Warner Bros. Discovery’s Cable Chief Kathleen Finch on Food Network at 30, the Future of TBS and TNT and How Linear TV Supports the Entire Company

variety.com:

Jennifer Maas TV Business Writer Warner Bros. Discovery cable warrior Kathleen Finch is heading into her Super Bowl: the holiday season at Food Network. “Fans come and we supersize them and super serve them with all this holiday content, daytime content, and primetime stuff,” Finch told Variety. “We have four big returning series this year, and that’s just talking about Christmas.

We start with Halloween, and we started early and had a lot of really great stuff that worked really well and kicked off our strong ratings early in September.” More than 63 million total viewers watched Food Network in the fourth quarter of 2022, and Finch is anticipating year-over-year growth for this season’s slate, which includes new series “Selena + Chef: Home for the Holidays” and “The Elf on the Shelf: Sweet Showdown.” This year, Food Network celebrated its 30th anniversary in a humble fashion, by continuing on with its regularly scheduled programming and making little fuss about the occasion, though that doesn’t mean Finch hasn’t personally acknowledged the impact. “We know that we have taught a generation how to cook,” Finch said. “So many people who are in their 30s or even 40s will say, I learned how to cook from the Food Network because growing up both my parents worked, we ate a lot of takeout, but I learned how to love food by watching Ina Garten.

And so much of our mandate at Food Network was not only entertaining people, but was providing a service, was providing something that was useful.

It’s the same with HGTV, the same with a lot of our networks, where utility-focused content has been one of our secrets.” With the amount of time David Zaslav and Warner Bros.