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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
Who knows. Though the production quality, acting and directing are decent, better than some of Netflix’s Marvel offerings. Okay, Iron Fist is kind of a low bar but still … This season ended on several cliffhanger plot points, so there’s easily a second.
One of the stranger realizations about watching the 1990s Sabrina is that it was contemporaneous with Buffy. The real mind-bender is imagining if Geller and Hart switching roles.
I’m a big Buffy fan and that show also skirted the religious aspect for many seasons — this is a series in which crosses and holy water repel the evil and often soulless undead, so: religion, right? — until they came up with the clever retcon that the undead’s aversion to religious symbols pre-dated Christianity and that organized religion appropriated these symbols because they were effective at warding off evil. That’s a long way to go to avoid the discomfort of inserting religion into a show aimed at increasingly irreverent teens; one might detect in it an almost religious commitment to avoiding religion.
I did like the bit in the 5th Monster Hunter book where the Vatican hunter in China was fighting vampires. “We’re Chinese; that symbol means nothing to us.” “You’re mistaken; it’s not what the symbol means to you that’s important. It’s what it means to me.”
Yes. It’s also contemporaneous with an increase in interest in the occult, wiccan, and a lot of other strange things from my childhood/early teen years that were uncomfortable.
Horror movies that appropriated christian and catholic imagery and symbolism to repel demons while also using those same symbols in occultic rituals was horrifying to me.
Ouija boards, stiff as a board, calling for bloody mary in mirrors… it was really mainstream popular before goth emerged as a subset and genre in teen cliques. Buffy was kinda part of that. Sabrina to a lesser extent as I always saw her as a “modern” spin on BeWitched.
Then there’s that great moment in the original Fright Night when Peter Vincent raises the cross against the vampire for the second time.
If it prevents even one child from falling into a life of good it will have been worth it.
You mean the Randian atheist libertarians right?
Deep faith=magic. I’m fine with that sort of Shamanism but I do like well thought out worlds. Hellboy was a perfect example of pantheistic magics.
Moreover, if Satanism is real, than Satan is a fallen Angel right? So some version of heaven is real? So wouldn’t there be Paladins along with witches?