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Small Screen Reviews: The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina
With special guest star: The Lord of Lies!
One well that TV execs like to go to frequently is the “gritty reboot.” They’ve dipped into that well so much in the past decades it’s running dry, but until they get nothing from it, they’re going to keep lowering the bucket to get all they can. In this case, we take an Archie Comics title, Sabrina the Teenaged Witch, which given from its publisher it would be noted this title would typically be lighthearted fun much like most incarnations of it on television of which are a surprising amount. A couple of cartoons and a live-action show that involve wacky adventures of a talented half-witch half-normal girl raised by kooky witch aunts. Netflix takes this and, building off The CW’s Riverdale (the gritty Archie and Friends reboot) and gives us The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina.
The background of the show actually takes a lot of material from the original source material. Some of the side characterizations are very similar to the comics. Sabrina’s parentage is explained and it’s a major factor of the original material and this show. Much of the background material remains true to source. It just adds a very large dose of Satan in the mix. I’m not even kidding about that last part. Not even a smidgeon. It’s the major conflict of the show.
In the very first episode, it’s shown that Sabrina has been living your average teen girl’s life. She goes to a normal school, has relatively normal friends (in context of this show at least), and has a relatively normal (again, context) doting boyfriend. But she’s expected to set it aside and join the local witch academy, abandon her mortal life, and sign over allegiance to Satan. I seriously warned you people, but did you listen? Oh no! Oh, the witches-slash-Satan worshippers use flowery language to make it seem as if it’s a great thing, “do what thou wilt” and all that, but Sabrina is at least smart enough to figure out that it’s a complete lie. She refuses, which opens up infernal retribution until through talented legal work she manages to get “dual citizenship.” The show plays off this dichotomy that completes against each other. And at least it manages to show those allied with Satan as being capable of terrible and horrifying depravity.
There is, unfortunately, a problem with this running theme of, “No man can serve two masters”. The evil is clearly defined: Satan and all his works. The longer the show goes the nastier, the more horrifying this wicked anti-church proves itself to be. The other side has … modern secularism. It’s not even well-defined, like modern secularism. We don’t see much of religion in Greendale beyond the church of Satan. We don’t see concerned priests or pastors. Don’t see church buildings. Don’t see churchgoers. In fact, the only reference we see of G-d on any basis is spoken from the mouths of those against Him. G-d and his followers are silent or non-existent. Secularism offers nothing save the possibility of mysticism and LGBT virtue. The only real opposition we get from the followers of Satan are his followers because they’re a terribly fractious bunch.
It seems the message is, “when faced with evil, do evil so that the worse evil will be overcome,” but we’re not given a reason why one evil is worse than another, other than that evil is opposed to Sabrina and those around her. There is no guide rail beyond the personal feelings of our modern individuals, which I suppose makes this one of the most 21st-century shows of those I’ve seen. The show is well-produced and fairly well acted. By the end, I found it left a bitter, awful taste in my mouth, but given the themes perhaps that is the best way it could end this.
Published in Entertainment
Only the Greater Evils for me, please.
Given today’s political climate, and the reality that the Left controls so much film content, I imagine that the insanity of the message of “Children, please do evil so you won’t have to do much worse evil” is a feature and not a bug.
When you think about it Rosemary’s Baby was pretty family oriented. Wonder why they haven’t made a TV series spinoff.
We’ve been watching the 1990s version with Melissa Joan Hart, which is 1) So much weirder than it need to be (“Team, we’re doing Pam a ski lodge episode. Can we punch that up?” “Sure thing, boss. How about we have the talking cat throw a party while they’re out of town.” “I like it, but I need more.” “Can we set it on Mars?” “Now we’re talking!”); and 2) Remarkably wholesome.
We watched a few episodes of the new one. Despite Sabrina and Harvey being genuinely cute, the whole direction of the show just seemed… mistaken.
Yes. It really comes off oddly. Again, the comic by the same title paved the way, but both seem just off, especially as the original source material kept things very lighthearted and most incarnations of Sabrina held more to the lightheartedness than anything else.
Good work!
Since you mentioned it, I have to say I get a kick out of Riverdale. I admire the audacity of taking Archie’s world and infusing it with sex, drugs, rock-and-roll (or least Josie and the Pusscats), gangs, murder, arson, etc. And all narrated by a dark, troubled, cynic named Jughead!
There was the Golden Age, when comics were basically invented. The original Batman and Superman, for example.
There was the Silver Age, when comics were reinvented for more-modern and more-adult audiences. Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, X-Men, et cetera.
Then, after a while, the people running the show realized that they’d hired a bunch of people who couldn’t really create worth a damn. That’s when the Tarnished Age started. Now, when someone gets put in charge of an older property, they make it “Dark and Edgy,” forgetting the whole reason for the characters in the first place. Heroes are marginally better than villains (if at all), everything looks like it just got dropped in the dirt, and the basic plot is “life sucks, but I’ll save the innocent bystanders anyway, because it gives me something else to whine about.”
I’m really, REALLY tired of the Tarnished Age.
Satan is like so five minutes ago. Representations of the demonic are pretty commonplace. Rosemary’s Baby or The Exorcist would never have the impact in the current Sataned-out era of TV and movies.
What I would really like to watch is a recording of the meeting at Fox to pitch the idea for the series Lucifer— the devil moves to LA, opens a nightclub and helps a hot female homicide cop solve crimes. Peak Satan.
It’s a Netflix show. It was a comic book series published by Archie Horror, and there was some kind of interaction with Jughead but they’re set in two separate universes.
Thanks. Come to think of it, I gave up Netflix a few years ago, too.
Honestly, I’m waiting in vain I fear for Turner classics to put every movie at my disposal for a monthly fee.
Wife and I watched Suspicion for the first time recently, on a second-hand DVD. It was well worth the price. Gregory Peck as a crazy man, being treated by a young psychoanalyst Ingrid Bergman (more or less).
This feels done before…
Buffy?
Everything needs to be reimagined in a darker, grittier and satanic manner. My elevator pitches:
Really Bewitched Samantha looks like a regular suburban housewife married to an advertising executive, but in reality she’s the hot dominatrix of a coven of witches. And we find out what really happened to the first Darrin.
I Scream for Jeannie An astronaut discovers a bottle on a beach after splashdown and unleashes a sadistic blonde genie with no bellybutton. Hilarity ensues as Maj. Nelson tries to explain his mysterious bruises every week to a suspicious Dr. Bellows.
Leave it to Cleaver The Cleavers, Ward, June and their two boys are cannibalistic serial killers in an otherwise quiet neighborhood. Fist up, “Has Anybody Seen Eddie?”
The Munsters A family of freaks moves into suburbia. They’re all straight, go to church on Sunday and vote Republican.
Fantasy Island Real people, real fantasies.
Actually, that part I mention above is from the original comic book incarnation as applied to this show. In a strange way we’ve gone full circle where the supernatural entertainment of the past inspires that of last year which inspires that of today.
I was just wishing something like this myself. I was hankering for Elvis, Tammy, and Millie. Throw in some Molly (the unsinkable variety) and I’d be a happy chore maven for hours…
You missed it. It was called Filmstruck and they just announced that they are ceasing operations at the end of this month.
The above sentence was created by Lovecraft through the use of a Dictaphone™ and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
Do you mean Spellbound?
@rightangles, It’s not just the clubbing over the head – that’s just annoying. The irritating part is that these people seem to think they are so daring, so revolutionary. They are unaware that, hey dude, we all get it. We all got it years ago. Everything you are doing here to “finally raise the consciousnees of the squares” was all done thirty years ago. YOU’RE the only ones left who don’t know that. Glad all this finally occurred to you, but the rest of us already did all this two decades ago. Our consciousness is raised, we f-ing get it. We just disagree. If you want to be revolutionary, why not listen, consider why we disagree, and make a show about THAT?
We’re not squares, you’re just puerile and, worse, boring.
Ouch. 😆
Must have been a Satanist Church Missouri Synod coven and not an Evangelical Satanist Church in America coven.
It’s a practical vote. Shoggoths would solve all our infrastructure problems without having to resort to a major new spending bill.
True, but SMOD would really wipe the slate clean. Why no series starring his family starting with dad who wiped out the dinosaurs?
Um. We only watched it once. But then what the heck was Suspicion?
Oh. Suspicion is a 1941 romantic psychological thriller film directed by Alfred Hitchcock and starring Cary Grant and Joan Fontaine as a married couple.
Thanks. It was Spellbound.
At least we have Arsenic and Old Lace. You know how many times a year I hear the words?: One teaspoon full of arsenic, then add half a teaspoon full of strychnine, and then just a pinch of cyanide.
Oh, we put it in the wine ‘ cause it’s less noticeable. When it’s in tea, it has a distinct odor.
Netflix is advertising the …well, you know… out of this show in Germany. Every single bus shelter between our house and the Augsburg House of Prayer (about 13KM) has a Sabrina poster- mostly the one with her lying in the pentagram. That alone turned me off the show.
This show was suggested to me by Netflix, but when I realized it was a Riverdale spin-off I passed. I watched four episodes of Riverdale before I was grossed out by the debauchery of the “teenagers”. I read Archie comics as a kid and I was expecting a sinister twist to the original material. That wasn’t what I got. Not my cup of tea.
I almost avoid it because of that. Riverdale held little of the spirit of the original material to me, especially as I read the comics and I recall the creator made several Christian comics with his characters (that I also read during church rather than listen to the sermon of course). So the debauchery and dark tones of the show turned me off. Not sure why I was less worried with Sabrina.
Like I said, Satan-worship figures heavily in the show, but even its less horrible moments you leave scenes with it feeling less-than-clean. Attempts by Sabrina to use her power to better lives of others typically end poorly if not downright disastrously. The ads show Sabrina with a playful-to-decadently playful expressions in such blasphemous situations, like the above poster shot where she’s in front of a birthday smiling cutely while behind we see the horns of the devil himself. But that never really manifests in the show which presents an internal power struggle as she tries to reconcile her witch-half and mundane-half mostly unsuccessfully. There’s really no playfulness about the show at all.
This pretty much sums up most folk religion systems. It’s satan against satan: exhausting and never-ending. I wonder how many seasons this series will gobble up?