Candace Cameron Bure has offered her fans and supporters a heaping dose of gratitude for helping her reach yet another career milestone in 2022. The “Full House” and “Fuller House” alum left The Hallmark Channel for Great American Family last year, and the move helped make the upstart network the fastest-growing in all of cable.
Bure, who is the network’s chief creative officer, posted a press release on her Instagram Stories page recently from parent company Great American Media that said the channel rounded out the fourth quarter of 2022 as the “fastest growing network in all of cable television.”
“Thank you for finding us and watching Great American Family Channel,” Bure wrote over an image of the press release, according to a Christian Post report.
“Great news for Great American Media’s #GreatAmericanFamily to end 2022 & an even better way to start 2023. Happy New Year to everyone who helped make this happen, from people on-camera & off, but especially our viewers!” the network added in a tweet touting the achievement.
Great news for Great American Media’s #GreatAmericanFamily to end 2022 & an even better way to start 2023. Happy New Year to everyone who helped make this happen, from people on-camera & off, but especially our viewers! 
#GreatAmericanChristmas #WelcomeHome #GreatAmericanWinter pic.twitter.com/HwCtF021II
— Great American Family (@GAfamilyTV) January 3, 2023
The Christian Post noted further:
GAF noted that in just the second year of the channel’s existence, it ranked “No. 1 in total day ratings growth in households (+113%),” ages 18-49 (+100%) and total viewership (+116%), as gathered by Nielsen. The family network also came in No. 1 in “Primetime ratings growth in households (+128%) among all cable networks.” Bure’s executive role at GAC Media began in April 2022, and since then the outspoken Christian has been working on producing and starring in faith and family-friendly content.
Bure, 46, who’s been dubbed the “queen of Christmas movies,” also helped develop the channel’s “Great American Christmas” franchise.
“I am constantly looking for ways that I can inspire people to live life with purpose,” she said in a statement last year. “GAC fits my brand perfectly; we share a vision of creating compelling, wholesome content for an audience who wants to watch programming for and with the whole family.”
“My heart wants to tell stories that have more meaning and purpose and depth behind them,” Bure told The Wall Street Journal in a recent interview. “I knew that the people behind Great American Family were Christians that love the Lord and wanted to promote faith programming and good family entertainment.”
Deadline noted in November:
At Great American Family, Bure reunited with her former Hallmark boss Bill Abbott who has given her freedom in producing and creating content under the banner “Candace Cameron Bure Presents.” Bure explained that the reason she left Hallmark was because “it basically is a completely different network than when I started because of the change of leadership.”
In response, The Hallmark Channel said, “We want all viewers to see themselves in our programming and everyone is welcome.”
The channel announced last fall that it would be promoting its first holiday film with an LGBTQ theme called “The Holiday Sitter,” the type of project that Bure said GAC would not be undertaking anytime soon.
“I think that Great American Family will keep traditional marriage at the core,” she said.
Meanwhile, Pure Flix founders David A.R. White and Michael Scott, who founded the network in 2005 and which has since been acquired by Sony Pictures, said the holiday market is huge and ripe for traditional themes.
“I think families were looking for it,” Scott, who is the son of a pastor like White, told Fox News. “People not only here in the U.S. but around the world were looking for it. It was just a great place for us to be.”
He said they were inspired by “this hunger and this need to give people content that uplifted and inspired that human spirit that was something different than what Hollywood was giving to them.”
“I don’t even think Hollywood really realized how big of a marketplace is here, like it didn’t even exist,” White added.
“I think for the longest time this content wasn’t available to families,” White observed. “Just safe, uplifting, inspiring content that ultimately brings people to higher levels of insight to who God is and the purpose that he has for their lives.”