By Adrian Ashford, The Dallas Morning News
DALLAS — Bill Abbott is something of an expert on Christmas movies.
Abbott founded and serves as CEO of Arlington-based Great American Media, a growing North Texas media company that makes family-friendly entertainment guided by Christian values.
The network, which launched in 2021, is known for its Christmas programming and is releasing 14 new holiday films this year.
Before founding Great American, Abbott was CEO of the Hallmark Channel’s parent company, which he left in 2020. Fellow Hallmark veteran Candace Cameron Bure serves as Great American’s chief content officer. Fans call her the “queen of Christmas” for her many Hallmark Christmas movies.
Abbott told The Dallas Morning News that through Great American, he wants to serve an audience he believes has been underserved and underinvested in by mainstream media — those who want family-friendly, clean, entertaining content that aligns with their faith and values.
He left Hallmark a month after a controversy over an ad campaign featuring same-sex couples. At the time, he said, Hallmark wasn’t interested in serving the audience he wanted to reach.
Great American has been growing rapidly and reported in 2023 that its cable television network, Great American Family, had been ranked the fastest-growing TV network for 12 consecutive months.
Trump Media & Technology Group, of which President Donald Trump is the majority owner, announced a partnership with Great American in August.
Abbott spoke with The News about his company’s holiday offerings this year, what makes a good Christmas movie and his love for faith-based Christmas programming.
Q: The holidays are obviously coming up. I’m curious if there are holiday projects that are coming out this year from Great American Media that you are particularly excited about.
A: It’s hard to always pick the ones among your children that are the favorites.
We have a Candace Cameron Bure movie that premieres this Saturday [Nov. 15], “Timeless Tidings,” that is really beautifully done; a movie from Danica McKellar that is also at kind of the top of the list.
The biggest note is that we’re doing the genre, the Christmas genre, in a very different way than we’ve done it — than anybody’s done it before in the past — by incorporating faith, incorporating the meaning for the season, and really celebrating that component of it within our movies.
The overall channel is a reflection of that reaffirmation of faith in people’s lives.
Q: What do you think makes a good Christmas or holiday movie?
A: It’s not a formula. I think that the genre gets a bad rap for being very formulaic.
So first and foremost, it’s a good story with a good character arc. There has to be a component within the character arc that presents a challenge, and they have to go on a journey, and you have to go on the journey with them.
But then you have the ancillary elements that are extremely important at Christmas, more important than any other time of the year, and that’s really a celebration of the season that can take many forms: from a tree lot to a Christmas party. Music is a critical component, because of the festive nature of the season and how important music is within the season.
The wardrobe is also very, very much more important than it is typically in a rom-com. And then, ultimately, it’s making people feel good — at the end of the movie, feeling like a) the time you spent watching a two-hour movie was worth it, and b) that you can feel positive about the world and be more optimistic about what lies ahead in the season.
Q: What takes a movie from a Hallmark-style, feel-good Christmas movie to something that really has that faith element and inspires people with the meaning of the season?
A: It’s not on-the-nose faith. It’s not faith that is just put in the movie to put faith in the movie. From our point of view, faith is a factor and an element in everybody’s life day-to-day, or in a lot of people’s life day-to-day.
And so depicting it that way, as just part of people’s lives, is where we aim to be. That goes from everything, from prayer before a meal to a journey where the focal point is not on the commercialism of Christmas.
“Christmas Prayer” is a really good example of that, because it’s about a little girl who develops a Christmas list, and instead of developing a list of toys and a list of things that she wants, electronics or things, she develops a list of people in her area who need certain things.
For example, a mailman — she puts on her list getting the mailman a ticket home to see his daughter over the Christmas holidays, a plane ticket. We have those wishes filled over the course of the movie, those prayers fulfilled.
So, it’s not on-the-nose faith: It’s not bringing people to church and having a service at church, that’s not what it’s about. It’s about having those pieces just be present and be treated in a very respectful way and not diminished. I think in the entertainment world, there’s a tendency to not always uplift people that have a very strong conviction around faith.
Q: Is there anything else that you want to say about why it’s important to celebrate Christmas, not just as a commercial holiday, but as something beyond that?
A: The majority of the country feels around the Christmas season that … it’s about a lot more than just giving gifts. And so I think it’s just important that entertainment reflects that, and reflects that part of the culture and the world.
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