Creator of Touched By An Angel Martha Williamson

by Angela Walker

Christian Cinema.Com

Martha Williamson is a storyteller. She got her start working in variety shows at a time when computers were a vision of the future and scripts were literally cut and paste (with Scotch tape) every few hours, depending on guest star changes and the creation of new jokes.

With Touched By An Angel, Martha and everyone else working in television came into the computer age. Martha took a pilot that CBS owned but didn't know what they wanted to do with it from a concept to one of the best-loved shows from series television. We talked about the release of two new DVDs (Touched By An Angel Holiday and Touched By An Angel Hope) from the Inspiration Collection and the legacy of her work.

How did you get connected with Touched By An Angel?

Martha:    CBS handed me this pilot that they didn't know what they wanted to do with. They knew they wanted to do a show about angels, but weren't sure where to go from there. At that time, I was a "fixer." I'd take pilots and scripts and get them to the next level.

I had always been a writer, but with that show, I moved to being the "showrunner" (executive producer). That was a real challenge, because the buck stops at the desk of the showrunner.

My job was to maintain the quality and integrity of a TV show that was actually about quality and integrity and faith. When you're doing a medical show or legal franchise, sometimes you can play fast and loose with details, but when you're talking about faith and what people believe, it's very important to stay consistent.

So my goal in that regard was not to change the message, but to protect the message and expand the topics of the show. We added a lot of music and some wonderful guest stars. We also expanded the topics of the show to address all sorts of difficult subjects. But our main message was always that God loves and cares about everyone.

I think you accomplished delivering the message without being preachy. You entertain and still deliver the message, but the message doesn't overtake the show.

Martha:    I believe all of us are along the path to a relationship with God, and we meet people who are at different points, and we ourselves travel at different rates. There is absolutely a place where the message is centric. Look at a Billy Graham film; the message is centric there. It's all about the altar call at the end and everything leads to that.

People are also telling historical Biblical stories. When you tell the story of Esther, you want to be as true to the Biblical message as you can be and still tell an entertaining story.

We had a challenge because we were not hired by Billy Graham, but were owned by a TV network. They wanted to make money. So our challenge was to provide to them what they wanted and keep an uplifting message that was not antithetical to Biblical truth. We still had to meet the requirements of commercial television.

It was such an unusual approach at that time that some have called it pioneering. We really went out there to consistently stay as Biblically accurate as you can be with two angels on Sunday night in a Cadillac.

It was very much a Judeo-Christian message, and we never changed that. Many Christians found that they heard the Bible quoted. Not shown necessarily, but spoken, and I believe God when He says His Word will never return void.

Something else you accomplished was addressing controversial social issues with grace and a Biblical perspective.

Martha:    People who haven't seen the series before, teenagers and college kids discovering it in reruns on the Hallmark Channel, find this really interesting. They thought it was really just about angels flying around, but then they see an episode like "Black Like Monica," where Monica is a black woman in the south being attacked by good old boys, and they realize we're addressing serious stuff.

I felt we always had to address these issues because they've been addressed on other shows, but not through the prism of the Bible. The light of God's love did not illuminate those stories, but we wanted to do that with ours. We had to because it was angels. At the same time, that presented its own challenges. When your main characters are angels, you can't make them too fallible because they represent God.

You mentioned that when you started, copying and pasting wasn't just a term used by word-processing software, but something you actually did. Can you talk about technological advances during the run of the show?

Martha:    During the decade the show was on, we had some great advances. I had to use some kind of program language when I wanted to print scripts. I had to actually type in characters like and /. I remember thinking that we were in serious trouble if we had to keep rewriting things every day.

With Touched By An Angel, we came right into the computer age. We started the show in 1994 and I went through 3 or 4 computers in the first 5 years just trying to learn to use them.

I had a friend who was the right hand man and supervising producer for another show that was going on at the that time called Promised Land. He was very bright, and set up a program so he could call into my computer and download scripts off my computer remotely.

He was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease, and when he realized what would happen toward the end of his life, he set it up so he could communicate with us until the very end. He created his very own program so he could just move his head and talk and somehow communicate with an electronic voice. There are very few people who have that disease that have the time or opportunity or understanding of computers to set things up for themselves before they can't use their hands or speak. It took a lot of forethought and courage.

What are your hopes for the release of this new pair of DVDs?

Martha:    I hope that, instead of being overwhelmed by 22 episodes in a season, people will realize they can get one little set for a reasonable price and find stories that will lift them up beyond their lives. Each set contains eternal truths, and these will bring encouragement and love into people's lives.

No one will remember what I said as a person, but I hope they will remember the truths that we put into our scripts and put on the screen. That's what shone through every Sunday night, what people went away with. They couldn't explain what touched them, but those who know the power of  God's love know what it is.
©2010 ChristianCinema.com

Executive Editor and Director of Producer Relations for ChristianCinema.com, Angela writes and edits articles and movie reviews, interviews filmmakers, and searches for new films to add to the ChristianCinema.com catalog. A primary focus is interviewing today's filmmakers to get to know the person behind the camera and gain an inside look at the process of making movies. Angela also writes the ChristianMovieNews blog, an ongoing dialogue about faith and film.