The Camden family is getting a second life on television, nearly two decades after viewers said goodbye to them. A new version of 7th Heaven is in the works at CBS Studios, and Jessica Biel, who grew up on screen as Mary Camden, is helping lead the revival behind the camera as an executive producer through her Iron Ocean banner.
The original 7th Heaven, created by Brenda Hampton, ran for 11 seasons on The WB and The CW from 1996 to 2007. It followed a California minister, his wife and their seven children as the kids grew up and the family worked through a new growing pain each week, and its gentle, watch-together spirit made it the longest running series in The WB’s history.
Biel laid out her plans for the new version in a recent interview reported by Deadline, starting with what will not change. “We still want to keep the DNA of what it was, where you can sit down and watch with your families, but we’re not going to hold back, I think, as much as we did before,” she said.
What will change is how directly the show takes on modern family life. Biel said the new series wants to address “technology-based issues, school stuff, bullying stuff, drugs, alcohol,” the real pressures facing teenagers and the people raising them. “All of those things we want to address in a very real way,” she said, explaining that the original only “gently touched on” many of those subjects because the cast and writers worked within a lot of limitations at the time. “We have less limitations now.”
Biel does not plan to play Mary again. Her role this time is producing, and she wants the set to be “a safe place for people to be really creative and really vulnerable,” because the emotional material asks a lot of the actors performing it. “If you don’t have that space protected, I think it’s hard. It’s hard to give those kinds of performances,” she said, adding that as a producer she is always working to “build out that space where everyone feels like they will be taken care of, and it’s safe.”
The reboot is still in the early stages, with no network or streaming home announced and no premiere date set, so the Camdens’ return is a plan in motion rather than a date on the calendar. Even so, for the generation that grew up with the family on Monday nights, the door to the Camden house is open again, and one of the Camden kids herself is the one holding it.