A talking cat. A giant flan. Truth sprinkles. Sabrina the Teenage Witch was irreverent and absurd, yes, but its feminist ethos and screwball-esque dialogue made it stand out from the average teen show of its day.

Which is why, 20 years on, it still resonates. When I asked friends if the show had an impact on their lives, I received a number of immediate responses – “If heaven is just a black cat offering retorts and advice, I’d be happy,” said one. “Everything in their magical world was grounded in logic,” said another. “Of course the cat can talk – he’s a man serving a prison sentence for trying to take over the world. Of course you have an evil twin – our whole family does. The justifications for magic were as exciting as the magic itself.”

Sabrina’s creator, Nell Scovell, wanted to make the perfect programme for her strange teenage self, “so Sabrina never hung out at the mall or went shopping. She cared about being a good friend, making good choices, and doing well in school. The magic was a metaphor for a young girl learning to control her desires and emotions, as well as an excuse to showcase a 6ft flan.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sabrina and Salem in her bedroom. Photograph: c.Warner Br/Everett / Rex Featur

When the original, male, head writer left for contractual reasons, Scovell soon got signed up. But while the network was “amazing about letting me be weird” (hence the giant flan taking over the school cafeteria), she found herself regularly going into battle.

One of the biggest standoffs was over Sabrina’s mother, who ABC assumed would be dead. “I decided that her mom was off travelling for work and made her an archeologist, which would explain her being out of reach. The network fought me. They said, ‘We don’t think a mother would go off and leave her kid like that.’ ‘Like what?’ I asked. ‘She trusts the aunts. Sabrina’s in good hands. Plus, Sabrina’s dad is off working in ‘the other realm’ and you don’t have a problem with it.’ I lost a lot of battles, but I did win that one. I bucked the Disney matricide tradition and made Sabrina’s mother lean in.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘The stories were never cookie-cutter’ … Sabrina with her aunt. Photograph: Moviestore/REX/Shutterstock

Her use of the phrase “lean in” makes sense today. Scovell co-wrote Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 bestselling ode to the power of female negotiation. And it was but one job in a broad (to put it mildly) career. The first staff writer at Spy magazine, she got into television via a script she sent on spec to It’s Garry Shandling’s Show. This led to writing gigs at Late Night With David Letterman (her Vanity Fair piece about what a hostile environment it was for a woman is a must-read) and the Simpsons before creating Sabrina.

The show premiered to almost 18m viewers and became a venerable staple in ABC’s 90s-era Friday night TGIF lineup. Today, Scovell views her career trajectory as utterly unsurprising. “It makes total sense to me,” she says. “Sabrina was my attempt to create a show that I would’ve loved as that weird young girl who grew up to write for Letterman and Spy and The Simpsons.”

The show lives on through syndication, exposing a new generation of teens to its unique, undeniable charm. When asked to explain the show’s continued appeal to smart, weird, girls and boys, Scovell says: “It was unusual to have a girl as the star, so that was empowering. And the stories weren’t cookie-cutter, either. In one of my favorite episodes, Sabrina wanted to know if [her best friend] Harvey liked her as more than a friend so she put ‘truth sprinkles’ on his bundt cake in home ec class. But the teacher ended up putting them on all the cakes and, for a day, everyone at school told each other what they really think. Sabrina came home and told her aunts that the lesson was that the world would be an awful place if everyone told the truth all the time.”



Scovell laughs. “I bet no TGIF show ever landed on that moral before.” And chances are, it never will again.

