Cable Hall of Fame Adds Balan Nair, 'Breaking Bad' to '18 Class

The Cable Center said it has added two more honorees to the Cable Hall of Fame Class of 2018: Balan Nair and Breaking Bad. Nair is chief technology & innovation officer for Liberty Global and will become CEO of Liberty Latin America once that unit splits off from Liberty Global at the end of the year. Breaking Bad, which won 16 Primetime Emmy Awards during its five-season run on AMC, follows the story of a desperate man who turns to a life of crime to secure his family’s financial future. Another AMC series, The Sopranoswas inducted into the Cable Hall of Fame in 2017.

“We couldn’t ask for a better way to end the year – with two amazing additions to our Cable Hall of Fame class,” Michael Willner, president and CEO of Penthera Partners and chairman of The Cable Center’s board of directors, said in a news release. “Balan is an incredible technologist whose expertise and insight has helped to transform our industry’s technology operating model. And Breaking Bad was one of television’s most innovative series. It had an immense impact on how we watch and consume television, and we are excited to pay tribute to this inimitable series at the 2018 Cable Hall of Fame.”

RELATED: Cable Hall of Fame Ceremony Set for April 4 in NYC

Previously the Cable Center named Nomi Bergman, senior executive, Advance/Newhouse; John Bickham, president and chief operating officer, Charter Communications; Richard Plepler, chairman & CEO, HBO; and Neil Smit, vice chairman, Comcast Corp., to the 2018 Cable Hall of Fame Class. Jarl Mohn, the longtime programming executive and CEO of NPR, initially was named to the class but later declined the invitation to focus on issues at NPR (before taking a health-related leave of absence from the broadcaster).

The Cable Hall of Fame induction ceremony will take place on Tuesday, April 4, at the Ziegfeld Ballroom in New York City.

This story was updated and corrected on Dec. 23. It originally stated, incorrectly, thatBreaking Bad's creator Vince Gilligan was being inducted.

Kent Gibbons

Kent has been a journalist, writer and editor at Multichannel News since 1994 and with Broadcasting+Cable since 2010. He is a good point of contact for anything editorial at the publications and for Nexttv.com. Before joining Multichannel News he had been a newspaper reporter with publications including The Washington Times, The Poughkeepsie (N.Y.) Journal and North County News.