Hampton, Brenda

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Brenda Hampton

Personal

Born 1951, in Atlanta, GA; married; children: a daughter.

Addresses

Home—Orange County, CA Agent—William Morris Agency, One William Morris Place, Beverly Hills, CA 90212.

Career

Writer and television producer. Mad about You, National Broadcasting Company (NBC), supervising producer, 1992-96; Daddy's Girls, Columbia Broadcasting System, Inc., executive producer and creator, 1994; Seventh Heaven, WB Network, creator and executive producer, 1996—; Love Boat: The Next Wave, developer and executive consultant, 1998; Safe Harbor, WB Network, executive producer, 1999; Fat Actress, Showtime, executive producer and co-creator, 2005.

Awards, Honors

Emmy Award nomination for Outstanding Comedy Series (with others), 1996, for Mad about You; Parents Television Council award, Media Project Shine awards, Entertainment Industries Council Prism Award, Anti-Defamation League Viewers Voice award, Academy of Religious Broadcasting Film Advisory Board honor, Kids Choice awards, Teen Choice awards, Family Friendly Forum awards, and TV Guide awards, all for Seventh Heaven.

Writings

TELEPLAYS

(With others) Lenny (series), Columbia Broadcast System, Inc. (CBS), 1990.

(With others; and executive script consultant) Blossom (series; episodes including "The Geek" and "Spring Fever"), National Broadcasting Company, Inc. (NBC), 1991.

(With others) John Larroquette Show (series), 1993.

"I Don't See It," Mad about You (series), NBC, 1995.

"The Procedure," Mad about You (series), NBC, 1996.

(With others; and creator and executive producer) Seventh Heaven (series), WB Network, 1996—.

Also wrote for series Sister Kate, 1989-90; story editor for Bagdad Cafe, CBS, 1990-91.

OTHER

(With others) The Healing Journey, Bantam Books (New York, NY), 1992.

Adaptations

The television series Seventh Heaven was adapted for a novel series, written by Amanda Christie, published by Random House.

Sidelights

Television writer and producer Brenda Hampton worked on a string of television series, beginning in 1990 and finally hit pay dirt in 1996 with Seventh Heaven, a family drama about a minister and his wife sharing love, laughter, and life with their seven children. The long-running series helped to put the WB Network on the television map and was the highest-ranking series on that network for many years. For Hampton the reason for the success of the series, as she told a contributor for Variety, is that "we don't take ourselves too seriously—we have a sense of humor. We have a great cast and try to tell funny and touching stories. Yet the show is idealistic, very idealistic at times, but we have a family … that people identify with; a family people would probably want to be part of if these people really existed."

Howard Rosenberg, writing in the Los Angeles Times, called Seventh Heaven a "prime time anomaly," in that it presents protagonists "whose everyday lives and religion are inseparable." The head of the fictional Camden family is a minister, and the show often revolves around moral themes. However, as Rosenberg pointed out, Seventh Heaven "neither ridicules religion by dismissing pious folks as zombie fanatics nor attaches to religion a halo of blinding luminosity that would shame even Charlton Heston." Instead, as Rosenberg further noted, the show "finds a mellower middle, religion in the sunlit Camden household being something of a nice fit, as comfortable as stuffed furniture."

Child of the Fifties

Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Hampton grew up in that city, the daughter of a television repairman and telephone company employee. She characterized her family, which include a brother, sister, and two long-time married parents, as "fairly functional" in an interview with Jim O'Kane for TV Single Dads, and added that because of her father's job there were television sets all over the house and she watched a lot of television as a youth. Some of her favorite shows while growing up were Leave It to Beaver, The Andy Griffith Show, Father Knows Best, My Three Sons, and The Donna Reed Show.

Hampton began her professional career in entertainment as a manager of corporate communications for the National Broadcasting Company (NBC), based in New York City. After co-authoring the book The Healing Journal, which describes a holistic approach to curing cancer, Hampton moved to Los Angeles to pursue a career in the creative side of the television industry. Shortly after her move, she was hired as a writer on Sister Kate, a series starring Stephanie Beacham as a nun named Kate who takes in orphans who can't get adopted. She went on to become a story editor for Bagdad Cafe, a short-lived series airing on the Columbia Broadcast Service (CBS) that was a spin-off of the popular movie of the same title. Hampton continued working as a script writer on such shows as Lenny, a short-lived comedy centered on Lenny Callahan, a blue-collar worker in Boston who moonlights as a hotel doorperson to make ends meet. From there she went to Blossom, as writer and executive script consultant. This series, which lasted four seasons, focuses on an eponymously named protagonist—played by Mayim Bialik—who is the only girl in a household of two brothers—played by Michael Stoyanov and Joey Lawrence—and father Nick (Ted Wass). She also wrote for The John Larroquette Show, and added supervising producer to her credits on the television series Mad about You, starring Paul Reiser as Paul Buchman, a documentary film maker, and his wife, Jaime, played by Helen Hunt. A young urban and urbane couple living in Manhattan, Paul and Jaime discover the rules of love and marriage together, each working out of a distinctly different temperament: where Paul is careful and analytical, Jaime is more of a free spirit. As part of the script-writing team for Mad about You, Hampton earned an Emmy Award nomination for her writing on that show.

Hits Home Run with Seventh Heaven

While still working on Mad about You, Hampton was fortunate enough to land a meeting with an honest-to-goodness television mogul. "My agent called and asked if I would like to meet with Aaron Spelling," she recalled to Alyssa Roenigk in an interview for American Cheerleader Online. "I did not want to embarrass myself, so I came up with the best pitch I could in a short amount of time. I just wanted to meet him because he's a legend in Hollywood." While with Spelling, Hampton pitched an idea about a family that does not have the usual neuroses and problems that make up typical prime-time television fare. "I think it's like I said to Aaron Spelling in my pitch to him: 'What if there was a functional family left in America?' Every family we see on television is dysfunctional, which works well for comedy or drama because it gives you drama or it gives you comedy but it is harder to write a show with a functional family. But I think if you're going to spend time with a family every week, this is a pleasant family to be with, and entertaining."

Thus were born Seventh Heaven and the Camdens. In addition to minister father Eric (Stephen Collins) and wife Annie (Catherine Hicks), there are five children: teenage son Matt (Barry Watson), teen daughters Mary (Jessica Biel) and Lucy (Beverly Mitchell), and preteens Simon (David Gallagher) and Ruthie (Mackenzie Roseman). Of course a fully functional American family needs a family dog, and the Camden's dog is named Happy. While Eric Camden is a minister of an unnamed religion, as Ken Tucker commented in a review of the second season of the popular series for Entertainment Weekly, "given the stripped-down decoration of his church and the fuzzy liberalism of his good works, I'm guessing Methodist, Unitarian, maybe?" Tucker went on to call the Camden family "contemporary Waltons," referring to the popular family television series from the 1970s. The reviewer further described Seventh Heaven as "one of television's least-watched good family shows," and one that presents moral lessons "without self-righteousness or cant; this is one of the rare shows in which religious beliefs are shown to be part of a family's everyday approach to life rather than a set of imposed rules."

Seventh Heaven details the usual problems that a family might have: when a son wants a dog, the answer is yes; when a daughter wants a tattoo, the answer is a resounding no, but the resulting pouting is diminished with a wash-off tattoo. As the Camden children have grown up over the years, new, sometimes serious issues have been addressed: an older son takes up smoking to everybody's dismay; children marry, and even the youngest, Simon, was old enough by the ninth season to worry less about having a dog and more about having premarital sex. Seventh Heaven also gained a reputation for addressing real-world events, devoting one 2002 episode to a U.S. Marine killed in Afghanistan. "I wouldn't make the mistake of saying there's a message," Hampton told Roenigk. "The show is for entertainment and hopefully it's the kind of entertainment that the family can watch together and turn off the television and have something to talk about. But if it only entertains you for an hour, that's perfectly OK with me." By its ninth season on the air Seventh Heaven averaged seven million viewers per episode and was the top-rated drama among female teen viewers.

Beyond Heaven

In 1999 Hampton branched out to another short-lived series, Safe Harbor, about a widower sheriff who learns to deal with the mysterious death of his wife even as he attempts to raise four difficult sons. Life is not made any easier for the motherless family, as they all live in a motel. The plot line of Safe Harbor ended up somewhat different than Hampton had first imagined it. As she explained to O'Kane, her original storyline "started out with a family who was at the end of their rope, and they had twin daughters and a son and a married couple and they lived at this motel and they had just run out of business, run out of money. And the kids had just, uh, run out of sanity! That's where the series began." However, to please the network, Hampton revised and rewrote her storyline. "It got softer and softer and then we blended in the female side of the show, and the vision became so diluted that it was not what I wanted to do," she further explained to O'Kane. "But I certainly tried to do the best I could and give the network everything they wanted. In the end, it just didn't work, for a number of reasons." Critics largely agreed. Ray Richmond, writing in Variety, described Safe Harbor as "almost like a paranormal My Three Sons—not because the characters have X-Files moments, but because the show plays with such bizarre incongruity.… It can toss fashion issues into the same pot with cold-blooded murder, stir, and emerge with an agreeably warped little stew. It's a million miles from reality." The series lasted only two months before the WB Network pulled the plug.

Not one to rest on her laurels, Hampton continues to look for new opportunities in network television. In 2003 she optioned a novel by humorist Fannie Flagg, Standing in the Rainbow, for a possible "family-friendly hourlong dramedy series," according to Cynthia Littleton and Borys Kit in the Hollywood Reporter. Planned for the 2005 television season, Hampton teamed up with actress Kirstie Alley, star of the long-running series Cheers, to create a series about a middle-aged actress and her attempts at losing weight while also acquiring a job and a steady boyfriend. Titled Fat Actress, the series is unscripted and builds out of a story outline with the actors improvising the dialogue. Fat Actress presented a new challenge to Hampton, who explained her main goal to O'Kane as wanting "to make family television funny."

If you enjoy the works of Brenda Hampton

you may also want to check out the following films:

Mrs. Doubtfire, starring Robin Williams, 1993.

Cheaper by the Dozen, starring Steve Martin, 2003.

Love Actually, starring Keira Knightley and Liam Neeson, 2003.

Biographical and Critical Sources

PERIODICALS

Daily Variety, April 22, 2003, Josef Adalian, "Brenda Hampton Has Signed with William Morris for Representation in All Areas," p. 11.

Entertainment Weekly, August 8, 1997, Ken Tucker, review of Seventh Heaven, p. 58; November 17, 2000, Ken Tucker, "Class Warfare," p. 103.

Hollywood Reporter, July 16, 2003, Cynthia Littleton and Borys Kit, "Hampton Salutes Flagg Novel," p. 4.

Los Angeles Times, August 26, 1996, Howard Rosenberg, "Virtues, Vices from 'Heaven' and Two Shows Less Divine," p. F1; March 15, 2001, Ann Conway, "Orange County People," p. B9; August 22, 2004, Kate O'Hare, "WB's Heavenly Series Adds Black-Sheep Theme," p. TV-3.

USA Today, March 22, 2002, Bill Keveney, "WB's Seventh Heaven to Honor Marine Killed in Terror War," p. 8; July 22, 2004, Gary Levin and Robert Bianco, "Alley Throws Her Weight behind Series," p. 8.

Variety, September 20, 1999, Ray Richmond, "Safe Harbor," p. 44; May 27, 2002, "Brenda Hampton: Creator and Executive Producer, 'Seventh Heaven'" (interview), p. S15.