The Curious Case of Freeform and The 700 Club

If you’re an avid reader of my blog, statistically, you’re probably gay or at least aware of gay culture.* And as a gay person or someone familiar of gay culture, you probably know about Freeform, the channel that has a bunch of shows about lesbians. What you may now know is that Freeform: The Lesbian Channel for Teens also runs multiple episodes of The 700 Club twice a day.

This is confusing because The 700 Club is a daily prayer show founded by televangelist, Moral Majority devotee, and known homophobe Marion “Pat” Robertson. Oh yeah, Pat Robertson’s real first name is Marion. He changed it because he thought Marion was effeminate. The 700 Club seems wildly out of place on a channel where every other show has a queer character. Especially since the audience for all these Lesbian Teen Shows are, at the very least, supportive of queer people and probably going to be offended by the ideas put forward by The 700 Club. And Freeform knows this, which is why they put up disclaimers before the show that say things like “Freeform is not responsible for what is about to appear on your screen. Watch or don’t watch. We’re ok either way” and “If you’re looking for us, we’ll be over at the Freeform app and Freeform on demand for a little while.” But if the channel disagrees so strenuously with the 700 Club, why is it still on the air?

The channel now known as Freeform was originally founded by Robertson and his televangelist empire, Christian Broadcasting Network. The channel, was originally the CBN Satellite Service and provided religious and family friendly programming from 1977 to 1997. In 1997, when the channel was sold to Fox Family Worldwide, Pat Robertson included a provision in the contract that required any owner of the channel to continue to air The 700 Club. And not just to air The 700 Club, but to air it at advantageous time slots, to allow the program to attract viewers. This clause survived when Fox Family sold the channel to Disney in 2001. Thus it has remained, with Freeform having an obligation to run The 700 Club twice a day. At advantageous hours. Every day. Forever.

Today, The 700 Club’s airtime is worth $42.4 million dollars annually, and Christian Broadcasting Network pays Disney $1.2 million to compensate Disney for the lost airtime. So not only is Disney losing money, they’re running program that does not mesh with the channel. They’re giving up millions of dollars. The nighttime airing of The 700 Club prevents Freeform from developing a prime time programming block. And they have to do this, for the REST OF TIME. Until the sun melts and the world descends into chaos, Freeform will have to run two episodes of The 700 Club every day.

How is this happening? The way I see it, there are two possibilities.

One is that Pat Robertson and his lawyers wrote the strongest contract known to man. The language is the contract is so ironclad that Disney, a company that changed United States copyright law to keep Mickey Mouse out of the public domain, cannot get out of it. I once talked to someone who shall remain nameless who worked as an underling in one of Disneys many companies who said the Disney lawyers “were referred to in hushed tones not unlike a norse peasant would refer to The Valkyries.” When I tried to make a novelty t-shirt for a trip to Epcot, WowCustomTees.com made me change the design because I added Mickey ears over the O in “divorce.” WowCustomTees, a site where random people make joke t-shirts, is so nervous about being sued by Disney that they wouldn’t make a shirt with two circles over the letter “o.” The Disney lawyers are very powerful. So if they can’t get out of this contract, it must be the strongest contract ever written.

Yeah, I made divorce themed t-shirts for our trip to Disney World. The answer to the question “who’s Sandy” is “who isn’t Sandy?” Were any of us getting divorced? That’s not the point.

Or. Maybe Disney doesn’t care too much about getting out of the contract. Maybe the effort they would have to put in to fight Pat Robertson on breach of contract is more energy than they care to expend. Maybe it’s not that Disney can’t get out of the contract but that they don’t want to. And maybe they don’t want to because they’re making the calculation that it’s better to make gays and people who support gays mildly inconvenienced and occasionally righteously indignant than it is to challenge Pat Robertson and potentially anger religious conservatives.

I don’t know which of these is true, because despite messaging lawyers who work and used to work for Freeform on LinkedIn, I don’t have access to the contract, so I don’t know how ironclad the language is! So I cannot give you a light legal opinion as to whether or not Disney has a strong chance to get out of the contract. I considered doing a whole legal article about this, but without access to the contract, I was arguing in hypotheticals and it wasn’t a strong piece of scholarship.

So this blog is my public appeal. Do any of you know a lawyer at Freeform? Can you put me in contact with someone who did the negotiations? Are you a law professor who has written about permanent conditions subsequent in contracts? Please. Help me. I want to get The 700 Club off the air, and destroy the final Horcrux that is binding Pat Robertson’s soul to this earth. This is my life’s work. This is my purpose.

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*If you’re not gay and you’re not aware of gay culture and you’re offended that I assumed you would be, I’m guessing you found me through that one Nancy Pelosi post that people comment mean things on once every couple of months. Thanks for reading my other posts, I guess? Please don’t comment racist stuff on this one.