After all, the family is a functional clan headed by a progressive minister (Stephen Collins) and a full-time mother (Catherine Hicks) who rule wisely over their five adorable children. The pilot featured such themes as a teenager's first kiss, an adolescent eagerly awaiting her first menstrual period and a young child yearning to get a dog.

This from the czar of such salacious series as "Melrose Place" and "Savannah"?

Not really.

The actual creator and driving force behind the series is co- executive producer Brenda Hampton, a former University of Georgia student who calls her benevolent Camden family "the seven whitest people in America."

"It's kind of like - what if there was a family like this? What if people were actually kind and loved each other?" Hampton says.

But Hampton slices her white bread with edgy reality, cutting into such `90s issues as teen pregnancy, wife abuse, carjackings and black church burnings - the subject of tonight's episode on WATL/Channel 36 at 8 p.m. (683795).

The segment focuses not so much on the church burning itself, but on the racial tensions that ensue when the black minister (Dorian Harewood) and his family move in temporarily with the Camden family.

"It makes a strong statement about the horror of burning people' s churches," Collins says. "But the way this show works and what I love about `7th Heaven' is that it's all about the relationships between people given a big situation like that."

In writing the episode, Hampton drew on her own experience 25 years ago at UGA.

"I went as a freshman and I was put in a dorm room with a black senior," she said. "It was probably one of the first integrated dorm rooms at that school. So that was kind of my first experience with looking at blacks having a different life in America than we do. And looking at this story, I have to look at `have things really changed that much over the past 25 years?' "

And?

"I don't know," she says. "I don't know."

Copyright 1996, The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, All rights reserved.

Jennifer Bowles, AP television writer, CHANNEL SURFER: Family drama, edgy issues in `7th Heaven'., The Atlanta Journal and Constitution, 10-14-1996, pp C08.

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