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The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is the latest incarnation of a long-running teen archetypal – the half-witch, half-human, all-American girl, fighting to grow up on her own terms and being in an ever-mutating story about girldom and its discontents . Every iteration is different – the Archie comic book, the seventies groovy cartoon, the post-Sassy Melissa Joan Hart 1990s sitcom, the macabre new Netflix thriller. like At Star Is Born, it's a story gets over and over, because each generation has Sabrina has a new tale to tell. But there is always something about being a teenage girl in a hostile world – that growing up.
And the superb Chilling Adventures is the first version that's an outright horror story. Showrunner Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa takes the Archie Comics in the middle and gives it a dark and edgy makeover, as he did it CW's fabulously lurid Riverdale. Mad MenKiernan Shipka is a truly fearsome teen, trapped in the interzone between high school and the netherworld. This time, instead of tangling with Britney or N'Sync, she's taking on her devil-worshipping coven and her misogynistic satanic patriarch. "This is totally the Sabrina for 2018, in so many ways," Shipka told Variety. "She's a woke witch."
Sabrina started out in the Archie Comics universe. She made a brief Archie's Madhouse When it was revealed in 1962, it was a terrified of "teenage" or "witch." But tellingly, she never came into her own as a Sixties character, and did not get her own comic book until 1971, After the show became a hit – it was TV, not the comics, where Sabrina blew up an icon. Her story really starts with the 1970s Saturday morning cartoon, from the era of Scooby Doo gold Josie and the Pussycats. She's just another fun-loving student at Riverdale High who keeps her witchcraft a secret, hanging with Archie, Betty, Veronica, Jughead and the gang. The occult was huge on kiddie TV at the time, from the Groovie Goolies to The Funky Phantom, But there was something about Sabrina that made her off as a star. She lives in a haunted mansion with her old-school witch aunts, bubbling cauldrons and all, though she uses her ear-tugging magic to battle the forces of evil or just flip the record on the turntable. As the theme song explains, "Her magic power can get her out of trouble!"
The next Sabrina debuted in September 1996 – one of the decade's funniest and realest teen shows. Melissa Joan Hart, already familiar from Clarissa Explains It All For You, lived her so-called life with a couple of Lilith Fair-era feminist aunties and the gayest cat in TV history, Salem. It was full of the uncoy feminism that saturated Nineties girl culture, with guests from Brat Brat to Blondie to Britney Spears. Melissa and Britney teamed up for the epochal 1999 "You Drive Me Crazy" video – clearly a friendship too perfect for this world.
The optimism of the 1970s or 1990s versions would look absurd now. This is Sabrina Resistance.
Of all the Nineties' teen superheroines from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to The Powerpuff Girls, Sabrina's sitcom's had the most authentic ordinariness. It was not a dark show – it was full of optimistic nineties that these young women were about to be taken over. (Broomsticks are so last century.) Like the time that Sabrina sneaks off with her friends to a Violent Women show – "classic Eighties rockers!" Gordon Gano serenades the girls with "Please Please Do not Go," after she dazzles him by casting a "half-hour infatuation spell." The aunts are proud of how Sabrina behaves herself, so they take her first flight. The perfect song blasts on the soundtrack: Liz Phair's "Supernova." Sabrina's face is pure joy as she is surfing the astral plain on her vacuum cleaner, bopping to Liz's guitar. In a way, this episode sums up all the best hopes and dreams of American Pop culture in the Nineties, just as The X-Files'' Memories of a Smoking Man Cigarette '' summed up what we feared about ourselves. Patriarchy was a nightmare Sabrina was waking up from, along with the rest of Gen X. We believed teen witches were our future.
The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is a darker show, for darker times – the optimism of the 1970s or 1990s versions would look absurd now. This is Sabrina Resistance. For the first time, we have her authority in running heroes in the witch culture she's inherited. Shilpa's supernatural teenager has to battle jock bullies at her high school human, but she also has to battle the Dark Lord, who wants her to be herself in the Book of the Beast. She belongs to a coven called the Church of Night, who are deeply into devil worship with human sacrifices and flesh-eating. She also attends the Academy of Unseen Arts, where she 's menaced by high priest Blackwood (Richard Coyle) father and a trio of mean girls inevitably known as the Weird Sisters (the excellent Gabrielle Tati, Adeline Rudolph and Abigail Cowen). And just as the 1990s had Paul Feig as her high school teacher, now her main is Bronson Pinchot, from that show's TGIF predecessor Perfect Strangers.
Shipka has the gravitas to make this Sabrina the toughest yet, a violent woman who comes to like Joan of Arc crashing a mastermix of Harry Potter and The Craft. Shipka broke out of Mad Men as Sally, Don Draper reckless daughter. She has become one of the world's greatest revelations, the rarer-than-rare box of a child performer who has grown up into a real actress, capable of pushing the drama further. (When the series began, there was no way they could have guessed how lucky they got Casting Shipka – her chops made the historic heights of Four Seasons and Four Possible.) And just like Sally Draper, her Sabrina is growing up well-versed in the evil that men do. in Chilling Adventures, she's visibly realizing she's going to fight this battle long after high school is over – a young woman is already going to be a bad-ass senior citizen witch she knows she'll have to be. This Netflix I-love-you-but-I've-chosen-darkness YA scream is more than just a great high-school horror trip. It proudly carries on 50 years of teenage witch tradition.
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