Jessica Biel, who played Mary Camden, is executive producing a 7th Heaven reboot at CBS Studios, and in a Deadline report on her Collider Ladies Night appearance, she said the new version will "modernize" the 1996 family drama around "technology-based issues, school stuff, bullying stuff, drugs, alcohol."
"Modernize" and "we have less limitations now" are doing all the work in that interview. The show Biel grew up on ran 11 seasons from 1996 to 2007, a preacher's family on The WB. "Modernize" is doing a lot of heavy lifting for what amounts to a 30-year-old premise with new sets and new phones.
The more interesting line is the one about limitations. She says the original show "gently touched on" the problems kids actually deal with, but the show "was very careful about what our audience wanted." Now the reboot has "less limitations" and "we're not going to hold back." The pitch is a 90s family sitcom with the content warning removed.
She's producing through her Iron Ocean banner, not returning as Mary Camden, and her stated job is building "a safe place for people to be really creative and really vulnerable." Meanwhile, most of the original cast has spent the last decade quietly distancing itself from the show's other star, Stephen Collins, who admitted in 2014 to sexually assaulting three underage girls and was never charged.
A reboot that won't hold back, from the era of the show that did. That's the whole pitch in one sentence.
YOUR TURN: Which 90s family show could survive a "modernization"?
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