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Emmy Award-Winning Producer: ‘I Love to Include God in Our Programs’

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Emmy Award-Winning Producer: ‘I Love to Include God in Our Programs’

By Movieguide® Staff

Emmy award-winning producer Sam Haskell of programs like THE WALTONS: HOMECOMING and DOLLY PARTON’S HEARTSTRINGS recently opened up about the importance of incorporating faith in his programs.

“I love to make you laugh and cry. I love to talk about faith. I love to include God in our programs. I love to create programs that families can come together and watch together,” Haskell told Movieguide®. “Our programming is so diversified in 2022. Families rarely can find something that everyone can enjoy, and I believe THE WALTONS: HOMECOMING brings that back.”

THE WALTONS: HOMECOMING, which premiered last year on The CW, won Movieguide®’s Epiphany Prize® for Television for Inspiring Content.

“It takes me all the way back to being a little guy growing up in Amory, Mississippi,” Haskell said. “Every Thursday night, when that theme song got on, I doubt that it would come on, we’d all rushed to the living room, because we knew it was THE WALTONS. When Warner Brothers came to me, and said, ‘We really think you’re the best producer on the lot to take this format, and do a reboot,’ and it’s the 50th anniversary of the original Waltons homecoming that stared Patricia Neal and Richard Thomas and all the kids. I just thought, ‘This is perfect.’ I loved it so much as a kid.”

The values in THE WALTONS: HOMECOMING are similar to the values Haskell incorporated into his Emmy award-nominated project, DOLLY PARTON’S HEARTSTRINGS, and later, the Emmy award-winning DOLLY PARTON’S CHRISTMAS ON THE SQUARE.

“The attention that I got started with Movieguide®, because Movieguide® was the very first organization to recognize what I was doing, to recognize what we were doing as a company, and what we were doing as a studio,” Haskell said. “You have always been there for us. And I think it gets people to notice us more because it all started with Movieguide®.  That’s why I am so appreciative and thankful to you, [Movieguide® Founder and Publisher Dr.] Ted [Baehr], because of the kinds of programming that you embrace as an organization, and that you want your audience to see.

“That’s what’s so great,” Haskell continued. The audience “wants it if it’s produced the right way. You can’t preach as much as you just set examples. I honestly believe that we attract more goodness with goodness than we ever could with anything else. And the fact that they’re all responding to this kind of programming says that I’m doing it the right way. You’re doing it the right way. And it makes a difference when you do it the right way.”

Watch Haskell’s full interview below.