It’s unlikely you know his name, but you definitely know his work. And that’s alright with Bill Abbott ’84.
As president and CEO of Crown Media Family Networks, Abbott answers his own email, eschews retaining a personal PR team and leads the Hallmark Channel, which over his nearly 20-year tenure has grown to include two sister networks, an online streaming app, skyrocketing ratings and revenue and a cultural foothold in the biggest family time of the year.
The foundation of the company’s past decade of success and entry into the holiday zeitgeist is Abbott’s yearend juggernaut known as Hallmark’s Countdown to Christmas, a seasonal programming block in which the cable network airs a mix of movies and themed specials and programming, October through December. Countdown to Christmas, in turn, launched the phenomenon known colloquially as “the Hallmark Christmas movie,” family-friendly, romantic or inspirational (or a combination of all three) stories that end on a happy, hopeful note.
“It’s just relentlessly positive,” says Abbott, who reads every script, reviews daily footage of movies in production and visits sets when he’s not traveling between New York, Los Angeles and Hallmark headquarters in Kansas City. “We take great pains to make sure that every story and character respect that quality. Making content that people like takes a great amount of time, energy and talent. We don’t like to disappoint our fans, so we take our work very seriously.
When you’re making that many movies, you don’t want them all to be exactly the same, yet you want them to be easily recognizable as a Hallmark film.”
This consistency and focus are no accident. Today’s audiences are routinely exposed to content that can be shocking or salacious, and stories with a wholesome message are a welcome respite for tens of millions. “We don’t want to surprise people — predictability is a compliment, not a criticism,” Abbott says. “It doesn’t make you boring, just reliable.”