After nearly 40 years on air, the iconic kids TV network Family Channel — home to favourites like Life With Derek, The Next Step and Yo Gabba Gabba! — is set to shut down in the coming months.
Toronto-based company WildBrain announced this week it would be shuttering four of its channels because they were “no longer commercially viable”: Family Channel, Family Jr., WildBrainTV and Télémagino.
“For nearly four decades, Family Channel has been a trusted destination for Canadian kids and families. We’re incredibly proud of the legacy we’ve built — thanks to our loyal viewers, dedicated television employees and the many talented Canadian producers we’ve partnered with,” WildBrain’s president and CEO Josh Scherba said in a statement.
WildBrain said that Rogers had notified the company it would stop distributing the channels after the two parties had been unable to work out a new broadcasting agreement. This — plus Bell’s previous decision to remove the four channels — led to the decision to shutter them entirely, WildBrain said.
An exact end date hasn’t been announced, but WildBrain said it will stop broadcasting the channels once Rogers stops carrying them.
WATCH | Trailer for the beloved Family Channel show, Life With Derek:
More than a TV program
Millennial and Gen Z viewers shaped by the channel will remember it as the Canadian home for Disney channel shows like Hannah Montana, The Suite Life of Zack & Cody and more, plus homegrown favourites like Life With Derek or The Next Step.
For the people behind the beloved kids shows — like Michael Seater, director and actor who starred as Derek in Life With Derek — the loss brings back formative memories of time spent on set or at in-person events the channel was known for.
Seater says he realized just how big Family Channel was to a generation of kids when he and his co-star, Ashley Leggat, did their first promotional meet and greet event at a mall. He recalls coming down an escalator and looking out over a sea of thousands of screaming fans.
Seater had starred in a few other TV shows before Life With Derek, but said none of his roles on other networks had received that kind of attention.
“I really understood that … Family Channel was a completely different beast,” Seater said. “Those were, like, definitely the glory days of Family Channel. And it was just wild how popular all these shows were.”
Outside of the shows themselves, Seater says Family Channel also promoted events and content that tackled important issues — like the Stand Up anti-bullying campaign. Kids would write in to the network about experiences being bullied or standing up to it, and stars of Family Channel shows, including Seater, would visit schools to talk about how to put an end to bullying.
“I was bullied a lot as a kid … and so it meant a lot to me. And it felt like a really cool thing to be a part of that Family Channel was doing every year,” Seater said.
Former Family Channel producer Adrienne McDonnell says events like the Stand Up rallies were something that really set the network apart from others. Mall tours, concerts and giveaways that gave fans a chance to be on the network all engaged viewers in real life in a way other programs didn’t, according to McDonnell.
“It was much bigger than just sitting down in front of the TV and watching for an hour or two,” McDonnell said.
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The channel also embraced its Canadian-ness, she says, airing homegrown shows right after some of Disney’s big hits in order to help give them a shot at the spotlight. McDonnell says the channel’s promotion of Canadian content makes the loss especially worrying.
“I hope that … kids will just be able to find that new and unique content, especially Canadian [content],” McDonnell said.
Tough times for kids’ TV
The move by WildBrain comes amid a tumultuous time for broadcast TV — and an even rockier one for kids programming, according to Ryan Tuchow, a senior reporter at Kidscreen Magazine which covers the kids entertainment industry.
WildBrain had previously signaled the company was moving away from broadcast when it secured a deal to sell off the four channels to IoM Media Ventures, Tuchow points out — a deal that WildBrain said is no longer, following the decision by Rogers to remove the channels.
“The … economics have become so troubling that moves like WildBrain shuttering channels, you know, are stark and depressing, but not wholly surprising. It seems like that’s the way things are going,” Tuchow said.
For their part, WildBrain said the impact of the channels’ shuttering on their business would be “minimal.”
Aside from broadcast, WildBrain licenses content to streaming services, and puts some of it up on its YouTube channel, which has over 11 million subscribers. But Tuchow says broadcast is still a major way that WildBrain would have been getting its original content to air.
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And while it’s possible some Family Channel content could migrate to other platforms after the broadcast channels are no longer, Tuchow points out that some programs could simply be unavailable to Canadians because of this move.
CBC News asked WildBrain if any programs would be unavailable to Canadians once the cable channels shut down, but the company said they couldn’t provide those details.
At the very least, “it certainly is going to be a hit for the company in terms of just how many eyeballs are going to be on their content,” Tuchow said.
This also comes as Corus Entertainment is set to wind down five of its own kids TV channels — Nickelodeon, ABC Spark, Disney French, Disney XD and Disney Jr — starting on Sept. 1. Those channels were home to programs like SpongeBob SquarePants, Bluey, Star Wars: Young Jedi Adventures and more.
With all of these channels lost, Tuchow says the landscape of kids entertainment on terrestrial cable is bleak.
“There’s really not much left for kids without all these [channels], right?” Tuchow said. “[Kids content] is going to be moving to YouTube and … that’s going to be, really, the only place for them.”
YouTube has eaten up a big share of the kids’ entertainment space from traditional TV and steaming alike. According to a 2024 report by parental control software company Qustodio, YouTube outranked platforms like Netflix and Disney+ as the most favoured entertainment platform by kids globally.
