By: Valerie Milano – Pasadena, CA (Hollywood Today) 1/9/12

Michael Riley, the President of ABC Family said about “Chloe King” being taken off their schedule – “it was about making some decisions, and we had to choose between what we thought was resonating stronger with the audience. We always look at the intellectual property that we’re capitalizing on and making sure that there’s opportunities for even more storytelling.”  But the movie is in development since ABC Family wants to “capitalize on the storytelling that’s already been in place.”

The Gay & Lesbian Alliance Against Defamation has named ABC Family the best network in terms of writing nuanced portrayals of gay and lesbian characters who also aren’t just white men.  When asking Riley about whether that is an intentional strategy or something that came organically out of their development process.  His response was, “we make sure that we ground everything that we do in storytelling and great characters, and those characters can really resonate in a lot of different ways. Millennials are a diverse group of people. We want to make sure that our programming really reflects that diversity, and I would say that that’s really something that we want to continue to do, not only in that space, but in a whole bunch of other multi dimensional spaces. It really is about bringing together all of the different opportunities to be greater than the sum of its parts, whether it’s the branding, the strong persimmon branding that you see around the room today or all of the amazing content, to really reflect that.”

On a different note, Riley’s logic behind  sort of a 32 episode season split into three for “Switched at Birth”? “we’ll open up the first season with ten episodes, and then from there, in the event it’s a success, we’ll look to continue to increase those episodes. For us, we absolutely loved “Switched at Birth” and wanted to get as many episodes as possible on air as quickly as possible. So really, it’s much more about loving a show, getting as much content as we can before everybody goes on hiatus.”

As for “The Lying Game” he said “We put that at the tail end of the summer because we knew it was a very strong show. We looked at it. We wanted to make sure that this was a show that we invested in. We really wanted to take a long term view as to what we wanted to do with “The Lying Game,” we added a new castmember, Charisma Carpenter. We changed the time slot. We paired it with “Pretty Little Liars.” We brought it back last week to record, record numbers. So for us, for most of the demos, it was up 30 to 50 percent across any of the key demos that were there. “Pretty Little Liars,” which is a show that really does heavy lifting for us. It’s a brand defining show.”

ABC Family’s is building music into their movie strategy,  “Elixir”, starring the amazing Chelsea Kane and Jane Seymour.  And also in the midst of casting is their new Christmas movie that will anchor 25 Days of Christmas. It’s called “Mistletones.” Who wouldn’t want to watch a movie about dueling caroling teams figuring out what to do during the holiday period?  They are taking music in a new direction. Last 25 Days of Christmas, worked two years ago with Colbie Caillat. This past year, also working with The Band Perry.  A direction that they want to continue to weave together as part of ABC Family and Millennial audience and a broader audience.