A Family-Friendly Cable Network

F aith, family, and freedom: three values the modern entertainment industry doesn’t uplift often. Most of television’s most popular shows contain mature elements — sex scenes, suggestive themes, violence, or depictions of nontraditional marriage and infidelity. Children’s shows hosted by Nickelodeon and Disney now prioritize LGBTQ representation and identity politics. GOP lawmakers even asked the TV Parental Guidelines Monitoring Board in 2022 to help parents identify children’s shows that have “sexual orientation and gender identity content” — to no avail.

Parents who are looking for suitable, family-friendly entertainment have in recent years turned to Hallmark, the channel known for its holiday movies. But as is the case with the rest of the entertainment industry, Hallmark has recently expanded its catalogue to include “inclusive storylines” with LGBTQ characters and “queer-forward” plots. Some families are now wondering where they might find noncontroversial and traditional films.

The Great American Family channel (GAC), led by Hallmark’s family-loving ex-CEO, Bill Abbott, is trying to fill that void.

“We are really, unabashedly, positive and family friendly,” he told National Review. “And we will always be that way and not let anything that is provocative creep into our storytelling.”

Abbott’s departure from Hallmark came in 2020, just one month after the channel pulled from its network a commercial that featured a same-sex married couple. Hallmark viewers had pressed the network to remove the commercial — the parents’ group One Million Moms led a petition asking Hallmark to keep its content traditional. Parents should be the ones to teach children about sex and sexual morals, advocates said at the time. Entertainment companies didn’t necessarily dispute that. Parents, after all, can choose what their children watch on television. If Hallmark wasn’t traditional enough, families were free to take their business elsewhere. But where would they go?

“We have a vision of really being faith-forward, focused on telling great family stories, and being supportive of the country. At the end of the day, the country is the best country on the planet. In today’s culture, and in today’s entertainment space, sometimes that’s not reflected,” Abbott said. “We really want to be supportive of things that historically, I think, in entertainment overall are not necessarily put in a positive light.”

During the 2021–22 prime-time programming season, 11.9 percent of regular TV characters were LGBTQ. Among broadcast, cable, and streaming platforms, there were 42 regular transgender characters, the Gay and Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation found. TV shows and movies in 2022 had nine times more profanity and five times more sexual content than they did in 1980, streaming service VidAngel found. As a father himself, Abbott knows the value of a child’s innocence. There’s a line, he said, between sheltering children and keeping them away from mature content. “Life is short,” he said. “Why put people in positions where they are going to potentially get their own mind polluted or corrupted?”

While the network produces many holiday movies, GAC isn’t just in the Christmas mass-production game, Abbott said. Unlike some of GAC’s competitors, the network is working to produce original and quality content — part of that effort is the network’s push to produce better faith-focused movies. Many Christian movies follow a similar story line: “Eighty-six minutes of someone at their lowest lows, and then ultimately, in the last two minutes, they come out of that in a positive way,” Abbott said. “That’s one way to tell a story, but from our point of view, we want to tell a positive story where people can really enjoy seeing people on the [faith] journey, and, at the end of the day, the journey has much more of a positive depiction.” The network made 21 original movies last year.

County Rescue is the channel’s first original series and will premiere in February on the company’s streaming service, Pure Flix. With stars formerly featured in Stranger Things, The Vampire Diaries, and Law & Order, the show will chronicle the story of an EMS team that overcomes obstacles to “find the joy of being faith- and family-focused,” Abbott said. The channel will also produce an Easter movie this year about a couple who has trouble conceiving a child, produced by Full House actress, former Hallmark star, and current GAC chief creative officer Candace Cameron Bure.

It’s challenging, Abbott said, to find scripts and writers who view a faith-centered movie in the same way that GAC does. “Finding writing like that, A, is challenging and, B, the notion, in a world where the majority of the creative community might not necessarily share that faith perspective, or those faith elements, can be very problematic,” and the channel doesn’t want to simply slap a “faith” label on any film that features a churchgoer or a minister.

Actors, on the other hand, are easier to find. “We have really strong relationships with the vast majority of talent in this genre that we know viewers love, have a very high level of integrity, can be looked up to, and are really icons in the business,” Abbott said, pointing to Cameron Bure. “And then, there are a lot of [actors] who might not wear it on their sleeve for obvious reasons, but they are certainly very supportive of faith, family, and country and would love to work with us.”

Two years in, the channel has made some impressive strides: In 2023, it was the fastest-growing television network (out of 112 ranked by Nielsen ratings), Abbott said. “We are making progress every year. It doesn’t happen overnight. But we are thrilled with the reaction, the growth of the brand, the growth of the overall business, and where we sit in the landscape.”

Faith- and family-centered entertainment isn’t popular, which is all the more reason why Abbott and his team at GAC face an uphill battle for ratings and views. But GAC doesn’t seek popularity, Abbott said, at least not from the wrong audience. “Whenever I get tired, I read viewer emails and responses, because we’ve had just an overwhelming response to what we’re doing,” he said. “People are so pleased, positive, happy, grateful.”