She’s Figured Out the Values Thing

Nestled unobtrusively between Rocky Mountain Auto Parts and the offices of a local catering service in an industrial section of Salt Lake City is a semidetached, nondescript building with no sign out front. It could be an insurance sales office. It is in reality an unexpected piece of Hollywood: The nerve center of a pair of CBS productions, it contains the executive offices of both dramas and the production offices for one. A few miles away is the other production center, which is undergoing refurbishing.

All this, plus an unmarked office suite in Studio City, belongs to Martha Williamson, a tall, chestnut-haired woman with a wide, square face and warm brown eyes. Even at work, she could easily pass for a high school guidance counselor instead of a television producer who has two dramas running at once, giving her something in common with Steven Bochco, David E. Kelley, Aaron Spelling and Chris Carter.

And if you asked her where it came from--this place, her success, her talent as a writer, which began it all--she is likely to tell you it is a gift from God.

At 41, Willamson is the force behind the uncommon hourlong series “Touched by an Angel.” A late-blooming Top 20 show now in its third season, the series follows the efforts of two women who enter people’s lives at a critical moment and help them find truth. Played by Della Reese and Roma Downey, these women are not what they seem to be--they’re angels. Blues singer Reese plays Tess, the older, wiser supervisor; Irish-brogued Downey is Monica, a caseworker whom Tess likes to rib, calling her “Miss Wings.” At the end of last season, John Dye became the third celestial regular as Andrew, a gentle, clean-cut, be-not-afraid angel of death.

Of course, there is another main character, one rarely present in prime time--God. A loving God, just and merciful, all-seeing and all-knowing--a rather easy amalgam of Old and New Testaments. The angels are his messengers.

Williamson’s new hourlong series “Promised Land,” which premiered this fall, is considered an “Angel” spinoff. It stars Gerald McRaney as Russell Greene, head of a family of six who, in the pilot episode, encounters Tess and Monica. Downsized out of a blue-collar construction job in North Carolina, Greene is crossing America with his family--his ex-schoolteacher wife, Claire; their teenage son and daughter, Josh and Dinah; Greene’s mother, Hattie (Celeste Holm), and nephew Nathaniel--in an Airstream trailer pulled by a station wagon. Greene seeks work--and opportunities to do good and give his life meaning.

Baby boomer and Vietnam veteran Greene is either above the political fray or a mix of Left and Right; he’s also the focal point for expressing a host of traditional values: hard work, speaking the truth, government leveling with its citizenry, helping one’s neighbor, keeping one’s word. Williamson is clearly pushing the right buttons.

As the millennium approaches, America appears to be reaching out with both hands for spiritual and moral anchors. The term family values is a political touchstone. A surge of interest in a smorgasbord of religions, 12-step programs and spirituality is evident, evenon the Top 40, where hits by Joan Osborne and Jewell deal with God and redemption. Angels and cherubs have become such a popular motif that they have their own boutiques.

At the same time, the visibility and vociferousness of the Religious Right have prompted many people to reexamine the very meaning of God and country. Boomers are now facing their own mortality and the job of instilling values in their children. They fear that their children won’t have it as good as they did and long for a supposedly nicer “Ozzie and Harriet” era. So it’s hardly surprising that God on TV is more acceptable than before.

“People’s lives aren’t working,” says Donald Miller, professor of religion at USC. “And they’re searching for some new pathway of meaning . . . . They’re scared and in personal crisis at all sorts of levels, and they’re looking for breakthroughs and new sources for interpreting their lives.”

“Hollywood may have gradually, after a tremendous amount of screaming and persuasion, begun to recognize that religious commitment is not a fringe phenomenon, that it’s extremely mainstream,” says Michael Medved, chief film critic for the New York Post. “And one of the reasons that’s changing is because of the presence of people in the industry like Martha Williamson. They create material more sympathetic to religion, and they change the stereotype. It becomes much harder to think all religious people are uneducated, barefoot backwoodsmen.”

Others take a more bottom-line view of the presence of God in prime time. “The last frontier television had to offer was religion,” says Robert Thompson, associate professor of television and film at the Newhouse School at Syracuse University. “Having done abortion, rape and sex change,” he adds, Hollywood had nothing new. Moreover, religion “fit so beautifully with good old-fashioned shows. Hospital shows are about life and death. Cops and robbers, too. And lawyer shows are often about serious ethical issues.”

Whatever the forces behind it, in the first hour of “Promised Land,” Greene stands in a small-town church cemetery, talking to God about things many people can understand: “Good evening. Um, Claire makes up these real beautiful prayers and Mama kind of yells at you . . . . My wife’s always saying the Lord’ll meet you wherever you are. Just look where I am. I love my country. I love my family. I love hard work . . . . I followed all the rules and I did my best, and it all just fell apart anyhow.”

Ironically enough, for Williamson--the woman who wrote those words, the woman who is only the second female executive producer ever to have two dramas running at once--it all seems to be coming together.

*

Wearing a plain brown cardigan, comfortable tights and no angel pins, Williamson breezes into her office. “It’s a crazy-making day. Actually we’re not really crazy,” she amends happily, “just busy.” Her mother, who lives in Utah near one of Williamson’s older sisters, is arriving the next day to celebrate her 80th birthday. So despite a hectic schedule, they’ll spend at least part of the day together. “When they’re 80,” Williamson says, “don’t wait a couple of days.”

She has a soothing voice and the kind of open manner that invites confidences. People move at a rapid pace in and out of her office, calls come and go, and she remains a centerpiece of serenity.

When not in Utah, Williamson, who is single, lives in Pasadena, but her church is the gospel-singing Faithful St. Mark Missionary Baptist Church on Century Boulevard and Figueroa Street. She certainly is ecumenical. When she won the Anti-Defamation League of B’nai B’rith’s Deborah Award (for talent and vision) in June, among her guests at the Beverly Hills ceremony were Faithful St. Mark pastor Gentry Adkins and his wife, Jeanie.

Williamson is a born-again Christian, but don’t typecast her. “I hate the phrase. Born again is like old-fashioned values,” she says. “What does it mean? Old-fashioned slavery is bad. Old-fashioned love, old-fashioned ice-cream is great . . . . ‘Born again’ became either a badge of honor for a bunch of intolerant creeps or the sneering label people put on those they perceived to be intolerant.”

“My life is different because I became a committed Christian,” she says. “There’s a phrase that they say--’You know the Lord.’ I’m not ashamed to say ‘born again.’ I am. But most of the people who use the term don’t know what the heck they’re saying.”

Talking by phone to veteran TV actor Chad Everett, who has agreed to star in a future “Angel,” Williamson is an uncanny mix of producer, therapist and lay minister: “Why is God always the last choice and not the first choice? Without ever chastising someone and saying, ‘you should’ve, could’ve, oughta,’ God will say, ‘OK, Here you are. I’m going to meet you right here . . . . ‘

“I was just telling a lady that,” she tells Everett, “how the same thing happened to me. I hit my knees and I said, ‘OK it’s your turn. You use me now. I haven’t done such a great job.’ And, praise God, I had a compulsive overeating problem. I was never addicted to alcohol or drugs or anything, but addiction is addiction. And that was one of the first things that went. It was, like, gone. It takes awhile to kind of notice it”--she listens intently--”but it was God . . . .

“The best thing we can imagine for ourselves is an Oscar or an Emmy, when the truth is God imagines even something better. . . . I think the children’s idea is neat--the sense of discovering the nature of God. Sometime in December . . . .”

Williamson has a way of talking about her beliefs--even to those who might not share them--that does not engender discomfort. Perhaps it’s because she’s so straightforward. Speaking about “Angel” to a panel on children and the media as part of a conference in Beverly Hills in mid-September, she says she’s often asked by reporters: “ ‘How can you do a show and call it reality-based when God is the featured attraction?’ And I say, very frankly, ‘because God is real.’ And I don’t debate it.”

Many would assume that anyone who talks that way, who embraces a born-again philosophy, is automatically politically conservative. Williamson was raised in a “conservative, upper-middle-class” home in Denver, and when “Promised Land” was about to debut, critics labeled it conservative. After all, the Greene children are home-schooled, a mainstay of the fringe right, and she did say the series would be about patriotism.

But Williamson insists she is apolitical. “What does the word patriot mean?” she asks. “I don’t know if you’re talking about Nathan Hale or Timothy McVeigh . . . . We’re doing things that are going to refute everyone’s thinking that it’s an extreme right show.”

In fact, the first Tuesday night episode of “Promised Land”--about a basketball coach in a wheelchair who’s so disgruntled he wants to leave the country--manages to span the political spectrum: Without ever using that buzz phrase “midnight basketball,” the story promotes giving teenagers something to do at night, while saving the recreation center through private--not government--money.

“Why should family programming suddenly be the sole property of the Christian Coalition or the silent majority or whatever?” she asks. “I know some of those Christian Coalition people. I also know some of the most liberal people you’ll ever meet in your life who are Christians. Good Lord, Jesus was the most liberal guy you’d ever meet, you know? And people forget that.”

“You used the L-word,” her visitor teases.

“I used the J-word, too,” she counters with a hearty laugh.

L. Brent Bozell III, publisher of the conservative Media Research Center’s monthly review of the entertainment industry, has unabashed praise for “Promised Land.” “I was just writing a column naming it as one of the two very good new shows,” he says from Alexandria, Va. “It celebrates the human spirit. It talks about hope. It celebrates America for what it ought to be.”

Williamson’s politics? “Who knows, who cares? is my attitude,” Bozell responds. “Until both sides decide to park their [political] guns at the door and look at a greater good, we’re not going to get around that. She is truly one of my heroes; we may look back 10 years from now and look to her and maybe one or two other people as the reason why television changed.”

*

I the beginning, says Robert Lichter, co-director of the Center for Media and Public Affairs, there was some religion on TV: in the mid-’50s, an anthology series called “Crossroads,” depicting the lives of clergymen; in the early ‘60s, “Going My Way” with Gene Kelly in the priest’s role that Bing Crosby had played in the movie; even “The Flying Nun” in the late ‘60s, he says, “though an idiot sitcom still was a positive portrayal of traditional religion.”

Then religion virtually disappeared from the small screen, surfacing only occasionally as subtext in family-themed series like “The Waltons.” Like politics, God and spirituality were pariah topics. “A new generation of producers came along who couldn’t care less about religion,” Lichter says. “As a mass medium, television couldn’t attack religion, but it could ignore it.” In 1968, “Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In” broke the political barrier with satire. Then Norman Lear took the whole kit and caboodle--politics, religion, race, sex, you name it--and plunked it right in the middle of the nation’s living rooms with the 1971 landmark “All in the Family.”

But it wasn’t until Michael Landon’s “Highway to Heaven” (1984-89) that angels began appearing on earth. Syracuse’s Thompson sees “Touched by an Angel” as a “hybrid of the I-can-walk-again stories on ‘Highway to Heaven’ that weren’t terribly challenging, and the serious theological discussions of ‘Picket Fences.’ (“I heard more stimulating discussion about religion and theistic practice on that show,” he says, “than I would hear in the pulpit on Sunday.”)

“Touched by an Angel,” he says, “has enough of that uplifting, feel-good spirit when you watch to make the show popular, and it is also seriously put together and theologically conscious.

“It took the ‘Highway to Heaven’ formula and added some seriousness and quality of production and at the same time leavened some of the uncomfortable issues involving religion that sometimes made ‘Picket Fences’ so uncomfortable to watch and which seldom ended in a way that made you feel good.”

June O’Connor, chair of the Department of Religious Studies at UC Riverside, considers “Touched by an Angel” to be “about morality and ethics.” “I like the fact that the angels give people more freedom. They seem to be pointers rather than dictators. Michael Landon worked miracles, where with this show people make more choices. Even the miracles are meant to open people up to the reality of their own lives and to move them from untruth to truth.”

“I want to express the fear that people have,” Williamson says, “and then offer some hope. So many shows, just by the very nature of them, express the fears and then expand on them.”

When Williamson talks about television, its moral arc and her place in it, she walks a fine line between the conservative attitudes of some of her shows’ most ardent supporters and defense of her industry. She acknowledges that her audience includes people who had stopped watching TV because they didn’t like the message it was sending their children. But she also criticizes Bob Dole for his attacks on Hollywood. “He should have done his homework. He commended movies [‘True Lies’] he hadn’t seen. And he attacked television and failed to note the quality family shows that were on. ‘Christy’ was on then. ‘Touched by an Angel’ was not particularly high-profile a year and a half ago, but it was there. People were watching.”

Williamson believes that her shows give people “permission to feel.” She quotes country singer Randy Travis, who says of “Angel”: “It’s not the show that makes you cry, it’s the show that lets you cry.”

A 29-year-old man, she says, wrote that to her in a letter. An unnamed “television critic of a major city newspaper” spoke to her by phone for 25 minutes and cried for another 40. A porter spotted her mother’s “Touched by an Angel” jacket and confessed, “I watch that show every week and I cry like a baby.”

“Good!” she says. “They weren’t crying like a baby in 1980. The ‘80s were all about making money, making the deal, accumulating wealth and stabbing backs.

“A lot of people have said to me, ‘Thank you for giving us permission to believe in God.’ People are talking about God and say they can see other people of faith on TV and not cringe.

“We didn’t soft-soap God. God is a loving, merciful creator. He is the caring and occasionally disciplining parent,” she pauses, “and an all-around great guy. God is not a practical joker or a Greek god who manipulates us like chess pieces. He is not a careless God. He is not a recriminating, not an angry, vengeful God who is quick to blot out humanity. God did not create AIDS. He is not responsible for our problems.”

People have free will, she says. “That’s God’s gift. But that’s also God’s gamble.”

With “Promised Land,” “we’re watching the flip side. One guy who saw an angel and knows he’s been touched by God and now is going through the rough times. They don’t end when you meet God. Usually they just start, because suddenly you start holding yourself to a different standard. Russell Greene has an ongoing relationship with God that is not unlike my own.”

*

It was in 1980 that Williamson got down on her knees to ask God to become part of her life.

She had been asked by a group called Reach Out to direct an Easter pageant. “I was standing in the back and it suddenly hit me that I kept my emotions completely out of of it.

“I prayed. I said, ‘I’m here. I’m not happy. I’m 25 years old and I’m not doing what I’m supposed to do, which is write and be creative and use my gifts that you’ve given me, and I’m floating. You’re on the top of the mountain. You can see what I can’t on the other side. Show me the way.’ ”

Raised Methodist, she went to church every Sunday, sang in the choir, took part in theological discussions at meals, even taught Sunday school. Her father, Joseph Williamson, an investment counselor and biblical scholar, was a pillar of Denver’s Washington Park Community Church, but “it never quite occurred to me that you could have a personal relationship with God.”

The youngest of three daughters, she says she had a happy childhood but also “some really tough times.” Her mother was 38, her father 54 when she was born; her sisters are 12 and 13 years older than she. “My mother was sick for a lot of my early years. I was alone. She had a lot of back surgeries, and I had to grow up very quickly.”

Her mother, Louise “Betty” Williamson, who worked with Martha’s father in business, went on to become treasurer of the American Association of University Women’s foundation. The oldest daughter, who has two grown daughters, worked for NATO in Belgium, is retired now and raises horses in Colorado. The middle daughter, now a Mormon and mother of six, lives near Salt Lake City.

Words were always Williamson’s strength. In elementary school, her mother was called in by a teacher who said the other children couldn’t understand Martha because she was using such advanced language.

She went to Williams College in Massachusetts, where she majored in art history and was active in dramatics. Playwright William Finn (“Falsettos”) directed her when she a freshman. Two decades later, he remembers her as being a determined individual. She describes herself as cynical.

Marc Lichtman, a fellow student, composed the music for the campus theater group, and Williamson wrote the lyrics. “From the beginning,” Lichtman says, “she saw something that would last. ‘We’re going to do something important.’ And I would go, ‘OK, yeah . . . . ‘ “ In 1990, at her urging, he moved to Los Angeles. Lichtman now writes all the music for “Touched by an Angel,” including Reese’s signature opening song, and oversees the scoring of “Promised Land.”

After graduation from college in 1977, Williamson moved to California, worked for the Pasadena Chamber of Commerce and freelanced theater reviews for the Pasadena Star-News. But finding insufficient work that appealed to her on the West Coast, she decided to try New York City. That was when her break came, as an assistant to television and theater writer-producer Kenny Solms, who lives and works in Los Angeles. “She came over to my hotel in New York,” Solms recalls, “and first thing she did, she helped me pack. So I said, ‘I’m working on this Broadway show [‘Perfectly Frank’] but to tell you the truth, I have this housekeeper I have to get rid of.’ And she said, ‘I can make you breakfast.’ ”

Williamson stayed at Solms’ house a few months making breakfast and dinner but soon was writing. She helped Solms on a number of Carol Burnett productions, a Disneyland 25th Anniversary special and with a Joan Rivers special featuring the Heidi Abromowitz tramp skit.

On the surface, Williamson seemed to be doing quite well. “But I didn’t know who I was,” she insists. “I wasn’t changing any lives. Ever since I was a kid, I just had to make a difference.”

With her epiphany, she went into therapy. She also came to the realization that variety sketches were not for her. Of such work as the Rivers-Abromowitz sketch, she says: “I quit because I couldn’t handle it--not out of any Christian umbrage. I just wasn’t a jokemeister. And some of those guys who should remain nameless, who are now like from the Golden Age of Comedies, were grabbing my butt and telling me to go get coffee. I was a writer. Just like they were. At the same table . . . . I’m still pissed off.”

In 1985, she got a writer’s job on “The Facts of Life” after submitting a “Family Ties” spec script. In the original, Michael J. Fox’s character gets stuck in an elevator with a Holocaust survivor. It was later retooled for “Facts of Life” and became her first script to be aired. She moved up to the job of story editor on “Facts” and later wrote for CBS’ “Raising Miranda” and ABC’s “Living Dolls.” She also made a name for herself as a script doctor, fixing the work of others.

She was so busy, in fact, that she almost missed her “Angel” breakthrough altogether. She had been asked by Andy Hill, former president of CBS Productions, to write a pilot script about angels--”I think because they knew I went to church,” she says. But before she could do more than contemplate angels, another CBS project took priority. “I wasn’t ready to write the [angel] show in 1993 because I was mad. I had just ended a very unsatisfying relationship, and I was letting the cynical side of me get the better of me.”

When that CBS project and yet another fell through, CBS came back to her. The angel show’s creator, John Masius, had made a pilot that the network didn’t like. This time, Williamson turned the project down because NBC wanted her for a courtroom drama. Still, the angels nagged at her. As she said in the May issue of the Christian magazine Guideposts, she telephoned a “prayer partner” who confirmed that she should give up NBC’s project--”I had been getting the same answer.”

Williamson wrote that when she walked into CBS’ conference room, she said: “You know I’m a Christian, and though this is not a religious show, there are standards I feel we must follow . . . . I’ll be responsible for providing you with one hour of quality entertainment. But we cannot do a show about angels if we don’t respect God.”

“She said everything I wanted to hear,” recalls former CBS Entertainment President Peter Tortorici. “It wasn’t sci-fi, it wasn’t high concept, it wasn’t high jinks. It was something that was very real to people who really needed something to believe in, for people of faith.”

When she got the go-ahead, she started from scratch but kept the stars of the original pilot, Della Reese and Roma Downey.

Williamson insists she drew inspiration not from such shows as “Highway to Heaven” or the movie classic “It’s a Wonderful Life” but from her own beliefs. “There is a God who knows what he’s doing and doesn’t make mistakes. We never have an angel look up at God and say, ‘What were You thinking?’ We make it really clear that God is God and we’re not.”

Like many other writers, she draws on her own personal and childhood issues.

An early “Angel” script, “An Unexpected Snow,” dealt with a single woman who has a relationship with a married man and then accidentally meets up with his wife and likes her.

“Wanting to love someone and wanting to be loved in return,” Monica tells her, “those things are good and right. But wanting them from someone else’s husband is wrong . . . . When you cry, God cries, too. But he can’t wipe away your tears unless you let him.”

“That was me,” Williamson says softly. “That was the unsatisfying relationship. I never said it before--and I am no angel. That’s the point. I’ve had some of the saddest things happen to me, I’ve made some of the dumbest mistakes, and if I can’t make them worth something, if I can’t do something good with them, then what was it all for?”

Keeping “Angel” on the air beyond the first season was an uphill battle. Reviews, as Entertainment Weekly noted, were “from hell.” Tortorici recalls one that said CBS must have been “touched” in the head. So Williamson waged a grass-roots campaign. She spoke in Christian churches and on Christian TV as well as on a Jewish cable channel in New York. She urged people to write to CBS. In February 1995, a full-page ad ran in Variety, headlined: “God Is Alive and Well on American TV! But for How Long?” Ratings began moving upward. Meanwhile, letters poured in from fans--and clergy, too.

That spring, she flew to CBS headquarters in New York to plead for “Angel.” “We felt we owed her that much because she had done good work and the show was very good,” Tortorici notes. “She showed one of the episodes with Kevin Dobson as a baseball coach, and everyone was tremendously moved by it. Most of the people in that room were like most of the American people. They hadn’t seen it.

“She did a wonderful job of selling.”

Last March, when CBS Entertainment President Leslie Moonves asked Williamson to come up with a second drama series, she did it at fast-forward pace. She says she drew inspiration from the nation’s reaction to the Oklahoma City bombing. “I felt we were like all together for a moment in this country, and that everything else didn’t matter because we had all been attacked. And that shook me, that that’s what it took.”

It took just two months for the spinoff episode to wrap. Introducing “Promised Land” to the nation’s TV critics, Williamson said: “We want to do for America what ‘Touched by an Angel’ has done for God. ‘Touched by an Angel’ is not religious, it’s spiritual. And ‘Promised Land’ we want to make patriotic, not political.”

*

A trio of angels is gathered on a Saturday night at Universal Studios to see Williamson honored by the Weingart Center--the nation’s largest provider of housing, health and social services for the homeless, located in downtown Los Angeles. The award, to be presented by CBS Entertainment’s Leslie Moonves, is for “There, But for the Grace of God,” a first-season episode dealing with homelessness. Della Reese is a vivid presence, dressed in red and white with enormous angel earrings. Roma Downey arrives early with her husband, director David Anspaugh, their 5-month-old daughter, Reilly Marie, and a nanny. “What I love is that the God that we work for is simply the God of love,” says Downey. “We never make reference to any religion, to any specific denomination, because we don’t want to exclude anybody. I’m from Northern Ireland, where people kill in the name of God.”

When Williamson arrives, she makes a beeline for Downey’s baby. This night, she is Hollywood glamorous--in minimalist black, set off by a flowing jacket with leopard-like spots. Williamson says she spent the week holed up in her Salt Lake condo writing back-to-back “Angel” and “Promised” episodes to air tonight and this Tuesday. The episodes will feature Delta Burke (married in real life to Gerald McRaney) as a former drug addict who meets Monica in a halfway house.

As cited by CBS’ Moonves, the key line in “There, But for the Grace of God” comes when Tess is telling Monica about her next case, to help a homeless man, played by Gregory Harrison, get his life back on track. Monica wonders whether she’ll work at a shelter. No, she’ll be homeless, too. “The only way to share his pain,” Tess advises, “is to share his pain.”

“The most important thing to remember,” Williamson notes, accepting the award, “is that somebody said yes to ‘Touched by an Angel.’ Not only were families employed [as extras] and were able to move out of the homeless shelter in Salt Lake City,” but Harrison donated his fee to the charity Habitat for Humanity, and there is a house standing in Los Angeles today because of it.

“This is how it really matters,” she concludes. “One lady saw that episode, and she saw Roma Downey get on her knees and wash the feet of a homeless man and humble herself and ask his forgiveness for assuming he had done something to get himself there. That woman, a nurse in a hospital in Salt Lake City, now washes the feet of every homeless person who walks into her emergency room.”

With success, Williamson has become a hot ticket on the speaking circuit, but with two shows in production, she must choose her engagements carefully.

In September, she flew in from Utah for the Beverly Hills conference titled “In Harm’s Way: A National Forum on Children and Violence,” sponsored by Children’s Institute International, which deals with child abuse and neglect. When her panel appearance was over, she immediately flew out again, to Washington. “Promised Land” was getting a special bipartisan showing on Capitol Hill. GOP Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott was there, but so were senators Paul Simon (D-Ill.) and Joseph I. Lieberman (D-Conn.), Rep. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) and Defense Secretary William J. Perry. Markey was so impressed with her presentation that he jokingly urged her not to run for office in his state.

Of course, part of circuit tripping is pure publicity, but while others may talk a good game about making television a provider of wholesome fare, Williamson seems to genuinely believe she is doing something at least as important as providing the network with good ratings numbers.

“The sad truth,” says Williamson at the children’s event, “is that television has become a surrogate parent, whether we like it or not, whether it’s right or not. We’re in a society where women must work, where husbands must work longer, or husbands aren’t at home, and people are raising children alone.”

She tells a story about her niece Dinah, 10 at the time, and nephew Donald, 9, who were being tormented in front of their house in Utah by a group of older boys throwing water balloons at them. “My niece managed to get around to the back to the house. She went to the toy box and she got a little BB gun that had never worked--they’d never had BBs in it. But in her mind, if she wielded this gun-like thing, they would go away, because she saw it on TV.

“She never saw it at home. My God, what would have happened if she’d had a father who kept a gun in the house? But that told me I can write all I want, and it’s still happening in my backyard, in my very family. TV that I can’t control is affecting them. So the very least I can do is the very best with the TV I can control.”