“We had Bonanza, we had Gunsmoke, you name it, they were all there.”īut the channel that would become Freeform would be bought and sold many times over in the enduing decades, with many brand iterations to boot. I mean big ratings, beat the other stations, because we just stacked them from 12 or one o’clock on Saturday all day long, one after the other,” he recalled. “They bought the biggest ratings all week long. Robertson told the Archive that old Westerns were among the major draws. It was programmed with Christian talk shows and sermons, but mixed in classic TV shows. HBO was founded a half decade earlier as a premium cable service, and Ted Turner put WTCG’s signal on cable and satellite beginning in 1976, but Robertson’s CBN service was the original basic cable channel. Is This Freeform's Future Without Scripted?Īnd while the deal saw a number of other channels were dropped in the deal, the dropping of Freeform suggests that, as the repercussions of the deal are felt across the pay TV ecosystem, no channel is truly safe.įreeform has a long and winding history that traces back to the earliest days of cable TV.įounded in 1977 by the evangelist Pat Robertson as a spinoff of his Christian Broadcasting Network local TV stations, the channel effectively became “the first satellite basic cable network in America,” Robertson recalled to the Archive of American Television in an interview.
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