[EDITOR'S NOTE: With this posting, we welcome yet another tenured TV writer to the TV Worth Watching family: DAVID HINCKLEY, former long-time TV and radio critic and critic at large for the New York Daily News. David used to work alongside me when I was at the Daily News, and took over TV after I left. He's a terrific and respected writer and critic, and it's a great honor to have him here beginning today -- and great fun to be on the same team once again. Please welcome him to TVWW, because we do! -- David Bianculli]
The ABC Family channel was smarter in deciding to ditch its old name than it was in picking the new one.
As of January, according to an announcement this week, ABC Family will become Freeform.
Perfectly good word. It’s just that as a means of conveying what programming to expect on a TV channel, it should come with a subtitle, which would be this:
“Huh?”
The channel’s parents, Disney, clearly and sensibly concluded they need a name that reflects what viewers actually see, which hasn’t been “family” programming in the old-school Disney sense for almost a decade.
The Fosters (left) to name one random example, is a terrific show. It’s just not High School Musical, where you can sit the whole family down with a bucket of popcorn and no one will have any questions.
ABC Family has been creating shows like that for quite a while, and it’s been an admirable pursuit.
Not every show has been ambitious, not every show has clicked, and yes, there’s been a lot of the soap-with-a-wink stuff that has made Pretty Little Liars (below) into a well-deserved social media phenomenon.
But many of these shows, like Switched At Birth or Secret Life of the American Teenager or Make It Or Break It, have taken the relatively bold step of also dealing with uncomfortable and important issues while they entertain.
So it makes sense for the channel to adopt a name that finally breaks cleanly from its long-ago roots in Pat Robertson’s Christian Broadcasting Network – even though, in one of TV’s most amusing incongruities, Freeform will still carry Robertson’s 700 Club.
One can easily envision hardcore 700 Club fans begging the Lord for absolution if they happen to tune in early and see some of the rest of what the channel carries.
In any case, the channel’s goal going forward from January presumably is to give viewers an instantly clear idea of the specific niche it seeks to carve in today’s ultra-cluttered TV universe.
Which is where the choice of “Freeform” comes in, because the word tells you, uh, nothing.
It’s like calling yourself “Whatever.”
Dude.
In a bit of minor historical irony, “freeform” as a media term has mostly, over the years, been associated with radio.
Some 50 years ago, the FCC started requiring owners of FM radio stations to offer original content and not just simulcast sister AM stations.
Thing was, half the radio listening world didn’t even own FM radios in the 1960s, so FM station owners looked for cheap and easy ways to develop programming they weren’t at all sure anyone would listen to.
A couple of owners just hired some DJs and let them play pretty much whatever they wanted.
Liberated from the tight playlists of top-40 AM stations like WABC, these jocks would play 11-minute songs, read poetry, mix jazz with country and rock, spin “underground” music and generally have a fine old time creating their own symphonies.
Most of it didn’t last. FM caught on so fast that corporate owners quickly started instituting tighter, more marketable formats.
But the romance of freeform lives on, and it’s still practiced today on a handful of college radio stations.
It is an absolute certainty nothing even remotely resembling that notion of “freeform” will be seen on the new Freeform television channel.
Now maybe the channel’s target audience will see the word and immediately get it. They’ve had practice with amorphous TV names, since two of the other recently unveiled new channels targeting younger demos are called Fusion and Pivot.
Which are about what? Thai-Mexican cooking? A Knicks forward drawing a foul for a neat move in the paint?
Better guess: Somewhere up in corporate marketing, they’ve concluded the next generation of potential TV viewers just responds to random words that score well in focus groups. No literal meaning necessary.
Supporting that theory is the fact that management of the new Freeform channel refers to its target audience as “Becomers.”
Which could just as easily be Twitter generation shorthand for “Beachcombers.”
Happily, if the new channel keeps delivering good shows, Becomers and beachcombers alike should tune in to watch.