunsmoke, you name it, they were all there.”īut the channel that would become Freeform would be bought and sold many times over in the enduing decades, with many brand iterations to boot. I mean big ratings, beat the other stations, because we just stacked them from 12 or one o’clock on Saturday all day long, one after the other,” he recalled. “They bought the biggest ratings all week long.

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Robertson told the Archive that old Westerns were among the major draws. It was programmed with Christian talk shows and sermons, but mixed in classic TV shows. HBO was founded a half decade earlier as a premium cable service, and Ted Turner put WTCG’s signal on cable and satellite beginning in 1976, but Robertson’s CBN service was the original basic cable channel. Hulu's 3-in-1 Deal Gets You Live TV Streaming With Disney+ and ESPN+ for FreeĪnd while the deal saw a number of other channels were dropped in the deal, the dropping of Freeform suggests that, as the repercussions of the deal are felt across the pay TV ecosystem, no channel is truly safe.įreeform has a long and winding history that traces back to the earliest days of cable TV.įounded in 1977 by the evangelist Pat Robertson as a spinoff of his Christian Broadcasting Network local TV stations, the channel effectively became “the first satellite basic cable network in America,” Robertson recalled to the Archive of American Television in an interview.

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