7th Heaven Goes to Heaven
Saying farewell to the longest-running family drama in TV history.
By Marisa Meltzer
Posted Monday, May 8, 2006, at 6:39 AM ET



There are guilty pleasures, and then there is 7th Heaven. The
venerable WB network drama, which chronicles a minister, his wife,
and their seven—get it?—children, serves up weekly doses of family
values so retro and heavy-handed that professing a love for the show
doesn't even pass as ironically hip.

But despite its blatant cheesiness, the show has become the longest-
running family drama in TV history (221 episodes over 10 seasons).
Perhaps more incredibly, 7th Heaven was created by Aaron Spelling.
It's counterintuitive that the king of trashy nighttime soaps (from
Charlie's Angels to Melrose Place) was suddenly offering a family
drama whose ethos is best stated in its theme song, which
asks, "Where can you go/ When the world won't treat you right?/ The
answer is home/ That's the one place that you'll find seventh
heaven." But Spelling knew what he was doing. The show's combination
of socially conservative values with a dash of melodrama has proved
to be an unlikely—and lasting—hit, following in the wake of
successful Christian-flavored shows such as Highway to Heaven and
Touched by an Angel, as well as teen dramas like Beverly Hills, 90210
(another Spelling creation). Now at the end of its final season, the
series will be going off the air as the WB network is reborn as the
CW television network this September.

The series finale will be tonight, but it's never too late to catch
up on the Camden clan, led by Eric (played with a knowing smirk by
the actor Stephen Collins, who writes erotic thrillers with names
like Eye Contact on the side), who is a reverend at a
nondenominational Christian church (the writers are careful to rarely
mention Jesus) in fictional Glen Oak, Calif. The show deliberately
recalls Father Knows Best and Leave It to Beaver and hearkens back to
1950s values in other ways: Eric's wife, Annie, is a content, albeit
meddling, stay-at-home mom to their brood of seven kids and dog named
Happy. Matt, the oldest, is in medical school in New York; Mary is
the bad girl, played by Jessica Biel, who famously posed for Gear
magazine and got fired from the show, so her character has been
exiled to Chicago; Lucy is the good girl who's an associate pastor at
her dad's church, a wife, and a mom; Simon is the rebel, who was the
sole child to engage in premarital sex; Ruthie, as the family's only
teenager, exudes hormones and high-school traumarama; Sam and David
are the monosyllabic twin moppets whose birth episode holds the
record for the WB's most watched hour ever.

Every single show is a Very Special Episode, ranging over topics as
diverse as sickle-cell anemia, cigarette smoking, the Lost Boys of
Sudan, alcoholism, cystic fibrosis, racism, homelessness, ephedrine,
and the dangers of chewing too much gum. Each episode deals with
issues Camden-style, which is to say that there is usually some
combination of miscommunication, argument, and resolution in under an
hour, with ample time given to hug it out in the end.

7th Heaven has the power to make anyone feel deliciously bad because
no matter how squeaky clean you might fancy yourself, the Camdens are
better. They don't swear, everybody talks about their feelings, and
they always remember to say "I love you" before going to bed. The
show exists in a world where the relatively quotidian issues of teen
dating or buying on credit are portrayed as life-altering crises. Yet
circumstances that seem like the stuff of fantasy happen on a regular
basis, such as longtime estranged parents reuniting or a family of
five adolescent children easily finding a couple to adopt them.

The last few seasons have focused on the consequences of sex. In 7th
Heaven, premarital sex is always a very bad idea that leads
unwaveringly to getting pregnant or fearing unnamed STDs (but never
ever going through with an abortion). Consider just one of this
season's story arcs, where Martin, a series regular who used to live
with the Camdens, loses his virginity during a one-night stand with
Simon's friend Sandy while visiting her college. Sandy gets pregnant
and decides to keep the baby despite having zero financial stability
or the semblance of a relationship with Martin. In turn, Martin gives
up his chance at becoming a pro baseball player and moves away to
join Sandy and the baby, never to be heard from again.

At the same time, for all its conservative sexual mores, 7th Heaven
is one of the most sexually frank shows on television. The parents,
Annie and Eric, constantly reference their own sexual desire—their
kids even know to let them "sleep in" on Saturday mornings and don't
seem at all grossed out by Mom and Dad's sex life. 7th Heaven's
genius is how it works on two levels. Parents think their kids are
getting good values from the show's wholesome worldview. Plus, the
show's parade of hot topics gives parents a starting point for some
uncomfortable discussions. On the other hand, 7th Heaven goes down
easy—kids get a satisfying dose of melodrama and a brief visit to a
world in which they can be guaranteed to feel cooler than every
single character.

The Camdens exist in a televised vacuum where Wayne Newton is an A-
list star, where they just got computers and cell phones a few
episodes ago, and Paris Hilton does not exist. Who doesn't want to
fantasize about living in that world for at least an hour each week?
What the show may lack in grit or reality, it makes up for in its
underlying message of being open-minded, telling the truth, and
helping one another. Being a Camden actually seems kind of fun. Home
is the one place you can go when the world won't treat you right, and
it's also where the good gossip is. And if rumors are to be believed,
the cast has been approached recently for one more season on the new
CW network. Here's to hoping that the Camdens will be coming home
once again.