Lots of unscripted stuff coming Freeform’s way over the last 12 months with two new ones being added this week, while some in their current original scripted library, Good Trouble has just finished its book after five seasons & 88 episodes on air & Grown-ish’s 2nd half of the sixth and final season will resume on Wednesdays from the 27th March to May 22nd. Where to go to from here after this? Having reversed their plans to have While You Were Breeding on the air late last year despite having a finished production of all 10 episodes.
All we know so far over the last two years is that they shot a pilot called AZNBBRL, a teenage drama following three Asian-American girls with a desire to follow their own way rather than their parents. But we haven’t heard much since then & it looks like that won’t be going forward & lots of people would have moved on by now since Freeform went with a different direction over time, which led to the reverse cancellation of While You Were Breeding. Freeform also added just two in-development projects throughout last year. One was Knife’s Edge (a horror drama where a Mother & Daughter is against vampires based on a book) just before the Strikes began in April & another most recent back in November was RUSH (a High School drama from Israel called The Station about their lives as first responders). Again, not much progress for both since then with no direction being finalised for Freeform’s original scripted programming over the next few months.
A few weeks ago, Craig Enrich who is the president of Disney Television Group & looks after Disney’s family of networks, said that Freeform won’t be going anywhere for the foreseeable future. He didn’t say much about what they will do about scripted stuff going forward but he did point out about the success of having reality content amongst a female focused audience & that the syndicated repeats & movie event nights are also here to stay. So there you have it, despite people cutting the cord in recent years, reality TV, repeats and movies has kept Freeform alive today until things go south & they find no other way to keep that channel going at some point in the near future. I guess RUSH & Knife’s Edge would still play a role onto the pilot stage & hope things will work out since there’s not much to offer on the comedy side, but it looks like it would be a thing of the past if Freeform think it would cost too much $$$ to chuck in a bunch of new scripted content like it used to be.
