“7th Heaven” was a moral drama with “minimal teens.” But it was also a success.

In early 2023, millennial comedian Rob Anderson was working on his book when he needed a break. He decided to watch an episode of 7th Heaven, a show he hadn’t watched since childhood, with a friend.

The plot is mouthwatering: Teenager Mary Camden (played by Jessica Biel) steals part of the cafeteria’s basketball team’s hazing ceremony. When her reverend father finds the bottle in the house, Mary’s older brother Matt takes the blame and agrees to take her to the kitchen and apologize. However, the restaurant manager files charges against Matt and a court case begins. In the end, Mary is acquitted and a group of local teenagers publicly repent in court for the various foods they stole.

“I looked at my friend and said, ‘This is crazy,’” Anderson recalled in an interview. “There’s no way this is funny.”

anderson wrote a comical conclusion from that Season 1 episode on TikTok, where he quickly found an audience willing to recreate the absurdity of the “7th Heaven” themes along with him.

Fortunately, the bottle theft was just one of hundreds of melodramatic plots in the series about a Protestant minister, his wife and their five, then seven, children. Over 11 great seasons, the devout Camden tribe has accomplished it all. spray paint, alcoholism, teamscaffeine addiction bulimia, Arenahomelessness and, in one particularly memorable episode, the matriarch’s devastating confession that she once smoked marijuana

When the series premiered in 1996, it was a surprise hit for the WB, a fledgling network that had launched just a year earlier. But unlike other popular series from the 1990s and 2000s, “7th Heaven,” which is available to stream on Prime Video, hasn’t experienced a nostalgic revival.

Part of this is due to the episode’s overall tone and the moral treatment of the various themes. It’s also partly due to the public downfall of actor Stephen Collins (the show’s patriarch, the Reverend Eric Camden) in 2014. accepted to sexually abusing three teenage girls in the years leading up to “7th Heaven.”

But now, three former child actors from “7th Heaven” are sharing their side of the “7th Heaven” story.

Beverley Mitchell (Camden’s middle daughter Lucy), David Gallagher (youngest son Simon) and Mackenzie Rosman (youngest daughter Ruthie) have launched a new, eponymous podcast. “With the Camdens” in July, detailing their experiences growing up on the series. In a recent video interview with The Times, the three actors sat on a couch in Mitchell’s home in Los Angeles, where they are filming. On the mantel behind them was a framed sign that read: “Seventh Heaven.”

“It really feels like being reunited with a member of your family,” said Rosman, 34, who was just 7 when she was cast. “It was very nourishing to all of our hearts.”

Podcasting your memories

The idea for the podcast came after the trio, along with Kathryn Hicks (who played their mother Annie) and Barry Watson (who played their eldest son Matt), attended Cony ’90s in March: a fan convention featuring panels and meet-and-greets with cultural workers of that era.

“What I saw at ’90s Con was people loving my work saying, ‘Where have you been and why haven’t we seen you?’ We’re going to miss you,’” said Gallagher, 39. “I could see that our audience wasn’t some Internet hole of anger and negativity that we would fall into and never get out of. It seemed like this . . . positive thing.”

Mitchell “wrestled” the group to do the podcast, Rosman said, and the three actors — who look almost exactly as “7th Heaven” viewers remember them, save for Gallagher’s bald head and full beard — are now regulars, recording the show in teams. Watson made a guest appearance and will narrate for Hicks and 7th Heaven guest star Ashlee Simpson in future episodes. They also hope to welcome Beale and other personalities back in the future.

The podcast’s first few episodes have the energy of eavesdropping on a dinner table conversation: messy, comforting, and not entirely productive. Following audience feedback, future episodes arriving every two weeks will stick to a structured episodic reboot format.

“We just wanted to share our memories,” said Mitchell, 43. “So everyone really wanted us to go through all these embarrassing moments, so we started rewatching them on a whim.”

“The youngest teenager of a generation”

“7th Heaven,” produced by TV titan Aaron Spelling, was not a “cool” show. It lacked the edge of global contemporaries like Dawson’s Creek, Felicity and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and its storylines tended to consist of reverends teaching Bible lessons to their families.

But even though Spin magazine nicknamed “The youngest teen of a generation,” 7th Heaven was the WB’s most popular show in its third season, with 12.5 million viewers in 1999. is set to see the birth of the Camden twins, giving the network its highest episode ratings of all time.

“Before ‘7th Heaven,’ there were always family shows that were staples on television, like ‘The Brady Bunch’ and ‘Little House on the Prairie,’” Gallagher said. “We came after these long generations of family shows and were kind of the touchstone for that style.”

Creator and executive producer Brenda Hampton often treated the Camden kids with elements of their real-life counterparts’ personalities, but the cast learned about many of the social issues the show first addressed when they became the story.

For example, Mitchell didn’t know cutting was a form of self-harm until there was a third episode about it. And Gallagher has never been drunk on the show or in real life, when a season 6 episode required him to handle Simon’s overzealous fallout. (The producer asked Gallagher to study the 1981 comedy Arthur to get a believably meaningful performance.) The three actors kissed for the first time on the show.

“Almost all of those great life experiences we first learned about when we were handed the scripts,” Rosman said.

Growing pains

Acting in a wholesome family series also came with certain expectations. Bill, who was cast to play Mary at age 14 and is actually a year younger than Mitchell, saying She went “against” the “limitations” of being in “Seventh Heaven” when she became the breakout star of the series.

She rebelled by cutting and dyeing her hair (moves she claimed weren’t allowed in her contract), and posed for the cover of Gear magazine at age 17, for which she had to apologize to Spelling. Biel ultimately left “7th Heaven” after Season 5 and reprised her role only periodically for the remainder of the series.

While Mitchell, Gallagher and Rosman said they sometimes wished they were on a weird show and experienced similar pains in wanting to break away from their squeaky-clean TV images during production, they never got in the way.

“She had more guts than anybody,” Mitchell said, laughing. “No matter how much I want to pretend I can be like a bad girl, I don’t have one bit of it. I’m definitely not going to survive ‘Cree Dawson.’”

A murky legacy

On their podcasts, the trio often reminisce about Collins, but an hour into this interview, no one has mentioned their former TV dad’s name. And what was supposed to be a laugh-out-loud discussion took on a more serious tone when I brought up the subject of the actor and the revelation of his sexual behavior.

“We were as surprised as everyone else,” Rosman said quietly.

Collins is not part of the group’s conversation, which includes many of her former “7th Heaven” co-stars, he added. And Gallagher said the discovery of Collins’ behavior, which has led to multiple networks pulling “7th Heaven” from syndication, is “embarrassing.”

“It colored the way we all viewed the show in a negative way,” he said. “What can you say about it other than it’s disgusting and not cool?”

Still, the young actors’ memories of filming “7th Heaven” are “as pure and wonderful as they come,” Mitchell said. “We all had a really great experience. So that’s all we can talk about: We can tell our truth.”

Anderson frequently posts a TikTok alluding to Collins’ crimes, but also insists that the actor’s actions should not negate the legacy of “7th Heaven.”

Anderson said that just because an element of the show is “gross,” it doesn’t mean we have to do away with everything everyone grew up with. But we have to admit it.”

Life after “seventh heaven”

Now, Mitchell, Gallagher and Rosman are all parents. Mitchell has three children, while Gallagher and Rosman have one. Focusing on their families has been a priority in the years since “7th Heaven” and “gives the show a new light,” Gallagher said.

Mitchell was the only child from “7th Heaven” to remain for its entire run from 1996 to 2007, eventually joining the cast of the Hampton family’s next show, “The Secret Life of the American Teenager.” In recent years, the actor has appeared in several Christmas TV movies, and one of Anderson’s TikToks – and moved to Colorado.

Gallagher left “7th Heaven” full-time in its eighth season to study film at USC, and Rosman also left the series early and now lives in Maryland, where she focuses on riding and training horses. (“I like going fast — cars, motorcycles, horses. Anything that breaks your neck, I’m in,” she said.)

The trio, along with Hicks and Watson, are scheduled to participate another ’90 rip-off in September. And while Gallagher said there was a time when a “7th Heaven” reboot was “seriously” considered, that time has long since passed.

“For now, be happy with what you have, which is our podcast,” Mitchell said. “You’re stuck with us.”