The ‘Bewitched’ Reboot Proves Why We Need Reboots

Reboots and revivals are all over network television right now. The X-Files came back, Will & Grace is enjoying another run on NBC, we’re a month away from more Murphy Brown, and America survived another season of Roseanne. On top of those sitcoms, new versions of action dramas MacGyver and Magnum P.I. are back on CBS, and also the new Hawaii Five-0 is not so new anymore. So the news that ABC is getting a rebooted version of Bewitched, the long-running ’60s sitcom about a witch and her mortal husband, shouldn’t be met with surprise. After all, everything old is new again and networks have been trying to get an updated Bewitched on their schedule for a decade now.

But there actually is reason to be surprised by this new take on Bewitched. It’s actually worth getting excited about, really excited about, especially if you grew up enjoying the original series. I’d even say that this new take from Black-ish creator and mega-producer Kenya Barris and Black-ish writer/co-producer Yamara Taylor proves how necessary revisiting these old ideas can be. Yeah, all we know about the reboot is the quick series pitch included in the initial reports, but that brief summary proves that Barris and Taylor are actually taking an old idea, confronting the problem at the core of it’s mid-century premise, and spinning it for the 21st century. That is what all reboots should do, and very few actually do!

Let me break this down, as someone that has watched a whole lot of Bewitched and counts Uncle Arthur as one of his all-time favorite TV characters. Bewitched was a fun show, but it was built around one really uneasy premise that felt dated by the time the show went off the air in 1972. She’s a powerful and proud witch, he’s a normal dude that works in advertising. They love each other, but their marriage comes with a big ol’ catch: she can’t use her powers. Darrin Stephens (Dicks York and later Sargent) wants a normal wife, and Samantha (the endlessly cool Elizabeth Montgomery) tries to grant that wish. Sxtenuating circumstances come up every episode, usually courtesy of Samantha’s elegantly snarky mother Endora (Agnes Moorehead) or her flashy and hella gay (but not really gay) Uncle Arthur (Paul Lynde), and Sam has to get rid of the problems with a twitch of her nose.

Darrin gets mad, yells at Sam and all her relatives, and every episode ends with the problem solved and the wife promising to not upstage her husband. While viewers were always on Sam’s side (who wouldn’t side with the rad witch?!), the show itself always came down on Darrin’s side by having Sam begrudgingly agree to suppress her heritage.

Back in the ’60s, when it was (mis)understood that a woman’s place was in the home (eye-roll), that premise rocked zero boats. But by the time the show ended, Mary Tyler Moore was playing a 30-year-old single career woman, celebrating women’s liberation. Time hasn’t been all that kind to Bewitched reruns, even if it’s still the undisputed best of all the wacky supernatural sitcoms of the ’60s (sorry, I Dream of Jeannie and The Ghost and Mrs. Muir!). That’s why this new premise is absolutely brilliant. Here’s the new premise, as described by Deadline:

In Bewitched, written by Barris and Taylor, Samantha, a hardworking black single mom who happens to be a witch, marries Darren, a white mortal who happens to be a bit of a slacker. They struggle to navigate their differences as she discovers that even when a black girl is literally magic, she’s still not as powerful as a decently tall white man with a full head of hair in America.

W-O-W. Wow. That right there is how you do a reboot. Just look at what these two sentences convey:

• A respect of the source material and initial premise
• Acknowledgement of the problem within that old premise
• A solution to the problem by actually making the show about that problem
• Which also makes the reboot relevant in a modern context!

That’s what reboots and revivals should do. There should be a reason for them to exist, a reason beyond “I dunno, here’s more of the same but now there are iPhones and the actors are older?” That problem plagued The X-Files, which spent two revival seasons barely addressing how conspiracy theories have infiltrated mainstream news sources to the detriment of our country (and when it did try to do that, yikes). Roseanne definitely got a Trump-era makeover, but it did so at the cost of what made the original show special and did a lazy job of tackling today’s issues.

This new Bewitched premise, though, has it all. It feels unlike anything we’re seeing on TV right now, the pitch alone has a very clear point to make, and it also sounds like an updated Bewitched.

There are definitely going to be people whining about why this is happening to Bewitched. I guess a new Bewitched could have been just like the original series, with the same retro power imbalance. We don’t know much about the other reboot attempts (one at CBS in 2011 and another at NBC in 2014), but I think it’s safe to say they probably didn’t have a take as aware and relevant as this one. I never thought I would be able to write this with a straight face, but this is seriously the Bewitched reboot we need right now.

Where to watch Bewitched