ABC Family Launches a Saga, 'Shadowhunters,' and a New Brand: Freeform
—Pasadena, CA
It’s a new year and a new name for the ABC Family channel, which as of Tuesday becomes Freeform, and apparently the first order of business is to save the world from demons.
The first new show that will premiere on Freeform will be Shadowhunters (Tuesday, 9 p.m. ET), a serial version of Cassandra Clare’s supernatural cult fave "The Mortal Instruments."
It’s a smart adaptation of the story. Certain touches could irritate purists, but that should be easily outweighed by building the romantic half of the story around an enormously endearing couple: Katharine McNamara as Clary Fray and Dominic Sherwood as Jace Wayland. (Top and below.)
The attraction between the red-haired girl and the golden-eyed boy should keep the attention even of fans who aren’t sure how much they care about saving the world from demons, which is the mission of the Shadowhunters, which is what Jace and Clary turn out to be.
Jace knew that was his destiny all along. Clary only finds out when she turns 18 and gets a sketchy fill-in from her mother, minutes before her mother is kidnapped by mysterious creatures.
Clary must find out the rest of the story on her own. Oh yeah, and she also must find and rescue her mother from a world of lethal secrets, warlocks, vampires and maybe even the father she always thought died when she was very young.
Shadowhunters has a large ensemble cast, including several friends of Clary who have a little trouble with her new avocation. On the netherworld side, some of the characters are just flat-out nasty, like the ones who want to subvert the world, while others are surprisingly nuanced.
Like any good supernatural story, it also has its own language. Regular old humans are called “mundanes,” suggesting that it’s less fun to be a person than, oh, say, a shape-shifter.
Freeform President Tom Ascheim noted to TV writers in Pasadena that Shadowhunters is his channel’s first “saga” story, plunging it into waters already well populated by competitors like the CW and MTV.
Ascheim suggested the popularity of supernatural shows is no mystery, because escape is one of the reasons younger audiences watch television.
That doesn’t make younger audiences unique, but Ascheim said they may have an advantage over their parents.
“I think it’s a moment in your life when your imagination is a little more open and vivid than it is as you get to be my age,” he said. “And so I think fantasy allows them to enter the fantasy world in a way that’s harder for grownups.”
Freeform isn’t putting all its money on warlocks to sell the channel’s new incarnation. Most of this Tuesday will be devoted to the surest bet in the network arsenal: Pretty Little Liars, which will run all day as a marathon leading up to a new episode at 8 p.m. ET.
The Liars have now taken their much-anticipated five-year catapult into the future, Ascheim noted.
“The actresses and the characters are each now of legal drinking age, much to the relief of both,” Ascheim said. “And it promises to be a really huge season. Somehow there’s a murder. Somehow there’s a mystery. It’s amazing what can happen in that small town.”
Freeform’s new rollout continues Jan 25, when The Fosters returns for another season and is followed at 9 p.m. with a new series called Recovery Road.
That’s about a brilliant high school girl who has developed a drinking problem. To stay in school, and on a college track, she must enter an outpatient rehab program, neatly giving her life an entirely different – and, she hopes, secret – second world.
In a couple of months Freeform will launch Dead of Summer (right), its first horror series, and Ascheim said shooting will begin this week for a sitcom pilot based on Nikki Minaj’s early life in Brooklyn.
Minaj will narrate and appear on camera, said Ascheim.
Ascheim said the reason behind changing the name of the channel is that people who didn’t regularly watch the channel couldn’t tell what kind of programming it carried.
Being known as primarily a “family” channel, he said, limited its potential among viewers who might be attracted to the kind of edgier shows it delivers.
Amid all these changes for Freeform, which include deeper plunges into the social media world, viewers who remember the channel’s last rebranding will be relieved to know that The 700 Club will continue.
That rather incongruous show, a holdover from the channel’s origins with fundamentalist preacher Pat Robertson, retained permanent daily airtime as a condition of the channel’s 2001 sale to ABC Family.
Asked if that meant The 700 Club would air forever, Ascheim said, “Forever is such a long time.”