With five years between us, it was sometimes hard for my sister and me to find common ground in the mid-90s. She was in single digits; I was a teenager. But one thing we agreed on was Sabrina, The Teenage Witch.

How Sabrina the Teenage Witch spelled a change in 90s TV Read more

From 1996 to 1999, most school year Friday nights would find us tuning in for ABC’s TGIF package to catch up with the latest magical and surreal and, OK, sometimes banal adventures of the titular heroine. I have a real soft spot for Sabrina. But the news that the show is getting a “dark” reboot on Netflix underwhelmed me. Sabrina was a gentle show to the point of plodding, and the new show, made by the makers of Riverdale, promises to be “a dark coming-of-age story that traffics in horror, the occult, and, of course, witchcraft”. Of course. But does the world really need Sabrina gone goth?

Maybe the original Sabrina wasn’t a good show, not per se, not if you judge by the standards of Art. But it was about a powerful young woman who lived with two powerful women mentors, and that wasn’t something that there was much of on network TV in the 90s. That the lead role was played by Melissa Joan Hart – the previous star of nerdcore Clarissa Explains It All – was no doubt a savvy move on the part of the showrunners. It flagged who the show was for: suburban girls who liked reading and were tentative about boys.

The show’s greatest charm was in the credulous introduction of surreal detail: there was simply nothing else like it on television (perhaps no other showrunners were taking quite as much ayahuasca). Sabrina’s talking pet cat Salem, who was actually a witch sentenced to serve a hundred years in feline form, was a key co-star. Sabrina’s father was a male witch who lived inside a book. Sabrina worked on a witch’s license that she could earn through a series of tests set by a Quiz Master. Her aunt’s linen closet doubled as a portal to another world, which looked very similar to the regular world, which is to say: cheaply constructed on a soundstage. The show was very silly and quite bonkers. And those are two things that teenage girls aren’t often permitted to be, not without critique.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Kiernan Shipka, who will be playing Sabrina in the reboot. Photograph: Nick Harvey/Rex/Shutterstock

Alas, this sense of fun doesn’t seem to be the aim of the new series. Based on a series of comics written by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa, the chief creative officer of Archie Comics, and starring Mad Men’s Kiernan Shipka in the lead role, the series promises to be slick and dark and sexy (and over-the-top) in the manner of the already-successful Riverdale. It’s good to see television that’s made for teenage girls. It’s essential to make good television for teenage girls. And it’s certainly the case that teenage girls need a bit of dark magic in their lives in a world that’s often set against them.

But putting that dark magic in the hands of a slim blonde heroine – again? – feels wrong for the current moment, though Shipka is a talented actor. Girls and women in America are finding their power in their own voices and in particular, in recognizing the importance and impact of diversity. Teenage girls are creative and imaginative and more inclined to speak truth to power than ever before. Another series based on a comic that was made for their cohort in the 1960s seems unlikely to embody their current zeitgeist, even if it includes a bit of cannibalism.

Some years ago I found myself at a dinner with a veteran screenwriter in LA. Over his third martini, he looked at me and said: “LA real estate entertains the world.” In other words, he explained, people come to Hollywood, make it big, and then spend the rest of their lives trying to keep up with their enormous mortgages, which means working on safe projects, familiar franchises, stuff that will sell in multiple markets, in syndication. Based on the success of Riverdale, I’m sure the Sabrina reboot will pay some mortgages. But teenage girls deserve more than that.