In the ABC Family constellation, the televangelist may be the Foster family’s strangest bedfellow. According to network president Tom Ascheim, Deadline reported Tuesday, the motivation for the rebranding was that “core viewers understand the younger, social-media active brand while non-viewers associate it with wholesome and family-friendly programming.” This name-change marks a decisive effort to finally shed the neoconservative Christian ethos that has dogged the channel’s branding, however mildly, since Fox bought the network from Pat Robertson in 1998. (The network calls us “Becomers,” because we navigate a whole host of life changes in those decades-“from your first kiss to your first kid,” they claim.)īut my older associations with ABC Family get in the way. If anything, ABC Family should be catnip to me: I’m still (barely) in the network’s core demographic, people (though mostly women) ages 14-34. Yet I kind of hate that I love it-partly because Stef and Lena are, respectively, a cop and a charter school principal, a shot of neoliberalism with your assimilation politics and partly because I’ve always thought of the network as vaguely Christian: Any channel that broadcast Secret Life of the American Teenager smells of strained morality and squeaky-clean visuals to me.Īnd it’s because of viewers like me that the Disney-owned network (ABC is also a Disney property) has announced that as of January 16 it will be renamed Freeform. Lena and Stef and the kids are clearly supposed to embody what the network calls “A New Kind of Family,” one that departs from 7th Heaven’s lily-white Camden family, one that embraces, say, families of color, interracial relationships, and same-sex parents. A friend of a friend calls it “acceptance porn”: Everyone finds a place in diverse Anchor Beach, California, and in the loving arms of the Adams-Foster clan. All of these things are true, and the show is pretty dreamy. New Yorker television critic Emily Nussbaum has written that the show is “understated” “largely undidactic” “wise, funny, and insightful”’-with diversity “baked” into the premise of the show. ( Get it?) But I couldn’t: It’s too good. I tried to resist the show, which centers on an interracial lesbian couple, Stef Foster and Lena Adams, and their multiracial family of five kids, some of whom are foster children. Helen Mirren and BBC Studios are represented by CAA.I didn’t want to love ABC Family’s The Fosters. “She is the perfect storyteller to take us on this journey as we reimagine the animal kingdom with a comic twist and bring to life the more humorous side of creatures great and small.” “Helen Mirren is without a doubt one of the greatest talents of our time, and we consider it a privilege to bring her iconic voice to this series,” said Valerie Bruce, general manager, LA Productions, BBC Studios.
“When you’ve won an Oscar, an Emmy and a Tony, the only way to further add to your legacy is to narrate When Nature Calls with Helen Mirren,” said Rob Mills, executive vice president, Unscripted & Alternative, Walt Disney Television. “I am excited by the opportunity to reveal the ‘true inner lives’ of the noble creatures with whom we share the planet,” said Mirren. Brad Stevens and Boyd Vico serve as head writers and executive producers. Anderson, exec producer of The Soup and Norm Macdonald Has a Show, will exec produce and serve as showrunner with Ryan O’Dowd exec producing for BBC Studios.
'TNF's Chiefs-Chargers Showdown Tops Thursday 'Station 19' & 'Grey's Anatomy' Rise With Winter Finales
0 kommentar(er)
