Netflix's 'Sabrina' is Not Your Mother's Teenage Witch
by EG
The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina may have a familiar title, but the series is very much a product of the current era. The series, according to one reviewer, is not perfect, but it offers more than enough fun to keep viewers engaged. Read on for details.
Via Vox.
By the second episode of Netflix’s The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, I was all in on the show. Not because it’s perfect, which it’s not; Sabrina can be clumsy and messy, and over the course of its 10-episode first season, which premieres on October 26, it never quite figures out how to establish a tone and stick to it.
But the second episode contains a moment so campy and smart and dark and gorgeous to look at — all the things that Sabrina’s first season proves the show can be at its best — that the moment I saw it, I knew the show had me by the throat.
It comes when titular teenage witch Sabrina Spellman (Mad Men’s Kiernan Shipka) gets into an argument with fellow teen witch Prudence (Tati Gabrielle) about exactly what they can reasonably expect from the world, both as witches and as teenage girls. Sabrina is trying to decide whether or not to pledge herself to Satan and come into her full powers as a witch in exchange, or to reject her witch heritage and live her life as a mortal. Ideally, she’d find a way to have it all: As she explains to Prudence, she wants both power and freedom.
It’s a tricky, chewy dilemma, one that animates the thematic core of Sabrina throughout its flawed, stylish, thrilling first season: Is magic a tool of empowerment for women? Or is it just another trap?
Sabrina is optimistic enough to believe that she will find a way to get everything that she wants. But Prudence has already signed the Book of the Beast, and she knows better.
Satan will never allow Sabrina to have both freedom and power, Prudence tells Sabrina, because Sabrina is a girl. And as for Satan, well: “He’s a man, isn’t he?”
This is a show that’s willing to both revel in the witch fantasy and to think about its limitations in a way I’ve never quite seen a TV show do before, to examine about what kind of women are allowed to be powerful, and what kinds of boundaries are put upon them in consequence. And it has an incredible amount of fun while it does so.
Get the rest of the story at Vox.
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