History of Freeform
American cable and satellite television network Freeform was originally launched as the CBN Satellite Service on April 29, 1977, and has gone through four different owners and six different name changes during its history. This article details the network's existence from its founding by the Christian Broadcasting Network to its current ownership by The Walt Disney Company, which renamed the network to Freeform on January 12, 2016.
CBN Satellite Service (1977–1988)
The network was founded by Pat Robertson as the CBN Satellite Service, an arm of his television ministry, the Christian Broadcasting Network. When the channel launched on April 29, 1977, it became the first basic cable channel to be transmitted via satellite from its launch and, effectively, the first national basic cable-originated network. Initially, the network offered only religious programs aimed at a Christian audience. The offerings on the CBN Satellite Service during its early years included CBN's flagship news/talk show, The 700 Club, along with programs from many notable and lesser-known television evangelists. As a result, a few televangelists began to produce stripped programs to air on the network each weekday. The CBN Satellite Service grew its subscriber base to 10.9 million households by May 1981.On September 1, 1981, the channel was relaunched as the CBN Cable Network. At that time of the name change, it was concurrently repositioned as an advertiser-supported "family-friendly" entertainment network, although the channel continued to offer religious programs that occupied about a third of its daily schedule. Entertainment programming that aired on the channel during this period included various classic television series, reruns of game shows, older movies, and some family-oriented drama series. CBN Cable also produced its first original series with the relaunch including a weekday-morning talk show, US a.m. and the faith-based soap opera Another Life.
The network also aired – and was even involved in the production of a few of them – a handful of Christian or family-friendly animated series, including some anime – such as CBN's own co-productions with Japanese animation studio Tatsunoko Production, Superbook and The Flying House and the television pilot sitcom Help Wanted; the channel also carried English-dubbed versions of Honey, Honey and Leo the Lion. Religious programming retained a sizeable portion of CBN Cable's schedule; in addition to continuing to run weekday airings of The 700 Club, non-CBN-produced ministry programs were relegated to Saturday and Sunday evenings, and Sunday mornings, encompassing only 22% of the network's programming lineup by 1990.
The channel's decision to mix secular and religious programs within its schedule mirrored the programming format used by the independent television stations that CBN had owned at the time of the rebrand. Additional programming that joined the CBN Cable lineup later in the decade included Hazel, Father Knows Best, The Big Valley, and Gunsmoke, plus foreign acquisitions The Campbells and Butterfly Island. Under the new format, the national distribution of the CBN Cable Network had grown from 28 million households in May 1985 to 35.8 million in May 1987.
The Family Channel (1988–1998)
On August 1, 1988, the word "Family" was incorporated into the channel's name to better reflect its programming format, rebranding as The CBN Family Channel; however, it was identified in on-air and print promotions as simply The Family Channel, which became official on August 1, 1989 with the formal rollout of a revised logo omitting the "CBN" moniker. On September 11 of that year, "Fun Town", a daily children's program block featuring animated and live-action series from DIC Enterprises, debuted as part of The Family Channel's morning and weekend afternoon lineups. Under its programming deal with the company, DIC would produce four specials per quarter that would air on the channel, including holiday specials and a film version of the animated series The New Archies, although those plans would ultimately be scrapped.On January 8, 1990, CBN spun off The Family Channel to International Family Entertainment Inc. for $250 million in convertible securities. The Robertsons paid $150,000 to acquire 4.5 million shares and a controlling ownership interest in IFE, with Pat and Tim subsequently purchasing an additional 1.5 million shares.
As a stipulation of the sale to International Family Entertainment, the channel was required to continue to carry The 700 Club. This time-buy clause was the only requirement that Robertson included in sales terms for the network to its subsequent owners. However, public assumption had conflated for many years that this sole existing stipulation was one of two that he included following the sale of the network by CBN; another contractual clause that Robertson was alleged to have added in the sale agreement to Fox required any future secular owners to maintain the word "Family" in the network's name in perpetuity. When Disney announced on October 6, 2015, that it would rebrand the network as Freeform, ABC Family president Tom Ascheim noted that there was no record of such a clause ever having been in place.
By 1989, the channel was seen in 47.3 million households, with its distribution jumping to 54 million homes by 1992. At that point, the 1950s sitcoms and westerns that had long been featured on its lineup were scaled back, in favor of more recent drama series as well as cartoons and later, game shows. The channel's weekday afternoon game show block consisted of the aforementioned programs along with the later episodes of Split Second and other shows specifically produced for the channel ; IFE would also sell 3.33 million shares of stock to the public. In January 1993, IFE purchased TVS Entertainment, a British broadcaster that had previously operated the South & South East of England franchise of the ITV network, and also owned MTM Enterprises, for $68.5 million.
That year, International Family Entertainment and Flextech jointly launched an international version of The Family Channel in the United Kingdom which broadcast a mixture of Family Channel's original programmes along with a small amount of UK-exclusive original shows and repeats from the TVS archive. On February 3, 1997, that channel eventually relaunched as the game show-dedicated network Challenge, following IFE's sale of its 61% controlling interest to Flextech in April 1996. In addition, in the United States, The Family Channel attempted to launch a spin-off network with a very similar format to that which the U.K. Family Channel evolved into; The Game Channel was intended as an interactive game show-oriented channel that was also set to launch in 1993. International Family Entertainment launched another cable channel, the Cable Health Club, on October 4, 1993, which was made available to cable providers without a carriage fee; the lineage of that network – which was later renamed FitTV – is traceable to the current-day Warner Bros. Discovery-owned network Discovery Life.
The network gained more visibility when, for a four-year period from 1994 to 1997, it served as the primary sponsor of Ted Musgrave's #16 Ford Thunderbird in the NASCAR Winston Cup Series.
Fox Family (1998–2001)
Purchase by Fox Kids Worldwide
In early 1997, Rupert Murdoch-owned News Corporation entered into discussions to purchase a stake in The Family Channel with International Family Entertainment as a partner, seeking to bring it under its Fox Kids joint venture with Haim Saban. On June 11, 1997, News Corporation purchased International Family Entertainment for $1.9 billion. The latter company's assets were split within News Corporation's portfolio: The Family Channel was merged into Fox Kids Worldwide, a joint venture between majority owners News Corporation and Saban, and media investment firm Allen & Company, which was subsequently renamed Fox Family Worldwide following the completion of the acquisition.The Family Channel was renamed Fox Family Channel – though on-air promotions typically referred to the network as just "Fox Family" – on August 15, 1998. With the change in ownership, Fox Family's operations were also migrated from the Christian Broadcasting Network's headquarters in Virginia Beach, Virginia, and integrated with the operations of some of News Corporation's other cable channels in Los Angeles at the Fox Network Center. The MTM Enterprises library was assumed by 20th Television.
Early programming
When Fox purchased the channel, programmers sought to reposition it to target a dual audience: children in daytime, families at night. Once the network became Fox Family, the new owners dropped nearly all of the programming that it aired under The Family Channel brand – which at that point included reruns of series such as Bonanza, The Rifleman, Carol Burnett and Friends, Hawaii Five-O, The High Chaparral, Rescue 911 and Diagnosis: Murder – and replaced them with shows that appealed to a younger demographic. Rich Cronin, who was appointed as the network's president and CEO, said regarding the channel's audience refocusing, "our focus is on younger families, more suburban or urban, more plugged into pop culture". Fox Family was obligated to continue airing The 700 Club as part of the sale, but the program's airings were scaled back to two times each day, with the evening broadcast being moved out of prime time, and pushed one hour later to 11:00 p.m. Eastern Time. Programming that appealed to children and teenagers was also greatly expanded on the channel. Fox Family added more animated series to the lineup, many of which came from the Fox Kids program library. At launch, Fox Family had four themed kids daytime blocks: "Morning Scramble/Weekend Chill", "Captain Kangaroo's Treasure House", "Toon-A Casserole" and "The Basement". Original series meant for family co-viewing were programmed from 6:00 p.m. to 9:00 p.m. followed by a movie. Fox Family's original programming budget was increased by $500 million, to be spent on 20 original movies and 680 episodes of original series.In 1998, the company announced the launch of two digital networks spun-off from Fox Family - Boyz Channel and Girlz Channel, and both launched in October 1999. Both networks contained programming content targeted at the respective genders; both channels ceased operations after one year on the air in August 2000, due to a combination of very limited national carriage by cable providers and the controversy that developed over the gender-segregated channels.