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 Positively Entertaining In 1998, Lowell "Bud" Paxson (most famous for unleashing the Home Shopping Network on America's credit cards) established PAX as the seventh commercial broadcast television network in the United States. Paxson was a born-again Christian who felt that the major networks were too raunchy and violent, and wanted PAX to be The Moral Substitute. Despite airing a few notable original dramas (such as Doc, which starred Billy Ray Cyrus, and Sue Thomas: F.B.Eye), it didn't take off.A problem that dogged PAX from day one was that its initial station roster was descended from PAX's spiritual predecessor, a network named "inTV", also owned by Paxson, whose entire schedule consisted of infomercials note . In addition, PAX was made up mostly of second-string independent stations purchased by Paxson which either carried religious programming or didn't step up their game with the rise of Fox, UPN, and The WB in the last 15 years and lagged behind everybody else. Most of these stations were high on the UHF dial and weren't licensed to the largest city in their market note . In addition to the infomercials and rare original series, most of the schedule consisted of (often Bowdlerised) reruns of older programs like Remington Steele, Scarecrow And Mrs King, and Bonanza; public-domain movies; and several Game Shows (including the third incarnations of Supermarket Sweep and Shop Til You Drop).The network changed its name to "i" (for "independent") in 2005, and then to "ION" in 2007. Its schedule now consists mainly of infomercials (an industry Running Gag was that the "i" name stood for "infomercial"), movies, overnight and Sunday morning religious programming, and reruns of various shows, which change frequently, though currently the infomercial block, which formerly made up 2/3 of Ion's broadcast day, is down now to 6-8 hours per day, par for the course with many cable networks. As of 2013, they seem to fixate on NCIS, Ghost Whisperer and Criminal Minds, and added new episodes of Flashpoint in a unique deal with CBS to air it outside the summer months. The editing stopped in 2005 (except for certain movies which have to meet FCC regulations) when Paxson left the network; it might shock viewers who remember the old PAX to see Scarface on a network that was formerly home to Promised Land and Hope Island. They managed to sign a deal with the Arena Football League to air games starting in March 2012, and in October 2012 began airing the newest go-around of WWE's C-level program, WWE Main Event.The network programs two digital subchannels: Ion Life, with health programs, and Qubo, with children's entertainment) on its stations. Both subchannels have more feature programming than the main feed, with the latter also having aired on some NBC and Telemundo stations (it was created in conjunction with NBCUniversal, which owns the aforementioned networks, though since the Comcast deal where PBS Kids Sprout joined the NBC family, their programming became the new NBC Edutainment Show block in July 2012. A remnant subchannel of the Paxson era, The Worship Network note , left the Ion airwaves in January 2010 but remains on some satellite systems. DirecTV and some Comcast systems air an infomercial-free version of the main Ion feed, a reaction to threats of the network being dropped by the both of them.Not to be confused with the manga ION, the play by Euripides, the Saturn car model, or the chemical entity. A company called "Positive Ions" with nothing to do with television filed suit against the network's name, but was laughed out of court.Original series include: open/close all folders Fiction
Game/Reality Shows
Professional Wrestling
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alternative title(s): Ion Television; PAX; Ion; PAX; Ion Television; I
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