ABC Family Sets New Fare
By Christian Lewis -- Multichannel News, 11/22/2006 9:54:00 AM
With one eye on its marketing blitz for the ninth annual 25 Days of Christmas stunt, ABC Family is keeping another trained on the new year’s horizon.
Coming out of the gate Jan. 1 is the third season of original series Wildfire, which tracks the struggles of a young woman trying to turn her life around on a horse ranch.
Testament to the network’s continuing confidence in the show’s legs -- it’s ABC Family’s second-highest-rated property with an average of 1.7 million total viewers, 293,000 18-34 watchers and 603,000 18-49 viewers for premiere episodes over its first two seasons -- is an order for a 13-episode fourth season, scheduled for next fall.
Another original series, LincolnHeights, will make its debut one week later, at 7 p.m. The show is about a cop who returns with his suburban family to the crime-ridden neighborhood where he grew up and embarks on a crusade to make it livable.
The network is now production on two pilots: Greek, a show about college fraternities and sororities; and Nobody, a fantasy series about a woman who accepts anonymity in order to save the life of her daughter.
Come summer, ABC Family will schedule the second season of its most popular original series to date, Kyle XY, which follows a mysterious teen-age savant who is devoid of such human instinctive behavior as anger, joy and love, and the family who found him.
KyleXY averaged 2.2 million viewers over 10 premiere installments last summer, including 336,000 adult 18-34 watchers and 801,000 adults 18-49.
Also on tap for the summer of 2007 is new programming involving fantasy original movie Fallen, which debuted last July.
Plans call for the content to take shape in the form of another two-hour original telefilm, with the remaining four hours either being developed as two more movies or in episodic form.
Fallen is based on a series of books by Tom Sniegoski about an orphaned teen-ager who discovers that he’s half-man, half-angel and is pursued by evil forces that want to kill him.
One ABC Family original series that didn’t ascend was Beautiful People, which was canceled after two seasons. But fans can catch Beautiful People star Daphne Zuniga on Dec.16 opposite Jay Mohr (Jerry Maguire) in original movie Christmas Do-Over.
