Original subtitles

[narrator] The Golden Age of television...

I Love Lucy didn't just change American television,

it invented American television.

...back when one screen brought everyone together.

Watching television was a family event.

[narrator] The shows that shaped us.

[Gary Cole] The Brady Bunch was part

of the American soul.

It's timeless.

[narrator] The familiar faces.

[Bob Costas] Ralph Kramden was loved on The Honeymooners.

-Ah, right in the kisser! -He was a presence.

[narrator] The unforgettable moments .

Dynasty captured the essence of what

the 1980s were about in America.

[narrator] These are their stories.

Cheers is the pinnacle of how great the sitcom can be.

[narrator] This is TV We Love.

[narrator] The year is 1993.

Bill Clinton is in the White House.

Grunge is spilling out of Seattle basements.

And America is halfway between analog comfort

-and the digital revolution. -[phones ringing]

-[man] You've got mail. -[computer beeps]

[narrator] The internet is

something you dial into.

Coffeehouse culture

is fueling Gen X.

And everyone's dancing the Macarena.

And deep in the heart of Utah, one television show

is about to take flight and make television history.

I have a message for you from God.

Audiences love Touched by an Angel.

I'm an angel.

A what?

Touched by an Angel was that kind of a show.

Whole families could watch together.

The fact that it was so overwhelmingly popular

made it a phenomenon.

At our height, I think we had

over 28 million each week.

-Holy. -Holy is right.

[Martha Williamson] And I love that.

Because we talked about

immigration, abortion, racism.

And it did melodrama really well.

There still has never been another Touched by an Angel.

[atmospheric music playing]

I love the origin story of Touched by an Angel.

TV networks at that point, they were looking for something

that would work for as large an audience as possible.

In the mid-90s, CBS did testing that showed

people were really interested in angels.

[Dr. Diane Winston] And I can understand

why they would think angels would be

something that they could tap into as a cultural vein.

So angels have always been around.

And they've always been popular.

Look, Daddy.

Teacher says, "Every time a bell rings,

an angel gets his wings."

That's right.

In the '90s, a lot of pop stars began

using angels in their shows.

Tony Kushner's play Angels in America

came out about that time.

There was a book published

in the early '90s by Sophy Burnham on angels.

And that became a big bestseller.

Tattooed wings on people's backs.

It was just a cultural moment.

[music stops]

[Ken Lazebnik] So CBS commissioned

John Masius to write a show

about angels, because this is what their testing

showed them people were interested in watching.

[Roma Downey] I remember getting a phone call from my agent.

He said, "I have an opportunity for you

to come in and read, to play an undercover angel."

I said, "Like, you know, is she an angel with wings?

Like, is it a Victoria's Secret angel?

Like, what kind of an angel are we talking about?"

He said, "I don't know much more than that.

Just make sure you sound American.

Don't sound foreign."

And so during the conversation after the audition,

one of the producers said to me,

"Could you try that with your Irish accent?"

And I thought, "Oh, here we go.

I'll be the interesting Irish choice,

but then they'll end up casting an American, you know?"

I started doing one of the big speeches

with my Irish accent.

And honestly, I could see

everybody in the room leaned in.

John Masius, brilliant writer, created a pilot.

With angels who were,

shall we say, angels with dirty faces.

They did one version of it that was darker

than the one we know now.

His version was hipper.

The angels smoked and they said

dumb things about the boss,

because people always rip on their boss.

But the network thought, "Well, no one's going to

want you to be mad at your boss if he's God."

[Downey] Monica dropped from heaven

into Santa Monica Bay.

And that's where she got her name.

Because then she meets some guys on the beach.

She says, "Where are we?" And they say, "Santa Monica."

And then somebody says, "What's your name?"

Later, and she goes, "Uh, Monica."

[Brian Bird] It was kind of dark.

Della Reese's character Tess drank as an angel,

and dropped some language bombs.

They resurrected a dead dog in the middle of the show.

It was a very odd show.

[Winston] And they screened it for focus groups

and nobody particularly liked it.

[Bird] It didn't test very well.

But something about the idea,

the premise of the show still resonated with CBS.

And they brought in Martha Williamson,

who reconceived it.

CBS had started a conversation

with me about an angel show,

because I was the "angel girl."

I was the lady who went to church and believed in God.

And so they said, "Go call Martha."

They gave me carte blanche at CBS to do

anything I wanted to with the original pilot.

And I said to them, "I want to throw

the whole thing out and start over."

And they said, "That's just fine.

Throw it all out.

I said, "Except for Della and Roma."

I interviewed them. They were perfect together.

It was lightning in a bottle.

She totally changed the nature of the show to make it

more upbeat, more wholesome, more family oriented.

I don't know what it is,

but I get a good feeling about you.

They said, "You know what? That's where we want to go.

Let's call it Touched by an Angel."

I said, "Oh, please don't call it Touched by an Angel.

That's such a weird title."

But they said, "We're going with Touched by an Angel.

It's all right."

But then I realized later that people were touched,

that they were moved.

And that was my mandate.

"How do we move people with these shows

and these scripts every week?"

Touched by an Angel essentially took the premise

of It's a Wonderful Life,

and turned it into a procedural drama.

It's like a cross between It's a Wonderful Life

-and Law and Order. -[bell ringing]

The idea for Touched by an Angel was that an angel

in training would be guided by an older angel to help people

here on Earth who were at a crossroads in their life,

to make a decision that would lead them closer to God.

These angels were able to show up at these times

of great pain, and offer some light to the darkness.

And God would sort of give them an assignment.

They were the assignment of the week.

[Monica] And how am I supposed to help him then?

Well, baby, the only way to share

this man's pain...

is to share his pain.

Usually, the younger angel, who is played by Roma Downey,

would come to a town and Della Reese,

who was her guardian, would bring her into a situation

where she has to help someone at a crossroads

find God and find God's love.

[Williamson] Roma was meant to be Monica.

She had a long history of working

in the theater in London.

But she was relatively new to Hollywood.

[humming]

Who are you?

My name is Tess.

And you may call me Miss Tess.

Della Reese was a big star.

♪ I got myself an angel ♪

♪ Standing here by my side ♪

[Williamson] Della Reese was mostly known

early on as a great singer.

Had these amazing hits in the '50s.

Then Della got into film and acting.

And she was very funny.

I know what I just said, but sometimes I don't think

you have the sense God gave the goat.

And I wanted to take advantage of that.

I suppose we should get started. Are you ready?

My agent had said, "Well, there's good news

and there's bad news.

The pilot's being picked up."

And I said, "Great. And what's the bad news?"

"You're moving to Salt Lake City."

I didn't know anything about Salt Lake City,

except I had put one of my very first posters

I had on the wall, of my childhood bedroom

in Northern Ireland, was of Donny Osmond.

And Donny Osmond was from Salt Lake City.

[Williamson] CBS wanted to shoot in Salt Lake

for budgetary reasons.

We didn't have much of a budget.

And frankly, a lot of people

really didn't have a lot of hopes for the show.

So they weren't really giving us all that we needed.

Touched by an Angel got off to a slow start.

We had an order for 13 episodes.

A full order, I think, was 22.

Critics, at least in the beginning,

were not terribly kind.

But let's remember that this program is coming out

when television is starting to really have

some more serious artistic ambitions.

This was the dawn of the prestige TV era.

We were just getting into an age where

cable was showing its force.

HBO, for the first time, was doing original series.

And critics were starting to really gravitate towards

those more complicated types of shows.

Three Emmys, you're at the very top of the dung heap.

Touched by an Angel was not a complicated show.

It was not a critic-friendly show.

One of the reviews in TV Guide was,

"This show will probably be off the air

before you even read this."

You know, we're bounced around from time slot to time slot.

And it's hard for a show to pick up traction,

and to find a loyal audience,

if the audience doesn't know what night

it's going to be on or what time it's going to be on.

They put it Wednesday night at nine,

which is sort of crazy, because this is the kind of show

that you would watch with the family.

And you'd want your kids to come watch it

because of the nice, wholesome values.

So nine was a little late, and they were about to kill it.

They started airing it, but then they put a pin in it.

And that pause pin is usually the kiss of death.

My first commandment is, "Thou shalt not forgive."

-God does forgive. -Not in LA.

To me, this was just the way it worked.

"Well, of course, this will get canceled."

And that's just, you know,

the usual way things go out here.

[static crackles]

[heartbeat thumping]

Touched by an Angel premiered on CBS

when CBS was a low-rated network.

It was in third place, even fourth place at times.

And they were really struggling to find their way

and get a new audience.

That's why Touched struggled as well,

constantly moving time slots,

not really finding any sort of traction.

The ratings were sort of marginal that first season.

[Downey] And yet Touched by an Angel

started to do well

in the flyover states.

It became a hit in the South and in the middle

of the United States before it kind of penetrated the coasts.

Particularly for people of faith,

there was nothing like this on television.

It was almost like we were a bit of a joke.

That we had a show that talked about God respectfully.

You know, it wasn't the norm at that time.

At any time, really.

By the end of the first season of Touched,

the word had gotten out that there was a show

that didn't make fun of people who believed in God.

And they were starting

to come around the show and support it,

only to discover that we were,

in fact, on the bubble.

There was a big campaign for people to write in

and try to save the show.

Fans began to write in and say how much they loved the show.

You know, this was like people literally

taking to writing letters, making phone calls.

[Williamson] "Save Touched by an Angel."

USA Today did a big, big push to help save the show.

We're so grateful to the fan base for activating.

They made a lot of noise.

Hallelujah.

And even though we were limping to the next green light,

they would drop us another one.

"Okay, you can do one more."

We don't know what our fate's going to be,

but we're going to do our damnedest to make a great show.

Then they tried us out on Saturday night,

on what they called America's Night of something.

And it was Dr. Quinn,

They had the Chuck Norris, Walker, Texas Ranger,

and they had Touched by an Angel.

So it was a big family night show.

Second season had come and gone.

It wasn't their biggest nightmare,

but certainly, "Why keep it around?"

We were on the chopping block, until Les Moonves

came in and said, "Wait, something's going on here."

And he saw the potential.

"If numbers keep growing,

you find a place to give them a chance to grow."

And that wonderful soil was Sunday night at eight o'clock.

We landed in that Sunday night time slot.

And then it sort of all clicked.

Which in hindsight, makes total sense.

A religious-oriented show on Sunday night, of course.

And I think that audience found it as well.

[magical sparkle plays]

[Rosanne Welch] Putting Touched by an Angel

on Sunday night was sort of a slam dunk.

"How silly of you."

Of course, people who were

of that part of the audience

were going to go to church,

be with family,

end the day by watching

the show with their kids.

[Schneider] So that really helped.

Moving the time slot paid off, with Touched by an Angel

turning into a mega hit for CBS.

And before you know it, we had 15 million people,

18 million people, 20 million people.

We found a very comfortable home

in the top ten for years and years.

There were even times when we beat Friends and ER.

Nowadays, a show can get a million people,

and that's considered a hit.

It was really exciting, frankly,

because suddenly you thought, "Wait, I'm on a hit."

This doesn't happen very often.

[whimsical music playing]

Twenty million people were watching

this show every Sunday night.

They were trying to reach as wide a demographic as possible,

because the specificity of religion was never mentioned.

You know, these were not Mormon angels or Catholic angels.

They were just angels.

God won't let you down.

The whole thing is essentially about God,

but it's got nothing to do with religion.

There is no doctrine, short of a few things.

"God loves you."

Have you got something against God?

-Yes. -But short of that,

this is not denominational.

They're really careful that these are unbranded angels.

It was very much a spiritual show,

not necessarily a Christian show.

There were so many stories

that came from the personal lives

and the personal passions of our writers,

and they put their hearts and souls into it,

and it shows up all over the screen.

-Action! -I don't want to out them,

but I'm rather sure there were heathens in the writing staff.

Not everyone sort of were churchgoers.

[Welch] I was, like, the token Catholic.

We had New Age people. We had Jewish people.

I'm Jewish.

Glenn Berenbeim was Jewish.

We had writers of every faith.

As Martha always said, "This is a show

about spirituality, not religion."

Hello, I'm Monica.

We tried our best

to be a water cooler show.

-You can be my age. -Back off.

I'm working here.

You know, CBS, they didn't just

want to preach to the choir.

Big broadcaster, they want to broaden it.

They want to get everybody to watch their show.

So I think they were going for

a very inclusive perspective.

One is black, one is white, one is young,

the other is older, where almost any kind of

American could feel comfortable watching it.

And obviously they did, since the show at its high point

was watched by 25 million people.

That's astounding in today's television markets.

There were other really big shows happening at the time,

but the fact that Touched by an Angel

was neck and neck with ER says something

about what the audience wants and is hungry for.

What made Touched so groundbreaking

was that we did more than entertain.

I know that you have the AIDS virus.

Oh, my God.

That we really got into

some of the deep stuff

that you wouldn't have expected

to see at eight o'clock

on a family show on Sunday night.

No!

[static crackles]

[heartbeat thumping]

I think audiences love Touched by an Angel

because every week they knew they could see

a story that was surprising.

[Bird] Touched by an Angel dealt with tough subjects.

Our whole family could sit together and watch a TV show

and talk about it, and maybe bring up a subject

that we wouldn't have talked about otherwise.

You think you can hide behind this Bible,

or that phony smile, or a white sheet?

I know who you are, you hate monger.

People think of it somehow as a soft show,

but we dealt with very dark material.

There were episodes about everything,

from alcoholism to divorce to death

to child trafficking.

We did an episode

about a young man with HIV.

It doesn't matter that they're HIV positive up here.

I should think that it matters very much.

I felt like nobody ever shied away from,

you know, real important social issues.

Things that were important to families.

Everything from illness to, you know,

alcoholism or drug addiction or suicide.

You know, the things that can break a family.

Detective McCovey has something to say.

We don't want to hear from him.

I was a cop, and I shot and killed

a Black kid because a black guy killed my wife.

And there's a speech that I give in a church

saying that, "I was mad at all of you."

And it was a Black church, because of that.

And, "I'm sorry."

Never thought of myself

as a bigot before, but...

[sniffles] ...but I guess I was.

Good episode.

We understood who was watching,

and we didn't want to do anything to alienate them.

But we also wanted to challenge them sometimes to,

you know, "Let's show grace to everybody."

People got certain messages of encouragement

and faith week after week after week.

And that's such a powerful message.

I think that's why people, at its heart, love the show.

And I'll also give full credit to Roma Downey

and Della Reese and John Dye.

You know, it was a wonderful, magical sort of casting

of these three actors who are all beautiful human beings.

And that came across on screen.

Roma Downey was beautiful,

but not sexy,

which made her attractive to women

as much as she might have been to men.

And she was such a gentle character

that kids could probably relate to her very easily.

You know, sometimes, Joey, you have to remember

the bad things so that you can learn from them.

So Roma Downey grew up in Northern Ireland...

and had a very, very hardscrabble childhood.

I think maybe because of that difficult childhood,

the struggles just to survive, she always has had

this generosity of spirit and sweetness.

[Bird] She was just graceful.

Like, it just oozed out of her, the gracefulness.

And that's how Roma Downey is.

She lives that way, too.

[Welch] My son was like two,

and Roma's daughter was about the same age.

So sometimes her nanny would come and say

my son could go play in their trailer

with her daughter, because the kids were bored.

So Roma had a very, like, motherly,

this is a family situation thing.

And I think that really resonated

with everybody for a long time.

I had my daughter on the series.

I'm sure my pregnancy was a challenge.

You know, many other shows they can write into,

that the character gets pregnant,

but it really wasn't an option on Touched by an Angel.

I carried very large sun hats.

I carried big bags of shopping.

I was standing behind car doors.

I was leaning over couches.

Sit, sit. Leonard, could you help me out here?

-[barks] -Even though

we thought we were being so clever,

you know, my face was just getting bigger

and bigger and bigger. [chuckles]

There was real chemistry between Roma and Della.

And people can see that, I think.

Della with her big, you know, the higher the hair,

the closer to God, right?

[Williamson] Roma and Della,

there was a real mother-daughter relationship.

-Are you all right? -[tearfully] I will be.

Roma lost her mother very early as a child.

And Della is just earth mother to all.

And the two of them had something special

that had to be written to.

Della Reese became like a mother to me.

Oh, baby, there is great joy. Great joy.

But God told us there'd be days like this too.

[Downey] I loved her with all of my heart.

Our friendship lasted right up 'til the very end.

The moment she hit the set, it was always,

"Well, hello, everybody."

And there's this prayer.

And she had this immense energy

that was incredibly embracing.

[big band music playing]

The way she treated us was how she ended up

showing up in the scripts as well.

And we wanted that authority figure.

-She was the supervisor. -So you listen to me.

Are you listening?

Later when I met my husband,

Mark Burnett, I warned him.

I said, "She's not a handshaker."

She's going to give you a hug. So be prepared.

She said, "That's my baby girl.

And if you hurt her, I will have you killed."

And he started to laugh, you know,

because he thought, well, dark humor.

And she said, "Oh, no, I'm not kidding."

Della is Della.

What you saw on the screen was Della.

And John, when he was added to the show in the third season

as the Angel of Death, he fit in very nicely.

I mean, Della and Roma and John were a trio.

You are looking good.

No, baby, you know that you're the one who looks good.

[laughs] Come on, baby, we got work to do.

John Dye.

How perfect of a name is that for the Angel of Death?

And I think part of what made John work

as the Angel of Death was his instinct that death

is not something to be terrified of.

It is a natural culmination of life.

And I think he was able to capture that.

[Downey] He was a true Southern gentleman.

He was easy on the eyes.

And, you know, you could only hope, when your time comes,

that as lovely an angel as John Dye would show up for you.

[Alexis Cruz] John and I used to crack up all the time

and tell jokes together.

We'd look at these scripts

and we'd go, "Wow, really?" [sucks teeth]

"That's kind of corny, isn't it?

We were like, what are we going to do with this?"

[Welch] And he just became

the third member of our family.

So Touched by an Angel had a relatively small

ensemble cast of our angels.

But what that gave us

was unbelievably big

casting opportunities for our guest stars.

[static crackles]

[heart thumping]

When you look back now at Touched by an Angel,

you'll be astounded by the kind of A-list talent

that were part of that roster.

Folks like Bryan Cranston.

He's still going to have to spend

some time up in psychiatric.

What?

We had brand new stars-to-be.

We had Brie Larson.

Silly, he lives in the boys' dormitory.

-[Williamson] James Marsden. -You can't do that.

Oh, no? Who's going to stop me?

[Williamson] Pedro Pascal.

What are you doing here?

-Aren't you a little old? -Watch it, buster.

America Ferrera.

And you think, "Oh, my gosh, I worked with Jack Black

when he was just, you know, a kid."

-Really? Never mind. -Hey.

[magical sparkle plays]

Huh?

We had movie stars on Touched by an Angel.

Kirk Douglas.

There will be a bar mitzvah today.

Mine.

And we'd say, "Really?

Are they going to do this? Are you sure?"

It's jaw-dropping.

We had A-list stars.

Carol Burnett. Debbie Reynolds.

Ernest Borgnine. Debbie Allen.

Oscar-winning people. Rita Moreno.

It's so good to be back.

[Bird] And it wasn't just a good payday for them.

Hello.

It's because they wanted to be on.

But they had other people.

Long lists of unlikely and sometimes

very interesting guest stars.

Like Muhammad Ali.

[gasps] What's going on?

Mr. Ali is a friend of ours, Tam.

We had this wonderful opportunity to call people up

and say, "We want to do something with you.

What do you care about?"

We went to Muhammad Ali.

And he said, "Bullying."

[Tess] Strength is not just about muscle.

You have to know what you're fighting for.

Big actors, big athletes,

big celebrities were open to hearing from us.

[Downey] We had Dr. Maya Angelou.

She just took my breath away.

Talk about a legacy.

Maya Angelou wrote a poem

just for our episode called Touched by an Angel.

"Love costs all that we are

and all that we hope to be.

Yet it is only love which sets us free."

A lot of secular actors wanted to be on a show

that had 25 million people watching it.

It was great exposure. It was a quick commitment.

They weren't coming on for, like, an extended arc.

-It was a one-shot deal. -Every week is a new case.

I loved the fact that every week, Touched by an Angel

was set in a different location.

It gave you as a writer a chance

to explore entirely different worlds.

We never had the same set from week to week to week.

And that was a huge challenge.

The challenges were we were in Salt Lake City.

And so it was like, "Okay, how can you make Salt Lake City

look like New Orleans or look like the Sudan?"

[Williamson] One week we were shooting the assassination

of Abraham Lincoln.

The next week we were shooting

Sally Ride in space.

[Bird] We took one street of Salt Lake City

and turned it into Beijing.

And it worked. I mean, it worked beautifully.

The biggest challenge was always,

"Can we keep the mountains out of the shot?"

Because once you saw mountains, that restricted you a lot.

But Salt Lake City was amazingly versatile.

And we did, well, we had over 200 episodes.

We believed on the show that every episode

needed a really good cry.

[chuckles] And we wanted to guarantee that in every episode.

We had a classic four-act structure.

And if you know that at the end of act three,

the dark night of the soul for your hero,

someone dies, someone is in deep distress,

you can work backwards and build story from that point.

There was always that moment

where the angel revealed herself.

Who are you?

-I'm an angel. -A what?

And it was sort of the heart and soul

of each of the episodes.

Whatever I had been wearing,

it would change miraculously.

Monica?

Now I was wearing some sort of

white dress, white and flowy.

I had a little bit of extra light.

-Holy. -Holy is right.

[Downey] And it was kind of an ethereal moment.

You could pick any episode, act four,

when the lights, the heavenly lights

would shine over the angels.

And there was a radiant glow behind her...

as we in the room said,

"the glow-job scene." [chuckles]

You're telling me you're an angel?

The revelation scene was

the big moment on every show.

It was a deeply meaningful scene and moment.

That it was emotionally fulfilling

to an audience to be weepy.

Hopefully, not because it was a terrible episode,

but because it was emotionally moving.

If you can get people to laugh, cry,

or have their emotions swell,

that's a really effective way to do television.

The revelation scene did that every time.

-[static crackles] -[heartbeat thumping]

You sound like you got a real good case of the blues.

We used music in a way that most shows never did.

♪ When I look into your eyes ♪

[Downey] I remember street jamming

with Justin Timberlake.

♪ God must have spent... ♪

♪ ...on you, on you, on you ♪

Hey, don't give up your day job.

It was always such an important part of it.

From our opening song, "Walk With You..."

♪ When you walk... ♪

...sang by our great Della Reese herself.

And Della got to sing in quite a few episodes.

Music always woven so skillfully.

Martha's always loved music,

and loved bringing music into the show,

and hiring guest stars who were musical performers.

We had a tragedy once where

our guest star could not show up,

and we had to scramble

and rewrite a show over the weekend.

And I went to Della, and I said, Della,

can you sing as many songs as I throw at you?

And she says, "Yeah, and we'll bring in my friends too."

And we did a show with Della Reese,

BB King, Dr. John,

Al Hirt, Hal Linden.

It was one of our best shows ever.

[flute playing]

♪ Oh, yeah ♪

There was a lot of music in Touched by an Angel,

but not all just because of Della.

We did have country music stars come to us,

because they felt that was also their audience.

[Downey] Wynonna was one of all of our favorites.

It was our hundredth episode that we filmed with her

that was so powerful and poignant.

♪ Happy birthday to you ♪

[smooches]

CBS wanted to do something special,

of course, for the 100th episode.

And it was always on my mind.

It would be a songwriter who was struggling

with something in her life.

What would be the worst thing

you could imagine, is losing your own child.

This is it, Monica.

I'm gonna lose my baby.

One of his wishes was to meet Celine Dion,

and we actually went to Canada and worked with Celine,

one of the great moments of our lives.

And the last thing he really wanted was

to see his mother write the song that had been

in her head for so long, and to complete that song.

♪ All the colors of the rainbow ♪

[Williamson] And at the very end of the show,

had that song singing

just as that little boy went to heaven.

And he broke all of our hearts.

And it was really so deeply touching.

And to this day, if I catch a glimpse

of that episode, it could really-- just made me cry.

Do you know what it's like to get two superstars,

Wynonna Judd and Celine Dion,

to agree to be on the same show at the same time?

And it was great to celebrate that we had gone that far,

especially first two seasons, not sure the show's gonna

get canceled, and then to earn 100th episode.

It was a beautiful thing.

Who is that?

When Valerie joined us,

very late in the show,

she was just a breath of fresh air.

We needed a real shot in the arm.

Valerie Bertinelli, my goodness.

I mean, she was America's sweetheart for so many years.

And she played a brand new angel who had just been created.

I'm homesick.

I know, baby,

but you've got a job to do here.

I really enjoyed working with Val,

who played the role of Gloria.

I was excited when Valerie Bertinelli was gonna

join the show, because of course she was bringing

a whole new audience to the show who might not have been

paying attention to it,

but she was very open and wonderful.

And I think she brought that honesty to her character.

As with all television shows...

It's going to be worse than I thought.

Yes. We better get going.

...there's an end date.

There's business aspects of the decision,

audience size aspects of the decision.

I just think it was ultimately time for it

to go and for it to end.

CBS had just bought Sunday Night Football,

and they kept running overtime.

And that became difficult and unpredictable.

People were saying, "Is Touched on?

Is it not on?"

So it became

a logistical problem as well.

There was a sweetness and a sadness to it ending,

really, because we had all been on it so long.

We had all become such a family.

You know, I think everything runs its course.

It was the dream job.

It was getting to write

for female characters

who had something important to say.

And it spoke to me that

America loves having

this place in their entertainment menu,

that they welcome this.

It was deeply satisfying to have the success

of Touched by an Angel demonstrated week after week.

I think it was over 200 and something episodes

we made, and maybe it was time to hang it up.

But there was a lot of tears,

of course, saying goodbye.

[Williamson] And so we knew that we were kind of winding down,

and it might be time to say,

"Let's take a look at where we're headed."

So we weren't canceled. You can't cancel God.

But it was really by a beautiful and lovely

mutual agreement with the folks at CBS.

It was time to say goodbye.

[heartfelt music playing]

♪

-[static crackles] -[heartbeat thumping]

I think Touched by an Angel

does still resonate 30 years on...

[magical sparkle playing]

...because the timelessness

of the core message will never go away.

All of us need to believe in ourselves, and to believe

in our community, and to realize that

all of us have the ability to make change.

And that's what they told people on a weekly basis.

"You don't think things are good in your life now.

I'm here to tell you, you can find a way to fix it,

and I will support you."

That's huge.

Touched by an Angel revealed

that even when we thought

the era of being able to pull off

such an earnest, sincere,

completely non-ironic program was over.

Touched by an Angel proved that you could not only

do that stuff, but people liked it.

Even though critics might have

a hard time celebrating schmaltz,

sometimes schmaltz, if done well,

can actually be interesting.

[Schneider] Along comes a show

that was about faith and morals.

This was slightly religious,

and obviously had an audience

that really embraced it, as something a little different

than what else was on TV in that age of sarcasm.

And I think that's one reason why

it did quite well at the time.

And it did melodrama really well.

I don't care what people say, sometimes a good,

manipulated cry is just what the doctor ordered.

We had a very unique show.

Nobody ever quite knew what to do with it

or how to categorize it.

And that's okay.

With all due respect to the members of the press,

it was your profession

that really has been the least kind to us.

But the people, in spite of what you wrote about us initially,

have continued to watch,

and have watched in great numbers.

There were a lot of people who could have made

a lot of fun, and they didn't.

[Schneider] Touched by an Angel

was two female leads.

And that was an important example

of how female leads could actually carry

a spiritual primetime drama,

where up until then, we'd seen mostly men

like Michael Landon, Highway to Heaven,

as stars of these kinds of shows.

So it did break new ground to that degree,

and that was pretty astounding.

[Downey] Very uncommon to have not one,

but two female leads.

And very uncommon to have

female characters that like each other.

Indeed, not just like each other,

but loved each other.

-Excuse me. -I love-- Oh.

[Downey] And so I think that gave it

a particular heartbeat.

I mean, they were two women running a one-hour drama

for all that time.

It was a big deal.

It seems almost every season,

someone's trying, "God friended me."

You know, "God is my best friend.

Where's God?"

There's so many shows that try to get

that secret sauce that Touched by an Angel has.

And that's part of its legacy.

[Bird] Perhaps the biggest impact on me, personally,

was the fact that it saved lives.

And I'm not hyperbolic about this.

We received letters from people saying,

"I was gonna do myself harm.

And I heard that message on television,

and I called for help.

I called a suicide hotline."

[Downey] To see in writing, "The show changed my life.

The show's helped us have a conversation

in our family to address our mother's alcoholism."

-No, I haven't had enough! -Ah!

[Downey] "This helps me heal from the suicide of my child."

Like, these were real people sharing the real impacts

of a TV show on their lives.

What other show has done that?

That's a massive thing to me.

So Touched by an Angel does have a legacy.

God has given you a second chance.

Take it.

It's a legacy of individuals whose lives

have been changed for the better.

[theme music playing]